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Intermedia E
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Dick Higgins S
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with an Appendix by Hannah Higgins
© 2001 The Estate of Dick Higgins LEONARDO, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 49–54, 2001 49
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E ments with change. Lack of change
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E E wrote a piece, Stacked Deck, in which any
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event can take place at any time, as long
I E as its cue appears. The cues are produced
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S by colored lights. Since the colored lights
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S could be used wherever they were put
and audience reactions were also cuing
situations, the performance-audience
separation was removed and a happening
situation was established, though less vi-
sually oriented in its use of its environ-
ment and imagery. At the same time, Al
Hansen moved into the area from
graphic notation experiments, and Nam
June Paik and Benjamin Patterson (both
in Germany at the time) moved in from
varieties of music in which specifically
musical events were frequently replaced
by nonmusical actions.
Thus the happening developed as an
Fig. 1. Intermedia Chart, 1995. (© Estate of Dick Higgins) The chart shows concentric and intermedium, an uncharted land that lies
overlapping circles that appear to expand and contract in relationship to the “Intermedia” between collage, music and the theater.
framework that encompasses them. It is not governed by rules; each work
determines its own medium and form
according to its needs. The concept itself
the relationship of the spectator and the belongs more properly to Beckett). Every is better understood by what it is not,
work. He put mirrors into his things so year fewer attend the professional Broad- rather than what it is. Approaching it, we
the spectator could feel included in way theaters. The shows get sillier and sil- are pioneers again, and shall continue to
them. That wasn’t physical enough, so lier, showing the producers’ estimate of be so as long as there’s plenty of elbow
he made enveloping collages which sur- our mentality (or is it their own that is room and no neighbors around for a few
rounded the spectator. These he called revealed?). Even the best of the tradi- miles. Of course, a concept like this is
“environments.” Finally, in the spring of tional theater is no longer found on very disturbing to those whose mentality
1958, he began to include live people as Broadway but at the Judson Memorial is compartmentalized. Time, Life, and the
part of the collage, and this he called a Church, some miles away. Yet our theater High Priests have been announcing the
“happening.” schools grind out thousands on thou- death of happenings regularly since the
The proscenium theater is the out- sands of performing and production per- form gained momentum in the late fif-
growth of seventeenth-century ideals of sonnel, for whom jobs will simply not ex- ties, but this says more about the accu-
social order. Yet there is remarkably little ist in 20 years. Can we blame the unions? racy of their information than about the
structural difference between the dramas Or rents and real estate taxes? Of course liveliness of the form.
of Davenant and those of Edward Albee, not. The subsidized productions, spon- We have noted the intermedia in the
certainly nothing comparable to the dif- sored at such museums as New York’s theater and in the visual arts, the happen-
ference in pump construction or means Lincoln Center, are not building up a ing, and certain varieties of physical con-
of mass transportation. It would seem new audience so much as recultivating an structions. For reasons of space we cannot
that the technological and social implica- old one, since the medium of such take up here the intermedia between
tions of the first two industrial revolu- drama seems weird and artificial in our other areas. However, I would like to sug-
tions have been evaded completely. The new social milieu. We need more port- gest that the use of intermedia is more or
drama is still mechanistically divided: ability and flexibility, and this the tradi- less universal throughout the fine arts,
there are performers, production tional theater cannot provide. It was since continuity rather than categoriza-
people, a separate audience and an ex- made for Versailles and for the sedentary tion is the hallmark of our new mentality.
plicit script. Once started, like Franken- Milords, not for motorized life-demons There are parallels to the happening in
stein’s monster, the course of affairs is who travel 600 miles a week. Versailles no music, for example in the work of such
unalterable, perhaps damned by its in- longer speaks very loudly to us, since we composers as Philip Corner and John
ability to reflect its surroundings. With think at 85 miles an hour. Cage, who explore the intermedia be-
our populistic mentality today, it is diffi- In the other direction, starting from tween music and philosophy, or Joe Jones,
cult to attach importance—other than the idea of theater itself, others such as whose self-playing musical instruments
what we have been taught to attach—to myself declared war on the script as a set fall into the intermedium between music
this traditional theater. Nor do minor in- of sequential events. Improvisation was and sculpture. The constructed poems of
novations do more than provide dinner no help; performers merely acted in imi- Emmett Williams and Robert Filliou cer-
conversation: this theater is round in- tation of a script. So I began to work as if tainly constitute an intermedium between
stead of square, in that one the stage re- time and sequence could be utterly sus- poetry and sculpture. Is it possible to
volves, here the play is relatively senseless pended, not by ignoring them (which speak of the use of intermedia as a huge
and whimsical (Pinter is, after all, our would simply be illogical) but by system- and inclusive movement of which dada,
modern J.M. Barrie—unless the honor atically replacing them as structural ele- futurism and surrealism are early phases
50 Higgins, Intermedia
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Fig. 2. Glasslass, modular poem, 1974. A modular poem is one in which the principal structural factor is the repetition, usually in different
contexts, of one or more elements of the text. Each element becomes a module that may be expanded, compressed or otherwise altered.
Or not. (© Estate of Dick Higgins. Originally published in Dick Higgins, Modular Poems [Barton, Vermont: Unpublished Editions, 1974].)
Higgins, Intermedia 51
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E preceding the huge ground swell that is time, since one wanted to hear one’s Something Else Newsletter and sent to our
S I
T N taking place now? Or is it more reason- own voice or self at work, without the in- customers, to all the people on our mail-
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E E able to regard the use of intermedia as terventions of history and historical ing list, to people to whom I felt the idea
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an irreversible historical innovation, judgements; this was art whose horizons would be useful (for example, to artists
I E more comparable, for example, to the would closely match one’s own. doing what seemed to me to be
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S development of instrumental music The vehicle I chose, the word “inter- intermedial work and to critics who might
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S than, for example, to the development media,” appears in the writings of Samuel be in a position to discuss such work). All
of romanticism? Taylor Coleridge in 1812 in exactly its in all, I gave away some 10,000 copies of
contemporary sense—to define works the essay, as many as I could afford; and I
which fall conceptually between media encouraged its republication by anyone
1981 that are already known, and I had been who asked for permission to do so. It was
In 1965, when the above words were writ- using the term for several years in lectures reprinted seven or eight times that I knew
ten, the intention was simply to offer a and discussions before my little essay was of, and it still lives on in print in various
means of ingress into works which al- written. Furthermore, as part of my cam- books, not just of mine, but where it has
ready existed, the unfamiliarity of whose paign to popularize what was known as been anthologized along with other texts
forms was such that many potential view- “avant-garde: for specialists only,” to of the time or as part of surveys.
ers, hearers, or readers were “turned off” demystify it if you will, I had become a The term shortly acquired a life of its
by them. The world was filled at that publisher of a small press, Something Else own, as I had hoped. In no way was it my
time with concrete poems, happenings, Press (1964–1974), which brought out private property. It was picked up; used
sound poetry, environments, and other editions of many primary sources and and misused, often by confusion with the
more or less novel developments; unless materials in the new arts (as well as reissu- term “mixed media.” This last is a vener-
the public had a way of seeing into the ing works of the past which seemed to able term from art criticism, which cov-
work by causing it to stand still for a mo- merit new attention—works by Gertrude ers works executed in more than one
ment and be classified, the work was Stein, the dadaists, the composer Henry medium, such as oil color and guache.
likely to be dismissed as “avant-garde: for Cowell, etc.). It seemed foolish simply to But by extension it is also appropriate to
specialists only.” To any dedicated non- publish my little essay in some existing such forms as the opera, where the mu-
specialist this could be frustrating—one magazine, where it could be shelved or sic, the libretto, and the mise-en-scene
wanted to know well the art of one’s forgotten. So it was printed as the first are quite separate: at no time is the
operagoer in doubt as to whether he is
seeing the mise-en-scene, the stage spec-
Fig. 3. Piece for Meredith Monk’s Apartment, intermedia theater piece, 1968. (© Estate of tacle, hearing the music, etc. Many fine
Dick Higgins. Originally published in Dick Higgins, some recent snowflakes (and other things) works are being done in mixed media:
[New York: Printed Editions, 1979].)
paintings which incorporate poems
within their visual fields, for instance.
But one knows which is which.
In intermedia, on the other hand, the
visual element (painting) is fused con-
ceptually with the words. We may have
abstract calligraphy, concrete poetry, “vi-
sual poetry” (not any poem with a strong
visual element, but the term is some-
times used to cover visual works in which
some poem appears, often as a photogra-
phy, or in which the photographed visual
material is presented as a sequence with
a grammar of its own, as if each visual
element were a word of a sentence, as in
certain works by Jean-François Bory or
Duane Michaels).
Again, the term is not prescriptive; it
does not praise itself or present a model
for doing either new or great works. It
says only that intermedial works exist.
Failure to understand this would lead to
the kind of error of thinking that
intermedia are necessarily dated in time
by their nature, something rooted in the
1960s, like an art movement of the pe-
riod. There was and could be no
intermedial movement. Intermediality
has always been a possibility since the
most ancient times, and though some
well-meaning commissar might try to
legislate it away as formalistic and there-
52 Higgins, Intermedia
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fore antipopular, it remains a possibility this or that visual novel is about and how create a sort of academicism, good for E
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wherever the desire to fuse two or more it works, and the intermediality is no providing examples to a class (“Okay, T N
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existing media exists. One can avoid it; longer needed to see these things. Same class, now this week I want each of you to E E
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one can be like Rosalind Krauss, a much with visual poetry and sound poetry (or do a pop art painting”), perhaps useful 8 S
respected critic who said in a lecture at “text-sound,” if one prefers that term). for heuristic purposes but not likely to I E
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Iowa City in 1981, “I am devoted to the In the performance arts, once there was open up new horizons for the artist or S
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idea of trying to bury the avant-garde,” the happening which was close to his viewers, listeners, or readers. S
which she does by attacking it, ignoring “events”; some happenings artists did And with this I would leave the matter
it and its implications, or, even worse, fluxus, and some did not. At least one of intermedia. It is today, as it was in
presenting theory as such an end in itself fluxus artist, Alison Knowles, evolved in 1965, a useful way to approach some new
that any sort of artwork becomes, at best, her work until she found herself doing work; one asks oneself, “what that I know
an unimportant appendage to the what other new artists—many of whom does this new work lie between?” But it is
theory. But there is always an avant- took great pains to distinguish what they more useful at the outset of a critical
garde, in the sense that someone, some- were doing from happenings, events, process than at the later stages of it. Per-
where is always trying to do something and fluxus—were calling, variously, “art haps I did not see that at the time, but it
which adds to the possibilities for every- performance” or “performance art.” is clear to me now. Perhaps, in all the
body, and that that large everybody will Where do we look for to find the conti- excitement of what was, for me, a discov-
some day follow this somebody and use nuity of these? To their intermediality: ery, I overvalued it. I do not wish to com-
whatever innovations were made as part they are all the same intermedium, a pensate with a second error of judgment
of their workaday craft. “Avant-garde” is conceptual fusion of scenario, visuality and to undervalue it now. But it would
merely a conventional metaphor drawn and, often enough, audio elements. But seem that to proceed further in the un-
(in the mid-nineteenth century) from will the intermediality explain the derstanding of any given work, one must
the military, in which an avant-garde uniqueness or value of the very best of look elsewhere—to all the aspects of a
moves in advance of the main body of art performance (or performance art)? I work and not just to its formal origins,
troops. “Avant-garde” is relative, not ab- think not. Some works will become land- and at the horizons which the work im-
solute. A conservative poet can be at marks and will define their genre, while plies, to find an appropriate hermeneu-
least morally avant-garde by moving in the others will be forgotten. At best the tic process for seeing the whole of the
the direction of ever-greater integrity intermediality was needed to suggest work in my own relation to it.
and purity, of vividness or metaphor and their historical trajectory, to see their
excellence of line. Others seek to follow, sometimes obscure pedigree (as one Note
even when they cannot; and thus the might use it, with happenings, to point 1. In 1965 I would have challenged this. But re-
metaphor retains its relevance. toward the heritage of happenings from searches into the history of visual poetry and
But when one is thinking of the avant- dada or futurist manifestations). But if sound poetry have suggested to me that virtually all
possible fusions have been made or at least implied
garde of forms and media, one is often the work is ever to become truly impor- at some time or other, and that the surfacing of
thinking of artists who, for whatever rea- tant to large numbers of people, it will some volume of such fusions has more to do with
son, question those forms and media. be because the new medium allows for the economics or the fashions of a time rather
than with its actual Zeitgeist.
They can reject some (e.g., André great significance, not simply because its
Breton’s predecessors in French dada re- formal nature assures it of relevance.
jected the novel, and they were avant- This, then, is the caveat inherent in APPENDIX BY
garde, while André Breton chose to move using the term intermedia: it allows for HANNAH HIGGINS
toward some kind of novel as a possibility, an ingress to a work which otherwise
thus provoking a break between his seems opaque and impenetrable, but Intermedia Chart
group, which in due course became the once that ingress has been made it is no Higgins’ “Intermedia Chart” (Fig. 1)
surrealists, and the other—and the new longer useful to harp upon the resonates with temporally dynamic
group, too, was avant-garde). They can intermediality of a work. No reputable sociograms, where human interactions
create others. And often this creation of artist could be an intermedial artist for are highly differentiated and radically
new media is done by the fusion of old long—it would seem like an impedi- decentralized and based primarily on
ones; this was very common in the late ment, holding the artist back from fulfill- the specific needs of a given body, in this
1950s and early 1960s, with the formal ing the needs of the work at hand, of cre- case artists. According to a model like
fusions I have already mentioned. No ating horizons in the new era for the this, historic and contemporary experi-
work was ever good because of its next generation of listeners and readers ence is diverse, causally flexible and per-
intermediality [1]. The intermediality and beholders to match their own hori- missive of the as-yet-unknown.
was merely a part of how a work was and zons too. What was helpful as a begin- The chart depicts intersections be-
is; recognizing it makes the work easier ning would, if maintained, become an tween fluxus and related work and
to classify, so that one can understand the obsession which braked the flow into the makes no attempt at linear chronology.
work and its significances. work and its needs and potentials. One Fluid in form, the chart shows concen-
Further, there is a tendency for often regrets the adherence of an artist tric and overlapping circles that appear
intermedia to become media with famil- to a set of dogma: the “movement artist” to expand and contract in relationship
iarity. The visual novel is a pretty much is a case in point—he adheres to the to the “Intermedia” framework that en-
recognizable form to us now. We have teachings of his or her movement, long compasses them. It is an open frame-
had many of them in the last 20 years. It after these have passed their relevance. work that invites play. Its bubbles hover
is harping on an irrelevance to point to There is the “late” futurist, the “late” ab- in space as opposed to being historically
its older intermedial status between vi- stract expressionist, the “late” pop artist. framed in the linear and specialized
sual art and text; we want to know what To be late in that sense is somehow to art/anti-art framework of the typical
Higgins, Intermedia 53
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E chronologies of avant-garde and mod- of what he explored through the inter- work and occasionally performed to-
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H T
E E paintings that include The Opaque and the a child I remember taking lessons at
S R Meredith’s studio. I include Piece for
8 S “Glasslass” Transparent (see Color Plate A No. 2). In
I E one catalog, Daniel Charles called this Meredith Monk’s Apartment here (Fig. 3)
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“Glasslass” (Fig. 2) is a poem about slith-
S ering assonance and the naked page. the “logical and coherent” outcome of because, when they saw each other at the
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S The sounds of the esses slither, seem- Higgins’ work. As intermedia objects, Walker in 1998, there was so much love
ingly seamlessly surrounding the inside these paintings belong equally to the between them that they just sat and
of the readers’ mouths. Esses spill sexily graphic arts, poetry, music and perfor- smiled at each other for some minutes.
across the page’s soft skin, savoring the mance. In this image, looking at and That is, I think, a big part of why artists
fancy glass lass. looking through are juxtaposed as a re- dedicate works to each other.
flective resonance that constitutes a frag-
The Opaque and the Transparent ment and a whole simultaneously. Typi-
For the last 20 years of his life, Higgins cal of his work generally, this image Editor’s Note: A traveling retrospective exhibi-
was, primarily, a scholar/painter. He ex- reforms its seemingly iconoclastic aims tion entitled “Betwixt and Between: The Life
tended his understanding of intermedia by reconstituting fragments as produc- and Work of Dick Higgins” will originate at
toward the past in the form of historic tive of a humanistic sense of the unity of the Columbia College Center for the Book and
writings on George Herbert’s pattern every time, place and modality. the Printed Word on 10 November 2000 and
poems (1977), a translation of Novalis make several stops at university galleries in
(1978, 1984), a history of Pattern Poetry Piece for Meredith Monk’s the United States over the course of the next
(1987) and a book on Giordano Bruno Apartment two years. The show is co-curated by Hannah
(with Charles Doria, 1991). These schol- My father and Meredith Monk were dear Higgins and Simon Anderson of The School
arly pursuits constitute the historic basis friends who greatly admired each other’s of the Art Institute of Chicago.
54 Higgins, Intermedia