Dick Higgins
Albumblatt

“Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media,” begins Higgins in the first issue of The Something Else Newsletter in 1966,¹ outlining his thoughts on the intermedial in contemporary art – a notion that also captures what is shared among Fluxus activities: visual poetry, action music, happenings, and Fluxus events all conceptually draw on classical genres yet show little interest in conventional boundaries. This holds true as well for the artistic practice of the poet, Fluxus artist, and composer Higgins himself, who tested the definitions of the musical, for example at the Fluxus. Festspiele neuester Musik concert in Wiesbaden in 1962, with the performance of Danger Music (1962). His composition, in the form of event scores, was intended to expose performers and audience alike to a sense of danger.
At Galerie Block, Dick Higgins appeared together with Alison Knowles for the first time in October 1966 with the performance Fluxus Concert at the Forum Theatre on Kurfürstendamm. In autumn 1973, Galerie Block presented a solo exhibition of Higgins alongside the show Something Else Press. Portrait eines avantgardistischen Verlages (Something Else Press. Portrait of an Avant-Garde Publisher), highlighting nearly a decade of publishing activity by the co-founder and editor of concrete poetry and Fluxus. After his break with George Maciunas in 1964, Higgins founded his own publishing house.
During Higgins’ residency as a fellow of the Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme in 1982, the screenprint Albumblatt was created, published in an edition of 50. The free compositional form invoked by the title finds its expression in a notation that deliberately avoids conventional means of score writing. This visual score, in the dynamic movement of red arrows sweeping across the lined music paper, conveys both a musical idea and an image of the composition, yet remains deliberately open as an instruction for its performance and instrumentation. The graphic Albumblatt was initially planned as an insert for an LP featuring a recording of a composition by Erik Satie performed by Higgins, together with one of his own pieces. For part of the edition, the simply folded screenprint thus takes on the format of a record sleeve. However, since the quality of the recordings did not meet the publisher’s standards — in Higgins’ recording, a dog’s bark had crept in at one point — the LP was never produced. Yet the mere knowledge of the compositions by Higgins and Satie behind this work subtly alters how the visual score is perceived.
Text: Birgit Eusterschulte

¹ The Something Else Newsletter 1, Nr. 1 (Something Else Press, 1966).