Lines of Thought: The Graphis Series of Dick Higgins

Writer, composer, visual artist, performer, publisher, and a founder of Fluxus, Dick Higgins expended a great deal of energy thinking about performance and drama. Beginning in 1958, over the next decade he created a series of nearly 150 Graphis notations to be performed, three of which are published in this issue. In his Selected Early Works, 1955–1964, Higgins describes his concept: “ All of the series is used to provide movements and sounds which can be produced by or with the human body . . . Props can be used when they are affected by the body directly eg. stilts, artificial limbs, motorcycles, shoes, or tied legs, but not tables, hats, or remote control instruments such as organs, pianos, radios etc., at any rate not so long as they are conventionally used.” Any number of individuals, mainly artists and musicians and dancers, could perform the score once they agreed on a system for performing it.

For at least the last decade, many have tired of familiar dramatic forms, lending the “postdramatic” an air of inevitability as a catch-all phrase to define contemporary theatre. In such a context, it may be time to rediscover Higgins’s imaginative proposals for “plays.” It was refreshing recently to see several of the “ Graphises,” as he called them, in the Museum of Modern Art exhibit, There Will Never Be Silence, Scoring John Cage’s 4’33’, which opened there in October 2013. PAJ 107, with its special focus on performance and drawing, was already in the works by then, and so Higgins’s largely forgotten graphic notations seem a natural choice for the “Play” section of the issue as a distinctive contribution to the current performance and drawing focus. Higgins viewed his series as an alternative to the predictability of the sequencing of events in drama. He disliked the theatre of his time, namely Pinter, Albee, Beckett, Ionesco, and Jack Gelber, who followed the traditional process of the actor controlled by the script. For him the new “theatre” was found in the more open works and intermingling of performer and audience, generated by Kaprow and La Monte Young. In the same year the Graphis works were initiated, writing in “Towards an Abstract Theatre,” Higgins offered the view that “‘calligraphic’ patterns can be permitted to arise from the material or the environment,” implying that it need not be enclosed in its own artificial world. Furthermore, he disliked what he considered the post-war theatre’s nihilism and existential crisis when measured against his beliefs in the new spirit of the art coming into being. His knowledge of and critique of theatre led him to a more pluralistic, interdisciplinary, and process-oriented approach to the live event. Many of his contemporaries, such as Kaprow, Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg, and Cage, too, also used the “theatre” as a point of departure in contextualizing their Happenings, concerts, and environments. “Performance” was not yet in usage in the vocabulary of the developing new genre that would be subsumed eventually under the performance/art rubric.

Freed of a fixed time structure and acting conventions, the Graphis series represents wildly inventive notations for any number of possibilities in a performance situation. Graphis No. 24 was based on a witching symbol. Graphis Nos. 28–57 (The Fourth of July Variations) were begun on that holiday in 1959, and completed in time for a concert given by cage’s class at The new School, which Higgins attended. It was to be performed by twenty-nine performers using only vocal effects. Higgins developed other techniques as he moved through the series, scores No. 132 and No. 133 (1965) are “print-through” versions using negatives of classified sections of a newspaper to generate what he called “performance texts” (perhaps the first use of this term?) for a performance at Expo ’67 in Montreal. Graphis No. 72 was conceived as a method of reading the movements of a body.

In his 1969 missal-like foew&ombwhnw, the layout of whose red-edged pages was designed in four different texts running in parallel vertical columns throughout the book, Higgins gives a personal account of each of...