Dick Higgins

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

This essay argues that key aspects of Fluxus have a striking resemblance to the ideas and antics of the computer “hackers” who, in the sixties and seventies, defined the culture of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence lab. The past several decades have seen the rise of a rich body of scholarship on hackers and the cultural critique that their practices imply. By relating this “hacker ethic” to the works of the Fluxus artists (who likewise practiced in the sixties and seventies), this essay argues that Fluxus deserves to be understood not as a late manifestation of dada or the inchoate prefiguration of conceptual art and institutional critique, but rather as the first avant-garde movement fit to the age of electronic information and their network protocols.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v022/22.4.rothman.html

""When writing about Cage, we encounter many difficulties with terminology. How to describe in a summary manner, without misunderstandings a writer, composer, teacher, music and social critic, poet, painter, anarchist, speaker, cultural animator, mycologist and a New Yorker in one person? In relation to musical practice, with which he is most often associated, he preferred to describe himself as an “organizer of sounds” and it seems that it was not only a stylistic manipulation, but the expression of a certain attitude, characterized by a high degree of distrust in relation to the musical tradition (which Cage consistently challenged), inherited from aesthetic components such as composition, work of art, score, harmony, as well as the artistry of composition. A paradoxical and somewhat surprising feature of his artistic practice, which ultimately sought to deny the foundations of matters in which he dabbled, was that it at first glance, the accidental and absurd assumptions were the result of meticulous study and analysis, creating a very coherent and thoughtful whole. Th e conceptual dimension of Cage’s artistic achievements allows to situate his work within the phenomenon that Kosuth describes as “art after philosophy” , in turn Cage himself in a suggestive manner defines the philosophical and conceptual nature of his art, writing that “philosophy for the [contemporary] artist is what the Bible is for the priest”. Certainly, Cage’s artistic achievements should not be put in the same category with the achievements of artists, whose only tangible characteristic is that of a single sweeping gesture to crack down on binding canons, undefining all that is definite. Cage’s artistic and ideological path strongly denies such an image. This book takes a bearings of this path.
The aim of my work is the reconstruction of the philosophical framework that creates the conceptual content of the work of the author of Silence. This analysis is a de facto reconstruction of the foundations of his aesthetic and ideological system . The reconstruction appears to be interesting because it contains the schema of possible references of Cage’s aesthetic to its various philosophical aspects, including those that were oblivious to him. Aspect (Latin appearance) is a frame, from which is considered a given object or phenomenon. “Philosophical” means in this case - a reference to a philosopher or a philosophical position. In Cage’s “paradoxical case” the possibility of such an approach seems to be twofold. On the one hand it presents ideas that deserve, in my opinion, attention, because they seem to me to be the most “adequate” to present the creative path of the author of Music of Change and the most “in his spirit.” They are not only original concepts, their presence in the vicinity of Cage’s aesthetic views is often dictated by the duty to simply repeat what Cage himself considered the conceptual framework of his creative activity. I am first and foremost thinking about the views of D.T. Suzuki, H.D. Thoreau, J. Joyce, B. Fuller and M. McLuhan. Subsequently capturing the aesthetic phenomenon of the works of the author of Four in the light of philosophical and artistic ideas of F. Nietzsche, J. Dewey, S. Beckett, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, J. Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, J.-N. Vuarnet and W. Welsch may be a risky treatment, but in my opinion, fully justified. On the other hand, built by Cage for more than half a century, the conceptual edifice of hisart, is not merely the chance result of various influences (conscious or unconscious), but appears in the eyes of the investigator as an independent being, deserving of attention and introduction, which on closer examination carries with it a whole new quality, putting the researcher in the face of unpleasant fact of almost complete incompatibility of the existing conceptual apparatus to describe this unexpected phenomenon. For the researcher, however, there is no other way. A researcher must come from that which is known, to perchance get to what is apparently unknown, or only temporarily inexpressible. He must at the same time give up many of the usual ways and habits, to see the matters from another perspective.
In the opinion of most researchers of the work of the author of Music of Changes a very important element that should be taken into account during the reconstruction of his views, is biography. This is the engine of his aesthetic choices. Spheres of practice and art, everyday experience and aesthetic experience are indeed inextricably linked for Cage, penetrating to the extent that almost always aesthetic choices are determined by the life situations, and not vice versa. They also shape by what might be called the world view of creator, but also his attitude and moral life. During writing, I used David Revill’s competent biography The Roaring Silence: John Cage - A Life, which, irrespective of magnitude of the accumulated evidence of the source material remains a proof of almost crystalline objectivity of the author: as when he describes the lessons that Cage learned due to difficult experiences of an emotional crisis period (due to personal problems) and financial collapse (which is related to the economic crisis of 1930s America and the hardships of war). From this period: “lesson of acceptance” and “practice of patience” in relation to own emotions - at first just as exuberant, as unfulfilled - in relation to the world and the people, sounds and musical material (supported by the idea explained to him by G. Sarabhai: “to sober and quiet the mind”) - became the guiding motto in Cage’s life. In the shape of subsequent aesthetic assumptions, the deficit in talent and “staying in line”, were also reflected in almost all the components of the Cage’s concept of art such as acting to overcome both his own individual limitations, and the entire former Western aesthetic paradigm.
My work consists of five chapters, introduction and conclusion. It also contains a time line of John Cage’s life, bibliography of Cage’s writings, titles of major critical studies and the remaining critical bibliography. In the first chapter At the basis of avant-garde. Some facts from the history of aesthetics from Kant to Cage in the context of an aesthetic nature of art (with music in the background), raises the question of the status of contemporary aesthetics and the adequacy of its categories for the description of contemporary art. To introduce the reader to the problems of aesthetics, I present Kant’s conception of beauty and Hegel’s and Schelling’s concept of art in the context of a dispute about the aesthetic nature of art (A. Danto, G. Dickie). Then, I present Nietzsche’s concept of art with particular emphasis on Wagner’s impact, all in relation to the fundamental dilemmas of creative individual in the modern era. In the next part I describe the avant-garde revolution, which took place in the play first half of the twentieth century in relation to theoretical propositions of Dewey, Adorno, and Bauman. In the second chapter In Schoenberg’s circle: the source of new music, I present the history of acquaintance between the creator of dodecaphony and Cage and the reasons for their separation in connection with the concept of expressionist art, taking into account the position of anti expressionistic Popper, and all this in the context of opposition of tonality to atonality and the uniquely American category of “experimental action”. The third chapter From sound to noise, from noise to silence. Formation of a new aesthetic of music by John Cage, I present the assumptions of Cage’s first manifest Future of Music: Credo, the impact of development of American civilization on aesthetic of his early ideas, the relation of Cage to Futurism, the concept of noise as an integral component of music in the context of twentieth- century discoveries in the field of electro-acoustics, psychology of the new perception, lying at the basis of the Listening to music manifesto, the concept of “music of all sounds” and “music of all time” as well as Cage’s understanding of time in the context of ontological discontinuity of the universe of sounds, and essential for his aesthetics of music, the term “indeterminacy of the composition.” In the fourth chapter Between art and experience, I describe the sequence of events from the biography of Cage, which had a direct influence on the shaping of his conception of art, in respect to the development of technology, artist’s creative and emotional crisis, relationships (including social) with abstract expressionism and discovering the silence for music. In the fifth chapter Philosophy and the aesthetic dimension of the work of John Cage, I present his views in the context of the anti-platonism position (Nietzsche, B. Fuller), a dispute between modernism and the avant-garde, and also in relation to the pragmatist concept of aesthetic experience (Dewey), the time and the sublime categories (Beckett, Lyotard), the concepts of fear and chance (Heidegger, Sartre), the experimental action and chance (W. Welsch, M. Eldred), the concept of demilitarization of language and a new philosophy of reception (Derrida), and in the context of Eastern thought (Suzuki), anarchist and apolitical nature of art (Thoreau, Artaud), Marxist criticism (C. Cardew) and the philosopher-artist category (J.-N. Vuarnet).""
trans. Magda Gziut

Este trabalho apresenta uma investigação sobre o indeterminismo na música, a partir da análise de três obras musicais que utilizam processos de indeterminação como elementos estruturais. Partindo de uma contextualização das práticas e tendências musicais que enfatizam o fenômeno da indeterminação, é feita uma reflexão filosófica sobre o papel da experiência na música aleatória e experimental, enfatizando a importância da idéia de novidade e sua associação com o acaso. A poética compositiva e o aspecto virtual da forma são as bases sobre as quais se fundamentam as análises das peças.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: poética, indeterminação, fenomenologia, música experimental

ABSTRACT

This work presents an inquiry on indeterminism in music, based on the analysis of three musical works that use indeterminacy processes as structural elements. A philosophical reflection on the role of experience in aleatory and experimental music is made after an oversight of the musical practices and tendencies that emphasize the indeterminacy phenomenon. The concept of “new” and its relationship with chance are also explored. The compositional poetics and the virtual aspect of form are the basis on which are founded the analyses of the pieces.

KEYWORDS: poetics, indeterminacy, phenomenology, experimental music

ETERNAL NETWORK: A MAIL ART ANTHOLOGY is the first university press publication in academia to explore the historical roots, aesthetics and new directions of contemporary mail art. The essays of ETERNAL NETWORK were written and assembled during the early 1990s by mail artist, writer, and curator, Chuck Welch. Published in 1995 by University of Calgary Press (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), the  edition contains forty illustrated chapters surveying an international community whose mailboxes and computers were a proto internet bridging  the analog and digital world of art and communication. ETERNAL NETWORK includes numerous photographs of mailed artifacts, performance events, congresses, stampsheets, posters, collages, artists’ books, visual poetry, computer art, mail art projects, zines, copy art and rubber-stamped images.

The book is divided into six parts: Networking Origins, Open Aesthetics, New Directions, Interconnection of Worlds, Communication Issues and Ethereal Realms. Appendixes include mailing addresses from the 1990s, mail art exhibitions, a listing and location of over 350 underground mail art magazines and a comprehensive record of public and private international mail art archives. The late Judith Hoffberg, founder of Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) and editor of “Umbrella Magazine,” wrote an astute and prophetic review of ETERNAL NETWORK in March 1995. “Some might think that this is the last gasp of a paper-orientated group of artists, but it is more a testament to the future of alternative art and the role of artists as networker”.

Dick Higgins coined the term intermedia at the end of 1965 to describe art forms that draw on several media, growing into new hybrids. Intermedia works cross the boundaries of recognized media, often fusing the boundaries of art with media that have not previously been considered art forms. Higgins published a now-legendary
essay describing an art form appropriate to artists who feel that there
are no boundaries between art and life. Along with many artists and composers, Higgins felt the time had come to erase the boundaries between art and life. From this, it followed that there could be few boundaries between art forms, perhaps none, and that new forms of art could enter the previously distinct media from the larger life-world.

ETERNAL NETWORK: A MAIL ART ANTHOLOGY is the first university press publication in academia to explore the historical roots, aesthetics and new directions of contemporary mail art. The essays of ETERNAL NETWORK were written and assembled during the early 1990s by mail artist, writer, and curator, Chuck Welch. Published in 1995 by University of Calgary Press (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), the  edition contains forty illustrated chapters surveying an international community whose mailboxes and computers were a proto internet bridging  the analog and digital world of art and communication. ETERNAL NETWORK includes numerous photographs of mailed artifacts, performance events, congresses, stampsheets, posters, collages, artists’ books, visual poetry, computer art, mail art projects, zines, copy art and rubber-stamped images.

The book is divided into six parts: Networking Origins, Open Aesthetics, New Directions, Interconnection of Worlds, Communication Issues and Ethereal Realms. Appendixes include mailing addresses from the 1990s, mail art exhibitions, a listing and location of over 350 underground mail art magazines and a comprehensive record of public and private international mail art archives. The late Judith Hoffberg, founder of Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) and editor of “Umbrella Magazine,” wrote an astute and prophetic review of ETERNAL NETWORK in March 1995. “Some might think that this is the last gasp of a paper-orientated group of artists, but it is more a testament to the future of alternative art and the role of artists as networker”.

This is a version of a short article to be included in the liner notes of a CD recording by the French pianist Nicolas Horvath, in preparation and forthcoming in 2016. This article provides an introduction to Fluxus, their use of event scores written in text notation, as well as their exploration of time and other artistic elements, and their implications for performance.  Horvath has granted permission for this version to be uploaded here on Academia.edu.

... with Ken Friedman's Zen for Record there is really finally nothing to listen to. After all the sheep bleating and bleary psychedelia; Sadler's jingoist snare drums and Zappa's deskilled jingles; Malachi Favors's "little instruments" and Simon Dupree's Big Sound; after Dylan's electric Judas kiss in Manchester and Rashid Ali's steel brushes shredding in Tokyo; after all the easy and difficult listening that year, you could have put on Friedman's disc and listened to nothing.

Abstract: The article is an attempt to answer the question " Is the avant-garde intermedial? " Inter-mediality is not a new concept in the field of art and media theory; it has a long history, going back to 1965, when Dick Higgins published his essay Intermedia. The artist then tried to put his ideas into words as an intermedial manifesto of the avant-garde. This paper characterizes its assumptions, defines the notion of " intermedium " , and determines the basis of intermedial strategies. In the subsequent section of the paper the author starts a discussion about media theory and mediality in avant-garde art, looking at intermedial relationships in many artworks, and drawing attention to the objectification of art, which has led to the development of intermedial ready-mades and poème-objets. An important aspect of the intermedial activity of the avant-garde artists seems to be also the tension between the opposing poles of " gesture aesthetics " and " discourse strategy ". In the subsequent sections of his discussion of intermedial practices of the avant-garde artists, the author refers to the allegorical strategy described in Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, whose aim is to work out the notion of a non-organic avant-garde work. It is characterized by montage, which can be compared to the process of integrating heterogeneous elements into a " new " whole, similar to the intermedium, which is a combination of different media. In this context montage may be understood as an intermedial process. The answer to the question " is the avant-garde intermedial? " is not obvious. The intermedial theories presented here seem to be anachronistic or even erroneous, because nobody understands intermediality currently like the avant-garde in the 1960s.

Longer version of the paper presented at the SLSA conference in 2013.

Working in collaboration with the musician and programmer James Tenney, founding Fluxus member Dick Higgins produced the modular poem “hank and mary, a love story, a chorale for diter rot.” Working with the programming language Fortran IV Higgins and Tenney realized a poem that is a four-column permutation of the four words “hank,” “shot,” “mary,” and “dead.” Run on +3/10/1967 the computer took 1.64 minutes to generate 625 combinations of the four words in a four-column layout. This Paper considers this poem in the broader context of
Higgins developing aesthetics and specifically considers how this work is a physical

manifestation of an attitude about art making; an aspect that recontextualizes creativity as a non-essentialist mode of pattern generation and can, and should, been seen as an important precursor to current discussions concerning the nature of creativity in a digital world. The significance of this poem is more than just a historical footnote as an early exploration into the use of computers in the arts. Instead, the use of the computer for the creation of this work marks a significant
departure from the more typical understanding of computers and art in the mid and late 1960s. Instead of emphasizing more "standard" views" of computer as technology Higgins recognized and made use of the computer as a means for processing and manipulating information and most importantly as part of a system for interrogating the nature and function of paradigms. In his own early explorations of the use of computers Dick Higgins understood a crucial point about their potential,  they were not the ultimate expression of centralized control, but they offered just the opposite, the greatest possibility for freedom for creativity through decentralization.

This chronology includes comments on John Cage´s works: The concepts of selected notations are described. The chronology can be read like an introduction to Cage´s concepts or like a journey through his ideas.
In: URL: http://dreher.netzliteratur.net/1_Cage_Chronologie.pdf

BC: Before Concrete focuses on two centers where the modern visual poem developed, Paris and New York City.  This an overview of  individuals adding to the wider development of Latin and Cyrillic alphabets’ visual poem types and movements by individuals associated with the early stage development of modern visual poetry and the field of visual text arts.  Centered in the discussion is the controversy surrounding the Poeme Simultané first developed by Henry-Martin Barzun and the contribution by members of the Stieglitz Circle to the visual poem, painted word and painted symbol. Visual text art types, movements and individuals covered or mentioned include, visual poetry, concrete poetry, Abbaye de Creteil, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henry-Martin Barzun, Blaise Cendars, E E Cummings, Stuart Davis, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Albert Gleizes, Marsden Hartley, J. B. Kerfoot, Adon Lacroix, Mina Loy, Agnes Ernest Meyer, Francis Picabia, Torres Palomar, Man Ray, Katharine N. Rhoades, Pamela Colman Smith, Alfred Stieglitz, the Stieglitz Circle, Jose Juan Tablada, Max Weber, Marius de Zayas, Poeme Simultané, Ideogramme, Calligramme, Orphism, Painted Word, Psychotype and machine portraitures, Camera Work, and 291 magazine.

Erik Satie’s vogue among the postwar avant-garde has been traditionally imputed to the Dadaist, anti-art influence of his late works. Significantly less attention has been paid to the midcentury reception of Satie’s Montmartre-period music, whose mystic, esotericist ambiance runs contrary in many respects to his subsequent creative agnosticism. This chapter examines the afterlife of Satie’s fin de siècle output by way of a pair of “case studies” from 1963-64: two “actions” by the German sculptor-performance artist Joseph Beuys, and the famous public premiere of Vexations presented by John Cage (I consider its less well-known antecedents, as well). Some attention is also paid to a third Satie enthusiast, the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, whose practice serves to bridge the art- historical perspective of Beuys scholarship and the more strictly musical one of much commentary on Cage. To varying extents, all three men engaged with the homeopathic content of Satie’s Rosicrucian work, and in particular the formula “heal like with like,” which tallied well with a broader fascination among 1960s artists for phenomena that exposed spectators to psychological and even physical danger. Both Beuys and Cage employed Satie’s “ahistorical” music as what the former called an “art pill,” which they hoped might remedy modernity’s “loss of meaning.” Yet their respective visions of art- religion had two very different termini: while Beuys replaced the debasements of modern historical memory with the icons and symbols of an idealized, but ultimately inauthentic, past, Cage took up Satie’s investigations into repetitive extremes in an effort to liquidate that memory altogether. In both cases, it quickly becomes difficult to draw any easy distinctions between “productive” forgetting and “irresponsible” amnesia.

Per tracciare, sia pur sommariamente, ma con chiarezza, l’evoluzione di un concetto che ci sta a cuore, come quello dell’“opera plurale”, non si costa proprio nessuna fatica,
quest’anno, a prendere le mosse dal centenario del movimento futurista. Pur se non si può fare a meno di accettare l’idea che Marinetti abbia tratto più di uno spunto dall’opera di alcuni precursori fuori dalle righe, bisogna dargli atto che la scintilla del primo manifesto, accesa sulle pagine de “Le Figaro” il 20 febbraio 1909, tra trasgressioni e innovazioni, ribaltamenti e sovversioni, ha avuto effetti piuttosto
significativi, innescando un processo di prefigurazioni a catena che hanno aperto prospettive insospettate al rapporto tra media e linguaggi.
Nella poesia, per esempio, i limiti della pagina sono efficacemente violati e la figura del poeta si trova di colpo davanti alla necessità di agire nello spazio acustico, visivo, scenico, per affrontare le esigenze pressanti di progetti fondati sulle intersezioni linguistiche, sulle contaminazioni, sulla percezione multisensoriale, sui rapporti con le nuove tecnologie e, soprattutto, sulla complessità della dimensione della performance. A scattare utilmente è l’interesse per la complessità dei rapporti tra la scrittura e le arti, che gradualmente s’incanalerà nella direzione di quella che, negli anni Sessanta, una fortunata intuizione di Dick Higgins indicherà come “intermedialità”.

This paper is about the 1969 "Street Works" of Scott Burton and Hannah Weiner, and it speculates as to the relationship between their intermedial format--as a form of poets theater that anticipates the demands of contemporary new media--and the social practice latent in early conceptual writing. I call "milieu logic" a "prosody of social expectation," or, to quote Dick Higgins, a way to "mean" a "social situation."

This work discusses McLuhan's ideas of electrical media as the extension of human central nervous system, consciousness, and wearing all mankind as our skin. In cyberspace the traditional essence of art and the original concept of art history have disappeared; all now is part of a real-time holistic data sphere inseparable from its models of perfection and simulation. For McLuhan, the artist is the sole person able to cope with technological reality with impunity, because of his awareness of the changes in sense perception. Examples of fuzzy boundary art are explored, with a focus on new media art by Ephemeral8, MTAA, Eduardo Kac, Nam June Paik and Ezra Orion. Such artworks challenge traditional artistic conventions such as “aura”, "author", and "art object", while transforming us all to an actors in a digital mosaic of a holistic theater.

«Fine direi, tanto per cominciare. Quando la prima elementare accorciò le ore del sonno facendo scivolare un freddo fastidioso nella schiena attraverso il colletto bianco inamidato. La fine di un'infanzia corta. L'odore dei lumini coprì improv-visamente i profumi di vaniglia delle confetture quando mia madre perse suo fra-tello Glauco, poeta. E fu subito scuola ché, già padrone di alfabeti materni, una suora in prima battuta mi chiese di copiare una pagina dal libro di lettura. Proprio così come la vedi. Proprio così? Le chiesi. Sì, così. E fu che ricopiai irreprensi-bilmente in bodoni perfetto, cercando di minimizzare i caratteri per non varcare i margini del foglio. Ovviamente fu la delusione della suora-maestra e fu la delu-sione mia. Che continuavo a chiedermi senza risposta perché avesse voluto ob-bligarmi a quell'esercizio tanto strano, quando avrei potuto scrivere tranquilla-mente in corsivo corrente. Un impatto deludente. E perdente. Nei confronti di quella signora bacucca così strana che si era senz'altro fatta un'idea sbagliata delle mie capacità scrittorie. In realtà ero abituato ad osservare tutto nei detta-gli. E mi interessavano le grazie dei ca-ratteri di stampa. Li vedevo cordiali e sorridenti. In particolare m'intrigava la "e", simpaticamente, che aveva deciso di porsi di profilo per esaltare il taglio della sua risata sganasciata. Abituato a scrivere sotto dettatura, capii, lì, che non dovevo prendere tutto alla lettera. Ma, in effetti, il gran finale fuor di bam-bagia c'era già stato quando scappai dall'infantile ostello. Un alto cancello. Un giardino. Un pino. Altre monache. Altro tipo di cuffia. Fu la mia prima performance. Una fuga in solitario di cui mi restano nella mente certi curiosi 1. Mio padre Adalberto.

Discusses shift in the politics of the avant-garde after World War II.  I argue that the utopian aspirations of the avant-garde are refocused on providing singular, non-binding examples of alternative ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing everyday life.  Chapters on John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, Gilbert Sorrentino, Samuel Beckett.

Consciously acknowledged or not, by both creators and users, the man- made built environment is a potential symbol which creators and users can either ignore or recognize; not only a symbol but a metaphor.

              It is the intention of this monograph to validate, and, hopefully, encourage the intentional, controlled, and designed making of metaphors because building metaphors  are actual, real and consequential.  The matter of applying the technology and ideas to make such metaphors are abundant.  What is at question is the will and intention of using these resources. In other words, whether we intentionally make a metaphor or not, the building is a perceived metaphorically as a metaphor.

            Even if a builder intentionally aims at not making a metaphor the building is still perceived as a metaphor.  Creators of the environment perceive the created work. In different ways and for different reasons. These differences are in the effort, time and intensity of involvement with the creation and subsequent use of the work.

              The result of creator's efforts becomes a symbol and a metaphor, this phenomena is serious, important and with its consequences worthy of validating.  The creator, well-motivated or not, will be at the beginning with an idea and involved in the process of using technology to convert ideas into a reality.  The user, perceiving or not, is involved with the product of this process and for a much longer period of time., perhaps attaching to it  meaning, significance and importance often  different and unexpected by its author.

                When by chance, the importance and consequences of the authors concerns are successfully imparted and manifested in the work and perceived by the users we can observe that this phenomena is rooted in the author's own sensitivity and concern about what his context means to him and his family. What importance is the built environment in his own life and how would its improvement, change, or modification affect him. It has been personal, cerebral, and willful. The architect chose to do it and followed his decision by a sustained effort. Have architects ignored there right, authority and unwritten mandate by being careless about this creative goal.  The goal of making metaphors and symbols, and, if revived what would change?  Would they be more uplifted and would their lives improve? Would the perception of there lives improve?

In 1981, Dick Higgins declared : “Intermediality is no longer needed.” Why did this Fluxus artist and theoretician claim that intermediality was not relevant any more, when he himself had defined the concept of intermedia fifteen years prior, in 1966? The notion of intermedia – as well as the intermedial artworks it is referring to – had been, according to Higgins, necessary at that time and had known quite some success since then. Higgins mentioned the term “intermediality”, which in turn designates a descriptive tool allowing to better analyse intermedial artworks, for the first time in 1981, and immediately considered it obsolete, because he deemed it not to be sufficiently precise in the changed landscape of contemporary art where intermedial artworks had become more prevalent - ironically at the same moment when the concept began to gain traction as an analytical tool in literature and art history. This paper considers the origin and the development of both notions (intermedia/intermediality) and asks, more generally, what the historical and social relevance of art can and should be, as well as the relevance of the conceptual tools one can employ to understand actual artistic developments. In its final part, the paper focuses on two possible continuations of the pair intermedia/intermediality : performance art/performativity and media art/media theory.

En 1981, Dick Higgins écrit : « Quant à la notion d’intermédialité, elle est devenue superflue. » Comment l’artiste-théoricien Fluxus en vient-il à affirmer à cette date que l’intermédialité n’est plus pertinente, lui à qui l’on doit la première théorisation essentielle de la notion d’intermédia quinze ans plus tôt, en 1966 ? Si la notion d’intermédia – de même que les œuvres intermédiales qu’elle désigne – étaient selon Higgins nécessaires lors de leur apparition et ont connu par la suite une fortune certaine, la notion d’intermédialité, qu’il utilise pour la première fois en 1981 et qui constitue l’outil descriptif permettant de mieux saisir les intermédia, semble pour lui d’emblée dépassée, car elle n’est pas suffisamment discriminante dans un paysage artistique où les intermédias se sont peu à peu imposés. Pourtant, le début des années 1980 constitue précisément le moment où la notion d’intermédialité commence à s’affirmer comme approche disciplinaire dans la recherche en littérature et en art. En revenant sur l’origine et le devenir de ces deux notions, l’article pose la question plus générale de la pertinence historique et sociale de l’art ainsi que celle des outils analytiques qui peuvent être mis en œuvre pour saisir les développements artistiques contemporains ; il examine deux prolongements possibles au couple intermédia/intermédialité depuis les années 1980, avec les doubles notions de performance/performativité et d’arts des médias (Medienkunst)/théorie des médias (Medientheorie).

The PDF presents the folded poster with reproductions of the illustrated text panels (in German) of the exhibition "Art as walking on the limits: John Cage and modern art". It was published by the Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst in Munich (now Pinakothek der Moderne). It presents John Cage in/between Marcel Duchamp, Black Mountain College and Fluxus. The panels introduce into the concepts and strategies of artists who transgressed the limits of established art media via experimental notations.

This essay by Chuck Welch, has been published in the current exhibition catalogue, Keep Art Flat! Mail Art and the Political 1970s, Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Denmark, 15 September - 06 November 2016. Welch, a mail art networker, writer, and curator wrote the essay as a survey of mail art objectives and networking during the 1970s. The text has been illustrated with artworks by Niels Lomholt, Robert Rehfeldt, Bill Vazan, Istvan Kantor and Guglielmo Achille Cavellini. All works are found in the Niels Lomholt Mail Art Archive, Denmark. Text is in English.

This book investigates the concept of pos-modernism since its roots on Philosophy, Social Sciences and Architecture to its musical sense in the 20th century. Also discusses the meaning of "post-modernism" in Brazilian music.
Now it is being reissued by Ed. Unesp, 2015.

This review of Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, co-authored by Steve Clay and Ken Friedman, is itself a collaboration between Virginia Kuhn and Betsy Sullivan. Both approaches, to the review and the book here under consideration, capture the importance of community in creating and sustaining the art of Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press.

This paper discusses a significant performance event of the 1960s titled 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering. In 2006, MIT held an exhibition to mark the fortieth anniversary of this event, the first large-scale performance in the US in which electronic technology, and importantly, ...

Although the Fluxus art (non-)movement is often read as a historical phenomenon, the breadth of its innovations and complexities actively thwarts linear and circumscribed viewpoints. The notion of Fluxus incorporates contradiction in challenging and enduringly generative ways. More than five decades after its emergence, this special issue of OnCurating entitled Fluxus Perspectives seeks to re-examine the influence, roles, and effects of Fluxus via a wide range of scholarly perspectives. The editors Martin Patrick and Dorothee Richter asked notable writers from different locations, generations, and viewpoints, all of whom having written about Fluxus before, to offer their thoughts on its significance, particularly in relation to contemporary art. With its emphasis upon events, festivals, and exhibitions, Fluxus may also be interpreted as an important, prescient forerunner of contemporary strategies of curating. Contributions by Simon Anderson, Jordan Carter, Kevin Concannon, Ken Friedman, Natilee Harren, John Held, Jr., Hannah B Higgins, Hanna B. Hölling, Natasha Lushetich, Billie Maciunas, Peter van der Meijden, Ann Noël, Martin Patrick, Dorothee Richter, Henar Rivière, Julia Robinson, Owen F. Smith, Weronika Trojanska, and Emmett Williams.

Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'Université de Montréal, l'Université Laval et l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Pour communiquer avec les responsables d'Érudit : erudit@umontreal.ca Article Giovanni Fontana Inter : art actuel, n° 97, 2007, p. 27-31. Pour citer cet article, utiliser l'information suivante : http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/45643ac Note : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir. Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter à l'URI http://www.erudit.org/apropos/utilisation.html Document téléchargé le 7 October 2012 04:07 « Esprit nomade, hérétique parmi les hérétiques, philosophe et poète… Giordano Bruno »

A entrevista redigida é fruto do diálogo entre a museológica, Manoela N. Souza, e a artista Gabriela Bresola. Essa conversa aconteceu na casa da artista no dia 21 de maio de 2016, com gravação de 34 minutos e 72 segundos. Os assuntos discutidos são relacionados ao desejo de conhecimento do trabalho de Gabriela e em compreender o que a arte significa e suscita para ela.