Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
THE EXPERIMENTAL FILMS OF DICK HIGGINS
August 2 – August 4
Artist, publisher, and Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins (1938-98) began experimenting with film while in college at Yale University, when he briefly joined a summer stock playhouse and served as the cameraman for a pornographic venture. After moving to New York City in the late 1950s, Higgins attended composer John Cage’s course in experimental composition at the New School and co-founded the New York Audio-Visual Group, which staged multimedia productions at venues in Downtown New York. Alongside artist Al Hansen, Higgins embarked on his first cinematic experiments, utilizing projectors, lights, and electrical circuits. The pair’s endeavors highlighted their shared love for risk and an element of danger.
Throughout the 1960s and early ’70s, Higgins created a dozen experimental movies, most of which have only recently been rediscovered and digitized. A selection of these virtually unknown works will be presented at Anthology. With the exception of THE FLAMING CITY (1961-62), which was occasionally screened in New York and Europe during the 1960s, the other films in the program have not been shown in over fifty years. The last recorded screening of a Higgins film program in New York dates back to November 1969, when the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque presented his works as part of their “Avant Garde Tuesdays” series at the Jewish Museum.
The series has been guest-programmed by Alice Centamore and Lauren Fulton, with support from the Dick Higgins Estate.
Lauren Fulton is a researcher and curator based in Lawrence, Kansas. She is an art history PhD candidate at SUNY Stony Brook where she just completed her dissertation on Higgins, which in part examines his work in film.
Alice Centamore is an art historian and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. She co-curated a show on Dick Higgins’s publishing house, Something Else Press, at the Reina Sofïa Museum, Madrid, in which his films were featured.
Special thanks to Hannah Higgins & Jessica Higgins (Estate of Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press) and Emily Cushman (MoMA).
