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Fluxus Experience

by Hannah Higgins.
University of California Press,
Berkeley CA,
2002. 260 pp., 57 illus.
Paper, $00.00. ISBN 0-520-22867-7.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens,
Department of Art,
University of Northern Iowa,
Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362,

U.S.A.

ballast@netins.net.

In the mid-1970s, I was sitting in an office in an Midwestern university when a colleague walked in with an out-of-town guest. I doubt if I had ever heard of Fluxus or Something Else Press, so when this person was introduced as Dick Higgins from New York, it meant nothing to me. But my interest was aroused when he held out a recently self-published book. Its outer appearance was that of a standard Bible (the title gold-stamped on a black pebbled cover, red ink on the edge of the pages, with a ribbon bookmark hanging out), but inside was a text of irreverent thoughts about art, life and what have you, titled Foew&ombwhnw (now called F,O,E,W for short). I've never forgotten that book (nor Higgins), and as recently as six years ago, I was finally able to obtain my own copy. I have also since discovered that Higgins was interested in Merle Armitage, a maverick book designer who died the same year as Higgins' visit, and about whom I have written too. He was working on a book about Armitage, when, at age 60, Higgins died prematurely in 1998. To get to the point, Higgins was the husband of another well-known Fluxus artist named Alison Knowles. I don't know how long they were married, but at some point they gave birth to twins, one of whom is an art historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is now the author of this volume. As a result, when I heard that this was coming out, I was terribly excited, eager to learn about the Fluxus art movement in relation to the daily lives of Higgins, Knowles and others. Unfortunately, instead it's a dressed-up edition of a doctoral dissertation, so austere, pro forma and scholarly that it might have been written by any art historian. In contrast to the claim on the book's jacket, it's hard to believe that the author "makes the most of her personal connection to the movement by sharing her firsthand experience." There is a surplus of "scholarly" books on Fluxus (a diffuse neo-Dada group that produced mail art, Happenings and sight gags in the 1960s), most of which read like they must have begun as doctoral dissertations. What is still lacking is a candid eyewitness memoir by someone who was there, in the eye of the hurricane, yet did not directly participate in the creative maelstrom. A good candidate is Hannah Higgins, who might have done that here if she had chosen to write openly about her father, or both her parents. Or about growing up in that context, since throughout her childhood, as she states in the preface, "I explored Fluxus objects that sat in our living room; attended Fluxus concerts and Happenings; and shared dinners, demonstrations, and avant-garde festivals with these people." Sadly, nearly the entire book is a formal, impersonal treatise that is, I find, far less interesting. As she herself says in the opening line: "This project has passed through me, but is not of me."

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, Summer 2003.)

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