Primary Information Sale

For the next 24 hours, all titles at the Primary Information site are discounted by 50%. 

The above collection of three Something Else Press works is available for only five dollars, for example. The new Fluxus newspaper reprint is only ten dollars. 

https://primaryinformation.org/

Camille's Reports #1

Dick Higgins/Something Else Press

Camille's Reports #1

New York City, USA: Something Else Press, [1965]

8.2 x 13.9 cm.

Edition size unknown

Camille Gordon is the alter-ego of Dick Higgins, and later possibly other artists who worked for the press (Emmett Williams, Ken Friedman, etc.) who found it awkward promoting their own publications. 

In the early days of the press, Higgins was the sole employee, serving as editor, designer, producer, and press strategist. He wrote the newsletters and the dust jacket blurbs for the books. This sometimes put him in the awkward position of having to write effusively about one of his own works. The name Camille Gordon was used to thwart this problem, and also make the press seem less like an outfit operating out of someone’s living room. 

This is the first of twelve "news cards" mailed out by the Something Else Press to advertise forthcoming titles. The format was eventually retired in favour of the newsletters, which “Gordon” also contributed to. 

The character was killed off in Newscard #12 ("killed on Route-1 when her car smashed into a chicken truck”) but then resurrected again in the Something Else Newlsetter, Vol. 1, No. 7 ("It isn't true. She's gone to Afghanistan, to Mazar-i-Sharif, with her fiancé, a folk song collector [...] we're awfully glad to hear she's okay”). 

A second pseudonym used was "Charles Gagnon" whose initials are also C.G. and for Dick Higgins sound like the French adverb ci-gît, which means "here lies.” 

Abebooks lists three copies of this title, between $125 and $250 US. Currently Division Leap is selling the above example on Ebay, with a current bid of $15.00, here. 

"I once played a joke with Dick’s pseudonym. A female photographer friend of mine had been hired by the New York Review of Sex, one of many tabloids that sprang up in the mid-sixties touting the new sexual freedoms, to shoot prostitutes and their pimps in Times Square. While she managed to do this very discreetly, she was afraid of having her name credited in the published spread. I offered, and she used, Camille Gordon. This upset Dick, so I never let on until now that it was my doing.”

- Barbara Moore

Catherine Christer Hennix

Catherine Christer Hennix died last week in Istanbul, at the age of 75. Hennix was a musician, poet, philosopher, mathematician and visual artist, and led the just intonation live-electronic ensembles Hilbert Hotel and The Deontic Miracle.

She studied with both legendary electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and raga master Pandit Pran Nath, whose other students included La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Terry Riley, Michael Harrison, Yoshi Wada and Henry Flynt. She became a pioneer in Swedish computer generated sound in the nineteen sixties. 

At the urging of Nath, she also pursued a career as a professor of mathematics and computer science.   She was affiliated with MIT's AI Lab in the late 1970s and was later employed as research professor of mathematics at SUNY New Paltz. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, she played with Arthur Russell and Arthur Rhames, as well as in Flynt's group Dharma Warriors. 

I met her once, briefly, at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s home in NYC. I had made a pilgrimage into the city during the final months of a ten year long multi-tone drone project. When I arrived I was told that the hardware had malfunctioned and it was temporarily down. Luckily, I was invited back that evening for a talk by Hennix and Henry Flynt. 

She died at her home in Turkey, on November 29th. 

Dick Higgins

Dick Higgins died on this day twenty-five years ago, in Quebec City, at age 60. 

Dick Higgins | Classic Plays

Dick Higgins

Classic Plays

New York City, USA: Unpublished Editions, 1976

[60] pp., 23.5 x 15.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 750

     

Over the course of his life, Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books. Classic Plays - dedicated to Robert Filliou - is his seventh under the Unpublished Editions imprint. 

"My interest in languages other than my native English had been an ongoing preoccupation from the beginning, as the reader can see from the list of books to date. But I also, therefore, felt that I should extend this into a single work in two languages, punning back and forth between the two. So it happened that in 1976 I wrote and Unpublished Editions published classic plays, which is in French and English throughout, and the title of which is an ironically preten- tious reference to wordplays as well as an allusion to its story, the Persephone myth, which it tells by allusion and reference, following an idea of Augustus Wilhelm Schlegel, one of the Jena group of early German romantics..."

- Dick Higgins, "The Strategy of Each of My Books" 1984

A Something Else Reader

[Various Artists]

A Something Else Reader

New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2022

368 pp., 6 x 9.25", softcover 

Edition of 4500

It’s difficult to quantify the impact of the Something Else Press, a publishing venture started by Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, in 1964.1 The press published about fifty titles in the decade that it was operational, including books by some of the most important artists in a variety of disciplines, including music (John Cage, Henry Cowell), dance (Merce Cunningham), Pop Art (Claes Oldenburg), Concrete Poetry (Emmett Williams), found poetry (Bern Porter), literature (Gertrude Stein), Mail Art (Ray Johnson), Happenings (Al Hansen), philosophy (Marshall McLuhan) and Artists’ Books (Dieter Roth). 

The publisher’s most radical contribution to the history of Artists’ Books is somewhat invisible now: the use of traditional book binding rather than the experimental formats favoured by many “book artists” working in the late sixties and early seventies. Other than two boxed works2, the press eschewed the alternative bindings of Fluxus (bolts, hinges, plastic boxes) and the more delicate hand-stitched, handmade paper offerings common at the time. This approach allowed them to effectively infiltrate libraries and bookstores, and for them to survive being passed down from owner to owner. 

Maybe the best measure of their ongoing influence is not an individual title, but the press as a whole. Contemporary publishers of Artists’ Books invariably take cues from the SEP, and perhaps none more so than Primary Information. 

The publisher of A Something Else Reader first came to prominence with their reprints of the Something Else Press Great Bear pamphlets series. Long out of print and often much more difficult to acquire than the books published the SEP, the series included text scores, essays, manifestos, performance documentation and other artists' writings. The Primary Information reprints were lovingly recreated in facsimile, and beautifully housed in printed wooden box. 

Even more difficult to track down now are the Something Else Press newsletters - broadsides that coupled catalogue entries and forthcoming titles with essays and writings by Dick Higgins and others. The newsletter was where Higgins outlined his mandate for the press and where his influential essay “Intermedia” was first published. 

Primary Information made the complete set available as downloadable PDFs, a year after the Great Bear reprints. They can be found on their site, here. 

Facsimile reprints of two other Something Else Press titles followed, in 2013 and 2015: Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, and Fantastic Architecture, compiled by Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell. 

I suspect these undertakings extend beyond a shared interest in the material, to a shared mandate. 

In addition to publishing Artists’ Books, the Something Else Press also produced facsimile reprints of out-of-print material. 

The Press reprinted The Dada Almanac for the book’s fiftieth anniversary in 1966, the first trade edition reprint of any of the early 20th century avant garde movements either side of the Atlantic.3 The Great Bear pamphlet series included a reprint of Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto The Art of Noise.

Dick’s 100 Amusements is a reprint of an 1873 compendia of parlour entertainment that Higgins recognized as proto-Fluxus4 (and probably also liked the shared name of the title).

Six volumes by Gertrude Stein were reprinted, amounting to over ten percent of the Something Else Press' output. These may have been partly due to the fact that they were in the public domain and that their sales might help support recent work5, or to stave off criticism of a lack of originality.6

But many of Gertrude Stein's works were either only available in abridged forms7, or not at all. And they were too costly on the secondary market to get into the hands of the general reader. 

“Something Else Press was selling books in supermarkets and had door-to-door salesmen,” Primary Information co-founder Miriam Katzeff told Bomb Magazine, in 2014. “For us, our target audience isn't collectors who are dominating so many other parts of the art world. It's our peers: artists, students, historians.”8

The desire to make important texts available again and at affordable prices is at the core of Primary Information's agenda. Like the Something Else Press, they produce titles in large editions (there were 4500 copies of A Something Else Reader produced, for example). And Primary Information takes it a step further, even, by reportedly selling their books at cost. 

They also publish works from a third category (alongside contemporary Artists' Books and classic reprints), titles which Katzeff calls "historical material that has never been printed in book form before"9. Fittingly, A Something Else Reader is a bit of a hybrid. The contents have all been previously published - in book form - but not as here, and not with Dick Higgins' introduction. 

The book was originally intended by Higgins as a primer which he pitched to Random House, hoping a larger publisher could introduce the material to a wider audience. They passed, but suggested that he publish it himself. However, the Something Else Press was already hemorrhaging money and re-categorization from the IRS made continuing the enterprise untenable. After ten years, the press folded in 197410. 

The proposal and assembled table of contents for A Something Else Reader went into Higgins’s archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled the book for Primary Information. 

The title includes selections from both The Something Else Press titles and the Great Bear pamphlets from a wide variety of artists including Eleanor Antin, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Augusto de Campos, Clark Coolidge, Philip Corner, William Brisbane Dick, Robert Filliou, Albert M. Fine, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh Fox, Buckminster Fuller, Eugen Gomringer, Brion Gysin, Richard Hamilton, Al Hansen, Jan J. Herman, Dick Higgins, Åke Hodell, Ray Johnson, Allan Kaprow, Kitasono Katue, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Richard Kostelanetz, Ruth Krauss, Jackson Mac Low, Robert K. Macadam, Toby MacLennan, Hansjörg Mayer, Charles McIlvaine, Richard Meltzer, Manfred Mohr, Claes Oldenburg, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Charles Platt, Bern Porter, Dieter Roth, Aram Saroyan, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Ellen Solt, Daniel Spoerri, Gertrude Stein, André Thomkins, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams. 

At $25, I can't recommend the title strongly enough. You can purchase it here. 

Better still, for only $45, you can buy a 'bundle', which includes the excellent Fantastic Architecture, A Something Else Reader and nine Great Bear pamphlets, here. Unless you need it for food, I can't think of a better way to spend your money. 

1. Fluxus artists Emmett Williams and Ken Friedman served as Editor-in-Chief and General Manager, respectively. 

2. Robert Filliou’s Ample Food For Stupid Thought and de-coll/age happenings by Wolf Vostell. Notably, the Filliou title was also issued as a hardcover book. 

3. Peter Frank. The Something Else Press: An Annotated Bibliography. McPherson & Company, 1983. Page 14. Frank also notes that the Almanac’s author, Richard Huelsenbeck, was a friend of Higgins’ family, making securing permissions a lot easier. 

4. Higgins also authored a book called Pattern Poetry, which traced the roots of Concrete and Visual Poetry back centuries. It’s still available from Amazon, here. 

5. “New masters” as Higgins called them in a newsletter essay entitled “Why Do We Publish So Much Gertrude Stein?”

6. In her 2020 thesis Something Else Press as Publisher, Rachel High unearths a note from Dick Higgins to Peter Frank, indicating that the purpose of the reprints was also to “head off the kind of criticism that led off, ‘you can’t do that—the dadaists did it all before,’ [or ‘Stein’].’”

7. A quarter the length, in the case of The Making of Americans, which the Something Else Press reprinted in full, all 925 pages.

8. "The audience that we are trying to serve aren’t the people who can afford the one of the five remaining copies of a legendary artist’s book," she told Brooklyn Rail. 

9. An excellent example being Lee Lozano's Notebooks. See earlier post here. 

10. Primary Information - which was co-founded by James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff in 2006 - has already outlasted the Something Else Press by six years. 

Grappa Fluxus Box 2

[Various artists]

Grappa Fluxus Box 2

Molvena, Italy: Massimo Lunardon, 1997

40 x 62.5 x 16 cm.

Edition of 8

A follow-up to the original Grappa Fluxus, four years prior. A Serigraphed wooden box with hinged doors, containing glass blown works by six artists affiliated with Fluxus:  Eric Andersen, Dick Higgins, Milan Knizak, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier.

"In 1995 Luigi Bonotto asked me to design a bottle for Grappa (Italian brandy). I wanted to make a bottle whose shape has features of wind instruments and string instruments, yet is none of them – an imaginary primitive shape of an instrument. Inside the bottle is genuine Grappa."

- Mieko Shiomi

Geoffrey Hendricks | Five Found Photos

Geoffrey Hendricks

Five Found Photos

New York City, USA: Printed Editions, 1979

[12] pp, 15 x 22 cm., softcover

Edition of 600 signed and numbered copies

A slim volume with tipped in found photographs published by Dick Higgins' imprint. 

Five Found Photos is available here, for $150.00 US. 

"Last summer in Germany, rummaging through flee markets, I collected some old postcards and photographs. The collection was made casually just picking out what struck my fancy. One night I noticed certain photographs were of the same people. Other cards seemed to go together because of similar structural elements. I began to group and regroup the material, pairing images visually, narratively, and numerically, seeing contrasts and similarities of form, subject, location, time, or emotion. Sometimes there were surprises. These five cards are one distillation from this process. They might imply a story, or a dream, perhaps a souvenir of a summer abroad. They are for reflection."

- Geoffrey Hendricks

Endre Tót Total questions by Tot

Endre Tót

Total questions by Tot

Berlin, Germany: Edition Hundertmark, 1974

16 pp., 21 x 14.7 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 300

The first booklet in the Hundertmark series consists of reproduction of questionnaires answered by Marina Abramovic, anonymous c/o Marylin Monroe, George Brecht, Jacques Charlier, Hervé Fisher, Ken Friedman, Dick Higgins, Pierre Restany, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi and Wolf Vostell, and not by Marcel Duchamp.

Tot posed five questions on a form titled "I'd Be Glad If You Answered My Questions". The form is marked "Please Print Clearly" but his questions are far from legible. Produced on a typewriter, many of the letters are obscured by other characters. And the final question is only a series of zeroes. 

The recipients replied in kind, either by leaving the fields blank or answering with rubber stamps (or in the case of Abramovic, postage stamps). Higgins and Friedman seem to try to answer in earnest, as may Mieko Shiomi, whose replies are in her native Japanese. 

The title was reprinted in 1981 in a second edition of 300 copies. These remain available from the publisher, here, for 16 Euro.

Printed Matter is currently presenting an exhibition of Tót's work titled Endre Tót : Gladness and Rain.

Curated by Darling Green, the exhibition features over 100 items, including artists’ books, printed matter, performance works, and mail art correspondence, with an emphasis on the Hungarian artist's printed output of the 1970s and 80s, which defied the censorship of Soviet-controlled Hungary with humour and absurdity.

The exhibition is billed as "the most comprehensive collection of Tót’s work ever shown in the US". It closes in one week, on November 14th. 

Dick Higgins

Dick Higgins died on this day in 1998, at the age of 60.