Lines of Thought The Graphis Series of

Bonnie Marranca

riter, composer, visual artist, performer, publisher, and a founder of , Dick Higgins expended a great deal of energy thinking about performance Wand 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 exhibit, There Will Never Be Silence, Scoring ’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 intermin- gling of performer and audience, generated by Kaprow and . 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

92  PAJ 107 (2014), pp. 92–98. © 2014 Bonnie Marranca doi:10.1162/PAJJ_a_00205

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00205 by guest on 30 September 2021 more pluralistic, interdisciplinary, and process-oriented approach to the live event. Many of his contemporaries, such as Kaprow, Robert Whitman, , and Cage, too, also used the “theatre” as a point of departure in contextualizing their , 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, theGraphis 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 , 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 the pieces in his “ Notes on the Gra- phis Series.” He indicates what tools were used (mostly ink, pencil, felt-tip pen), when the individual numbers were completed, and instructions for how they are to be per- formed. The actual notations interspersed through the text, mostly unnumbered, show that some of them look like calligraphy, some use words, and others are audio pieces. Apparently, many were lost or given away, and a number were sent to Tokyo for a 1962 exhibition at Sogetsu Arts Center. Some of the Graphis drawings are lists of objects, others choreographic or map-like, and still others are like handwriting. The individual pieces in the Graphis series are referred to at different times as “notation,” “calligraphic work,” “piano ,” “structure,” “photomusic,” “drama,” “roadmap music,” “process notation,” “choreographic procedure,” “drawing,” “diagram,” “play” — the descriptions are by no means exhaustive. A study of the relationship of these pieces to , movement, or what Higgins called his “event theatre,” and of the relationship of the drawing to the performance, is long overdue in the histories of performance.

The Graphis works exemplify what Higgins would define as“” in his highly influential 1965 manifesto of the same name. AGraphis notation exists between media — for example, between drawing and drama or between music and drawing or between drawing and poetry. Some of them bear a resemblance to the musical notation and visual poetry the erudite Higgins had already created. Not only was intermedia a new ecology of the arts, its attitude toward process also embodied a vision of social relations characteristic of the sixties. Significantly, theGraphis is ful- filled by the collective, as the activities of performance and participation unfolding in a non-hierarchical setting. The Intermedia ideal also reflected Higgins’s preference for work that was situated between what he viewed as “art media” and “life media.” In

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00205 by guest on 30 September 2021 their casual incorporation of everyday life and artifacts, and free form styles, Graphis is a form of poetry — the daily tuning — in the life of the artist. A way of thinking about a day — Was it a-two-wavy-lines-day? Was it a-blackened-paper-with-white-three- hole-punch-spots-day? Was it an-explosive-energy-of-intersecting-angles-day?

The examples from the Graphis series printed here reflect very different approaches to the scores. Graphis No. 19 (Act One of Saint Joan at Beaurevoir) is a visual plan for Higgins’s long play (he called it a “ceremony” ) Saint Joan at Beaurevoir, per- formed in 1960 at the Players Theatre in Greenwich Village. It consists mainly of stage directions and fifty-five slides projected on the performers. Chance operations determined the sequence of events, the actions, and duration of the scenes, with a cast of characters featuring numerous historical figures that suggests a comparison with ’s historical plays. She is also one of the characters, along with Helen of Troy, George Sand, Queen Victoria, Gandhi, Chief Siting Bull, Patrick Henry, Ulysses S. Grant, and many others, not forgetting Diogenes the Cynic. The drawings used for Acts II and III are in the archive on which the landmark John Cage book Notations (published by in this period, as was Stein) is based. Some were made with a mimeograph machine Higgins had acquired around the same time. The layered trapezoidal lines and intersections in different colors create dynamic potential for the interplay of body, sound, text, and image. As for the music, Higgins describes “such noise-producing electrical objects as vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, drills, sirens, tape recorders,” for a start.

Graphis No. 82 has had an interesting life in other versions besides the one published here since Higgins sometimes duplicated his drawings. He was fairly cavalier about the sanctimony of the “original” and duly fearless on incorporating in them found materials or accidental mishaps. One version, in thickly drawn lines, was published in the Winter 1965 issue of The Drama Review, which explored the new performance then; another, made with much thinner lines, is included in the Selected Early Works. Graphis No. 82 in the MoMA show is the only one signed, delineating more of a vertical axis than the others. This is one of the Graphis drawings that uses words. It was performed three times on May 1 and 2, 1962, at The Living Theatre on 14th Street, in a concert that also featured works by and Philip Krumm. La Monte Young’s Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. and ’s Glass Environment for Sound and Motion were performed that night as well. The perform- ers for the evening’s events were Corner, Yvonne Rainer, Malcolm Goldstein, Judy Ratner, Arlene Rothlein, Florence Tarlow, and Letty Eisenhauer. Dancers, painters, poets, and composers were the primary performers for avant-garde events in this era.

Eisenhauer remarked in her Drama Review note on Graphis No. 82, that it “came about by making incomplete and overlapping outlines from a pair of tin snips lying on a piece of paper,” with words taken from a Puerto Rican dream book, King Tut’s Dream. Still, it was not the only chance-based selection of the Graphis series or of other Higgins plays. The notation was enlarged onto a 20 x 24'-piece of black polyethylene that was stretched out on the stage floor, as a visible score for the performers: an actual work on paper. Each performer made up an action for a word

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00205 by guest on 30 September 2021 and a method of moving from one word to another, never exiting the stage. Actions were both mimed and enacted in the performance, which had been rehearsed. This Graphis was considered by Higgins to be “complex,” one of a handful up to then that were “pushing the conceptual limits of the series.” It is published, along with some other Graphis pieces, in the artist’s 1961 mimeographed volume 100 Plays.

Higgins had a clear idea of what he wanted for the Graphis notations. His description of the series as an attempt at a form that was “unsemantic, even choreographic, in conception, if not execution” seems a particularly apt description of Graphis No. 89 (for a drama). It has a certain gracefulness, with flowing lines and concentric circles forming a network of suggested movement — a perfect rendering of the abstract theatre that Higgins envisioned. Of all the Graphis in this issue it is the one most similar to what is usually thought of as a drawing, with its wonderfully airy feeling of freedom and joy.

In foew&ombwhnw Higgins referred to this particular Graphis as “geometric design . . . a very complex drawing on graph paper, representing quantitatively all the aspects I could think of which drama might assume.” Wrapped in a mysterious weightless- ness, lines trail off like passing thoughts, settling into points in space. Higgins has left behind a handwritten note of a possible world. What was he imagining drama might become? Now, more than a half-century later, are we any closer to knowing?

What is drawing to performance, what are we to the line.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00205 by guest on 30 September 2021 Dick Higgins. Graphis No. 82. 1960. Ink on paper, sheet: 10 11/16" x 10 15/16" (27.1 x 27.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008. © 2013 Dick Higgins.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00205 by guest on 30 September 2021 Dick Higgins. Graphis No. 89, for a drama. 1961. Ink on paper, sheet: 13 7/8" x 16 3/4" (35.2 x 42.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008. © 2013 Dick Higgins.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00205 by guest on 30 September 2021 Dick Higgins. Graphis No. 19 (Act One of Saint Joan at Beaurevoir). 1959. Felt-tip pen, ink, and pencil on paper, sheet: 14" x 16 7/8" (35.6 x 42.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008. © 2013 Dick Higgins.

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