• artists' book
  • cloth boards with dust jacket
  • offset-printed
  • sewn bound
  • black-and-white
  • 21 x 14.5 cm.
  • 360 pp.
  • edition size 1200
  • unsigned and unnumbered

Jefferson's Birthday / Postface

Dick Higgins

description

Artist's book by Dick Higgins. Book can be read from two directions. "Jefferson's Birthday consists of all the things Dick Higgins wrote, composed, or invented between April 13th, 1962 and April 13th, 1963, inclusive on the assumption that the bad work that one does is just as valid as the interesting work. So some is lousy. SO? Some is terrific. Hurrah for the Irish! And hurrah for Thomas Jefferson! And Daniel Webster too!" -- from interior flap of Jefferson's Birthday side. "On a good day, somebody is shot, somebody is cold, somebody can't find work, somebody doesn't care, somebody has contempt for somebody's hunger. The central problems of the moment are based on this fact. The question is how should or does art mirror this fact. I wrote Postface to try to help end a line of degeneration that leads directly from Wagner and Strindberg to Koch and Leroi Jones and Stockhausen. It is necessary to have an art which creates a tough, uncompromising, revolutionary mentality capable of expressing, handling, and extending scientifically the great tendencies of our times." -- from interior flap of Postface side. Printed in black-and-white.

references

"Book as Artwork 1960 / 1972" by Germano Celant. London, United Kingdom : Nigel Greenwood Inc. Ltd., 1972, pp. 60.
"Something Else Press : An Annotated Bibliography" by Peter Frank. Kingston, NY : McPherson & Co, 1983, pp. 4.
out of stock
Let us know if you’d like to be notified if this item becomes available: send us an email.