

Statement about my "metadramas"



by Dick Higgins







One of the main genres of Fluxus pieces of the 1960s is and was

"events." These were first done before Fluxus, and came to be

conceptually framed as a sort of cognate of happenings, which were new

at the time-that is, intermedial, free-form pieces which lay

conceptually among the bounds of music, theater and visual art. Events

differed from happenings in that they were always as compressed as

possible, minimal statements that would provide a mental or emotional

impact. But, of course, they were highly abstract. I did them, George

Brecht did them, and others of the Fluxus artists did them also though,

for the most part, somewhat later than 1958 when George, I, AI Hansen

and others studied with John Cage in his class at the New School for

Social Research in New York, a story which has been told, more or less,

to death.



However, events made their point and the genre became well defined

over the years, through Fluxus concerts and individual performances and

works by, quite literally, hundreds of artists. In the sixties, when

purely formal explorations seemed essential to sweep away the overly

personal baggage of the 1960s, this was a positive thing. However, in

the 1980s, when personal expression has been minimized, and when art

performances, the heirs in some respect of happenings, often celebrate

boredom and almost always deal essentially with technical and formal

concerns, it seems more desirable to do pieces which are mainly minimal

emotional statements or narrative ones, complete with characterizations

in most cases. I had done a few such pieces previously, but not so

consciously as now. I call them "metadramas" because they must be

dramatic in order to satisfy the criterion, and, the "meta-" part

suggests that they are "next to" or "about" what they relate to-that

is, some are dramas about the drama, while others simply don't pretend

to be dramas but do point in that direction. I wrote about sixty of

them in the summer of 1985, destroyed most of them, and then noticed

that they seemed to define a genre to which the earlier events belong,

though not vice versa.



Barrytown, New York

18 September, 1985

