Dick Higgins was a > primary philosophical voice, and others helped to develop different kinds of > innovative strategies for performance, publishing, production, and > reproduction. > > We, too, would welcome Dr. Smith's thoughts on these issues, --yes, yummy
The most expressive term, and the one that Higgins most durably gave to the English language, was the word "intermedia." Higgins coined the term "intermedia" in the mid-sixties to describe the tendency of the most interesting and best in the new art to cross the boundaries of recognized media or even to fuse the boundaries of art with media that had not previously been considered art forms. With characteristic modesty, he often noted that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had first used the term. Higgins was too modest. Coleridge used the term "intermedium" once (and apparently once only) in referring to a specific issue in the work of Edmund Spenser. Those who have read Coleridge's Lecture Three: 'On Spenser' see a distant kinship to Higgins's construction of the term, but note that Coleridge's use was different and distinct in meaning and form. Coleridge referred to a specific point lodged between two kinds of meaning in the use of an art medium. Coleridge's "intermedium" was a singular term, used almost as an adjectival noun. Higgins's "intermedia" referred to a tendency in the arts that became both a range of art forms and a way of approaching the arts. Higgins said on more than one occasion that he may have read the Coleridge essay at some point in his years as a student at Yale or Columbia, and thus subconsciously taken it in. This may be so, but Dick Higgins coined a new word in the current form and contemporary meaning of the term "intermedia." He went on to elaborate the issues and ideas involved in this term in a program of artistic research and writing that spanned over three decades. see: http://colophon.com/umbrella/higgins_21.3_4.html
