Monty Cantsin’s book on the mail artist Ed Higgins was something of a revelation. I mean, I already knew a lot of this – well, no, really, most of it was new to me. Monty did a great job of describing the larger artistic realms Ed Higgins was involved in, and in which Monty himself played a key part.
At every moment of his flamboyant art career, Cantsin addressed his personal archive in Toronto, literally, with postcards as he traveled. With this series of books on the ‘boys in his band’, Kantor rounds out his artistic activism with a radically anti-formalist art history. (I’m thinking of Rosalind Krauss’ campaign against the ‘biographical’ as relevant in art history, even as she was sleeping with the principle subject of her writing.)
But I see differently now what I thought I knew then that it – mail art, the “correspondance” of artists all over the USA and globally – has pretty much stopped. Artists don’t do this continual exchange of hand-made and decorated letters much now. (Likely I’m wrong**; but a golden age has surely long passed.)
Ed Higgins was a regular presence in my life for a time decades ago.*** He was always around the Rivington School HQ, the social club No Se No, during its early days in the ‘80s, drinking his ubiquitous can of beer. Some years laterr he did yeoman service to promote and preside over the crazy art auctions which marked those East Village gallery days, where artworks went for peanuts. (Peanuts were what Higgins demanded for a visit to his studio; and beer.) I was a customer at these living thrift-shop-of-art events when I could find out about them.
Ed Higgins III ‘branded’ the Rivington School art movement. “Six O’Clock”. He put his wingnut logo on patches, and often hollered out the slogans. Silent Ray Kelly – (Monty Cantsin has a book about him, too, which is on my shelf waiting) – was the presiding Texas threat. Ed did the talking in the early days.
About drinking and art… Jack Tilton worked for Betty Parsons, the important early dealer of Abstract Expressionists. After those experiences dealing with belligerent drunken artists, he refused ever to serve alchol at any opening of his gallery. The Rivington School was marinated in it. The whole project could have been sponsored by Budweiser. That’s a lot of why I didn’t take it seriously. When I passed by I was on my way to ABC No Rio, which we started and managed for those crucial early ‘80s years, I considered that what we were doing was serious. And what they were doing was …. well, un-serious.
But, in the end – and the end has been coming along for a few years now, as folks have dropped dead and I have moved the largeish art collection of NYC art I accumulated over years for my parents out of their house in Milwaukee and down to southern Illinois, to the Sharp Museum of the university there – I can see what Ed was doing, in both his work at the swingin’ door saloon museum of No Se No and his lifelong involvement with mail art, the long arc of his career as Monty tells it. His work and his character are important to an understanding of the late 20th century bohemia that was the Lower East Side.
First Mailart Congress NYC Printed Matter 1980. (Ruud Janssen @iuoma-network.ning.com.)
Raised in the US midwest, Ed Higgins brought that sensibility, the west, the plains, animals, sex and foodways, to NYC. To me he’s a strong representative of a moment of the Loisaida district, which became a magnet for creatives from all over the nation and the world. Especially the US midwest.
Ed returned to his cabin in the “UP”, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan every summer, which, since his death in 2021, is where his sister Ginny keeps his archive. Although a child of the suburbs of Wisconsin and Michigan, he brought the “UP” rural forest sensibility into his work – plaid shirts, fishing lures, buxom blondes in the open plains. And firecrackers.
NYC likes to understand itself as the capitol of art culture as well as the locus of predatory American capitalism. And it is still a destination for artists globally, and probably still the most dynamic gallery scene.
The art scene in NYC is far from democratic. It’s not even an aristocracy of talent. The art world practices its own dynamics of exclusion, rooted I’d argue albeit unconsciously in the era of the Four Hundred of the Gilded Age, and the rigid, ruthless social practices Edith Wharton wrote about. (During those days, the nascent Metropolitan Museum was closed on weekends, so working people wouldn’t visit.) It’s also the focal point of an East Coast network of expensive private schools, including the “Ivies”, churning out fine arts and humanities graduates who funnel into the city to seek their ‘fortunes’, many already equipped with one.
Being “serious” in NYC art terms is deeply involved with representing the face of American empire, either for, as it is, or against, as it should be. Just being with folks how they are in the heartland isn’t part of the program.
Ed’s sensibilitiy is broadly comic, albeit dadaistic – er, “doo-dahistic”. His imagery, paintings he transformed into “faux” stamps (called “cinderellas” in the philatelic world), was clearly comic, built on multiple stereotyped American themes. But it was always odd, off its Pop base in some way.
Other series of the stamps he made from his paintings were of friends and comrades, other mail artists from around the country and the world who participated in this special mode of art-making. In this way he was a promoter and maintainer of the network, commemorating the uncommemorable.
According to Kantor’s book, which includes texts and quotations from Ed’s many friends, he was an American of his era in other ways as well. Loud always, usually in a humorous way, but aggressive even racist when drunk. Which he quite often was. In this way he fit in with the darker shadows of the Rivington School.
When I visited there I could feel it. It wasn’t just Ed, but also others in the group. There was a strain of schoolboy brutality at work in the Rivington School, which repelled me. After one interaction where an asshole offered to punch me out, I ceased to stop by. I continued to visit Toyo Tsuchiya and Jim C’s gallery projects, but I threafter avoided the No Se No bar. I left it to Los Lobos, vatos who scrap.
The birth of the school, however, was strong – dramatic and synthetic, marked by the diversity of artists some of those chumps later appeared to disdain. The “99 Nights” of performance which opened the project brought together diverse actors from other downtown sites – A’s Salon, Storefront for Art & Architecture, and others. But it devolved… even as the artists built their most memorable monument, the enormous welded-together sculpture garden.
Surely the NYC art scene, at any point in time is a hard one to navigate. Especially if you’re from the American heartland, a bourgeois or worse, from a working class environment. Great Gotham is water that many are born into. It’s not warm. To find a home where you aren’t judged and spit out, where you can lose yourself in an alcoholic haze amongst others feeling equally foreign in a strange land, is a powrful thing.
As Monty’s book reveals, Ed Higgins III was a consummate artist, dedicated to his work throughout his life, ceaselessly productive and ceaselessly drunk. The last time I saw him, at a Printed Matter Art Book Fair, I helped him stagger his way to the booth where he was supposed to be signing a new stamp edition. Happy to do it for the poor guy. Sorry I didn’t hang around and buy one.
Now I’m making up for lost time. Ed Higgins III’s art belongs in a museum, where people can learn about the vast obscure network of artists with which he was involved, and laugh at his surreal impressions of American life.
NOTES
* The name Istvan Kantor adopted, “Monty Cantsin”, is discussed as the “Open Pop Star” in Marco Desiriis' book Improper Names: ColleCtive Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous (2015).
Desiriis' chapter on Monty Cantsin tells the complex story of the Neoist movement, the polemic between Kantor and Stewart Home, and the role of Ray Johnson and Fluxus in the rise of mail art. It is clear that, through Higgins, Neoism was a key influence on Rivington School artists.
** My own ex-partner, Mary L. Cambell, has produced numerous exhibitions of mail art through her Day de Dada performance group, most recently at the “ABC No Rio 45 Years” exhibition at the Emily Harvey Founationin NYC. The “correspondance” continues, and the artists of this movement remain in touch via other means as well.
*** I ran the MWF Video Club distribution project from 1986 to 2000-ish. We did a number of shows of Rivington School videos. The XFR Collective transferred the analog collection of MWF Video tapes to digital media, and uploaded quite a lot of it to Archive.org. (Many are in the “MWF Video Club Collection”.) It’s not so clear where those videos are, sprinkled around the internet and even around here and there in Archive.org. I couldn’t find the one where Ed Higgins punches holes in a cantaloupe to show how to use it as a bowling ball as Ray Kelly looks on and drinks beer, but I did find Rik Little's useful “Rivington School” documentary (1999?; https://archive.org/details/XFR_2013-08-08_1C_01), the first part at least, and my own “Story Cafe - Rivington School Pt. 2” (2004) interview session with assorted miscreants of those days (https://archive.org/details/mwf-story-cafe-rivington-school).
CITATIONS
"E.F. Higgins III" exhibition at Van Der Plas Gallery, NYC
https://www.vanderplasgallery.com/e-f-higgins
Review of the 2022 retrospective
Marc Bloch, "E.F. Higgins III: Doo Da Forever! at Van Der Plas Gallery"
https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/at-van-der-plas-gallery/5421
Ed Hamilton, “Istvan Kantor's Hero in Art: The Vanished Traces of Richard Hambleton”
is an extended review article on Monty’s antics, the book he wrote, Hambleton’s art and character, and the Rivington School
https://brooklynrail.org/2023/04/books/Istvan-Kantors-Hero-in-Art-The-Vanished-Traces-of-Richard-Hambleton/
View of the Van Der Plas Gallery installation in 2022
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