Anna Higgins: Total Montage
Anna Higgins’s work operates within a cinematic, layered logic of montage—an intricate interplay of history, memory, and materiality.
By Giles Fielke
Issue 1, Summer 2023/24
“I just want to be like Scott Walker,” Anna Higgins tells me. Later, she quotes from a profile of the musician to clarify what she means: “like Andy Williams reinventing himself as Stockhausen.” This description, offered by Simon Hattenstone, encapsulates Walker’s career trajectory — from a member of the sixties pop group The Walker Brothers, to reclusive solo artist and experimentalist prior to his death in 2019.
Related
Before pop, before Warhol, before Hamilton—there was Donald Duck. In a wartime outpost in Papua, Charles Bush painted an eerily prescient vision of mass media’s encroachment. A symptom, not an agent, of pop’s first age, Bush’s work sits uneasily in art history’s timeline.
Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) is a film without images—just a luminous ultramarine field and an evocative soundtrack. Made as he was dying of AIDS-related illness, Blue resists spectacle, embracing abstraction, memory, and loss. Thirty years on, it continues to evolve, expanding across artists, mediums, and generations.
