Higgins’s Graphis series is a hauntingly beautiful, enigmatic body of work. Taking inspiration from Cage,
with whom he studied, and from others who used unconventional notations for musical scores, Higgins developed the idea for the works to act as “unsemantic, even choreographic” scripts for theater, beginning in fall 1958. These “plays” did not specify “what was to be said” but instead are graphic notations that are to be treated as plans of action.