Complete set, originally published between 1965 and 1967, the Great Bear contributors were a who's who of the sixties avant-garde: George Brecht, John Cage, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Nam Jun Paik, Diter Rot and Emmett Williams, were just but a few of the artists/authors in the series. All of the pamphlets were staple-bound and 16 pages in length (except for the Manifesto issue, which was 32 pages). While they shared the same format,each title in the series was printed on varying colors and types of paper.
The Great Bear pamphlets were published by Dick Higgins: for those not familiar with him, he was a prominent member of the Fluxus group in New York, meaning a whole network of artists, writers and musicians who were to redefine what avant-garde art, literature and music could mean 50 years after the Dadaist or Futurist iterations. An internationalist assortment of artists, Fluxus anarchic strands “plait into a thick braid entwining amazing brainstorms, a politic of liberation, parareligious asceticism as well as the pratfall of the burlesque stooge who slips on the banana peel of life, an elliptical humor much in debt to Marcel Duchamp, the jokey side of Dadaism traceable to the music hall of Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics. Last, Fluxus’ political bias is strongly primitive-Christian and pro worker.”

List of pamphlets

01. By Alison Knowles/Alison Knowles
02. A Book About Love & War & Death: Canto One/Dick Higgins
03. Chance-Imagery/George Brecht
04. Injun & Other Histories (1960)/Claes Oldenburg
05. Incomplete Requiem for W. C. Fields/Al Hansen
06. Ritual: A Book of Primitive Rites and Events/Jerome Rothenberg
07. Some Recent Happenings/Allan Kaprow
08. Manifestos/Includes work by Öyvind Fahlström, Robert Filliou, John
Giorno. Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Nam
June Paik, Diter Rot, Jerome Rothenberg, Wolf Vostell, Robert Watts and
Emmett Williams
09. Berlin and Phenomena/Wolf Vostell
10. The Twin Plays: Port-au-Prince & Adams County Illinois/Jackson Mac Low
11. Diary: Change the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)/John Cage
12. The Cursive Scandinavian Salve/ Bengt af Klintberg
13. Auto Biography/David Antin
14. Popular Entertainments/Philip Corner
15. A Filliou Sampler/Robert Filliou
16. Untitled Essays and Other Works/Allan Kaprow
17. A Look into the blue tide, part 2/Diter Rot
18. The Art of Noise/Luigi Russolo
19. The Last French-Fried Potato and Other Poems/Emmett Williams
20. A Zaj Sampler/ Contains work by Jose-Luis Castillejo, Ramiro Cortes,
Javier Martines Cuadrado, Juan Hidalgo, Walter Marchetti, Tomas Marco,
and Eugenio de Vicente