Tom Phillips's A Humument features in Austin Kleon's April 24th Ted talk Steal like an Artist TEDxKC

Eye Magazine Issue 18 Autumn 1995, Humument feature, "Tom Phillips’s treated novel is a key text in the short history of deconstruction and experimental print" Limited edition prints A Humument p6: The Man as Photograph and A Humument p.363 Twilight of the Planet (produced for The Guardian climate change auction), are exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Humument Biography

Tom embraced the RA once he was on the inside but, like many other Academicians elected before and after him, he was less than enthusiastic towards the institution when he was on the outside. A year before he joined, I had taken a part-time job at the Academy to start RA Magazine. At the time, I was working for Tom producing the etchings for his major project of translating and illustrating Dante’s Inferno. When I told him what I was intending to do, his face said it all. It wasn’t an institution he or his peer group had much to do with. This changed, however, with his election to Membership. The painter R.B. Kitaj, one of his contemporaries whose work he particularly admired, had been elected at the same time, and, knowing this, Tom jokingly announced that he couldn’t possibly refuse membership as Ron had accepted. KR: In a comment on your Curriculum Vitae series, you said, “Once more I emphasize the fact that I regard texts as images in their own right: treated as they are here with words ghosted behind words to form a (literal) sub-text they are all the more image for being doubly text.” Moving beyond the palimpsest, William S. Burroughs — in the Paris Review interview you said sparked your work with collage and effacement — said that words “will be laid aside eventually, probably sooner than we think,” and that cut-ups “establish new connections between images, and one’s range of vision consequently expands.” Has this conceptualization of text-as-image infused your work? Do you think Burroughs was moving in the right direction then — and have you carried it on, now, or will you? As well as words with meaning I have enjoyed the discovery of nonce or nonsense terms which provide a fantasy obbligato to the measure of the text. These are extracted from longer words. The less self-evident their source the more autonomously real they can seem, as on p46 where ‘derstan ansfig’ are ‘the last words on earth’.

In One Side & Out the Other pub. Ferry Press includes 21 illustrations by Phillips using Humument procedures A Book of the Book, some works and projections about the book and writing, ed Steven Clay & Jerome Rothenberg pub. Granary Books In spite – or, perhaps, because – of all this, his name remained unexpectedly little known. He found his exclusion from dictionaries of 20th-century art hurtful. “I’m not even in this one,” he would sigh, thumbing plaintively, adding, “I’m quite a well-known artist, you know.”Tom Phillips: Works from A Humument an exhibition at Flowers Gallery New York City, includes new series of Humument collage works. The exhibition is reviewed by Faye Hirsch Art in America No 9/Oct, Works from A Humument' appears in Art in Review, New York Times (June 2005), Roberta Smith Phillips has worked on this novel? poem? art piece? for 50 years. In 2017, the final version of the work will be published. It has been used as the basis of an opera (in 1969), a digital app, exhibitions, and several published versions. The book seems inexhaustible in its possibilities both for other art/poetry works and reading pleasure. Below this review are my notes, placed here for my own interest, and anyone who wants to trudge through them. Academic paper Tom Phillips: Treating and Translating by Mary Ann Caws, pub. Mosaic (Winnipeg) , Vol. 34, No. 3 , September 2001

Academic paper That/which/he/hid/reveal I: uncovering the infinite in Tom Phillips's A Humument, Kristina Jipson pub Textual Practice Volume 27, Issue 2

Be that as it may, and despite the exponential popularity of erasure techniques amongst contemporary experimental artists, A Humument remains the most important and successful avatar of overpainting erasurism to this day. By “ex-huming” the corpse of an obscure late 19th century novel A Humument constitutes a singular case of a rewriting whose reputation and achievements outdo those of its predecessor.

The Art of the Book: From Medieval Manuscript to Graphic Novel, a publication about the National Art Library and its collections by James Bettley (pub. V&A Publications, ) Phillips's first one-man exhibition in London was in 1965 and he won a John Moores prize four years later. However, in the late 1960s he was possibly better known for his music activities (both classical and with Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra) including his own compositions, as performed by the pianist John Tilbury. Fragments of text from A Humument appear in a suite of prints O Chateaux oh Saisons, published by Wine Arts In an interview in the Guardian the following year, he said: “I could have imagined doing a third, but that would have taken another 25. So I’d be a dribbling 105-year-old, or more likely dead, before I finished it. It was time to stop.”

I took a forgotten novel found by chance. I mined, and undermined its text to make it yield alternative stories, erotic incidents and surreal catastrophes, which lurked within its wall of words. I replaced with visual images the text I’d stripped away. 'A Humument' began to tell, amongst other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love’s casualties.’ Première of the opera Irma staged by the Ceolfrith Arts Centre at the University of Newcastle and later a second performance at York University, directed by Richard Orton TP: The art world now is behaving as a branch of the fashion business, and I am pleased always to have it now almost received as a primarily literary work by people with a fitter attention span than the those who flit from novelty to novelty like the puppet collectors of the art world’s ever falser reality. It is, after all, my resource of greatest use – and all thanks to a man who, from photographs and contemporary accounts of his personality, would seem to be someone I would not at all have enjoyed meeting.