A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel

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The sixth edition of A Humument, published in 2016, brings the work to completion exactly fifty years after it was begun.

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, ) TP: The cover picture serves to identify one edition from another. The most recent echoes the first and says that I am still forging on. The cover as it appears on the iPhone/iPad app is the best, taking advantage of a changing image. I sometimes imagine the whole book like that were there but world enough and time. However diligent the compilers of some dreamed-of omnium gatherum might turn out to be, there will always be scraps and shards that elude them; a trivial greetings card here, a record sleeve or CD cover there or even a faded T-shirt at the bottom of a drawer. Imaginary Postcards, with Jonathan Williams (pub. Trigram Press), A Humument Volume VIII (Tetrad Press), Works/Texts to 1974 (pub. editions hansjorg mayer) TP: Cage became, more than anything, a moral exemplar for me — showing, as Wittgenstein says, that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same thing (I would go farther to say that ethics is a subset of aesthetics). As for Eno, I was a reluctant and largely ineffectual teacher, and gave it [teaching] up as soon as I could afford to. Brian started as a student, and I as a tutor, on the same day. It was my first job. Brian was my best student — in fact almost the only one I can remember, except for some amazing looking girls. But that was almost fifty years ago, and the lines of age converge in that now he is just a friend and colleague, and we both believe one should sing every day (and louder sing…). He has produced and performed in Irma, and he wrote a song for a concert I gave in Oxford of music by various composer friends based on A Humument texts. His was “It Felt Like Running Away,” which he performed, and I was in the chorus, my last public singing gig… somewhere there is a recording. There is a portrait I did of him in the National Portrait Gallery, and he was at my seventy-fifth birthday party: so it’s a long story. I mention this here to show that A Humument is a chronicle also of family and friends, with things and people coming in and out of focus over the years. By the time I finish it, it will feel like that poem by Patrice de La Tour du Pin: “Ici venue mon histoire s’achève. / Quels passagers m’ont suivi jusqu’au bout?” [“I’ve come thus far, my story winds up here: / What passengers have seen me to the end?”] I haven’t got the book at hand, and since I’ve carried these lines in my head for many years, I may be in part misquoting them, as I usually find when I look up bits of Shakespeare that I think I know.Like most projects that end up lasting a lifetime my version had its germ in idle play. A relish of words plus the influence of Burroughs and Cage with their use of chance had led me into casual experiments interfering with texts in the columns of The Spectator. I had indeed already begun to toy with the idea of treating a book in the same fashion. Now the die was cast, the dice thrown: chance had become choice and a notion grown into an idea. Academic paper, Transforming Text: Finding the Poem Within Deborah F. Carrington & Chapman Hood Frazier pub. JAEPL, Vol. 16, Winter 2010 p14

Limited edition prints A Humument p73: Here was a Woman and A Humument p168: Twilight Railings are exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition A Humument features in an exhibition of works from the Centre for Book Arts at New York Public LibraryAs 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’.

Text fragments from A Humument appear in a series of watercolours, largely based on postcard sources, published by Tetrad Press as 12 prints: Ein Deutsches Requiem: After Brahms Large display of works from A Humument at the Keiller Library, National Gallery of Scotland. Opening night event, on 6th October at Hawthornden Theatre, Tom Phillips in conversation with Graham Rawle P.95 A Humument Entering A Europe, a limited edition silkscreen print is published for academic conference 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?

Humument Slideshow 1-50

A treated text by Tom Phillips is used on the cover of Heather McHugh's essay collection Broken English: Poetry and Partiality

Dante in His Study by Tom Phillips. In the late 1970s, he began work on a new translation of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated with his own prints 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

A Humument p10 Give Me Tomorrow and A Humument p154 Our Excellent Exodus in limited editions are exhibited Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Unbound Narrative opens at the Cameron Art Museum in North Carolina in August. This exhibition features A Humument in the context of nine contemporary artists who utilise the book as medium and inspiration. 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 A Humument is referenced in Imaged Words and Worded Images, edited and with an introduction by Richard Kostelanetz (pub. Outerbridge & Dienstfrey) The Atlantic, Volume 266 No.4 Oct. Pamela Petro's essay "Books as Works of Art" describes " A Humument" by Tom Phillips as "perhaps the most famous artist's book to date"