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A Humument
A Treated Victorian Novel

Foyles Review:

A cult classic that turned a cheap, forgotten Victorian novel into a delicious work of art, A Humument is a still-ongoing project by British artist Tom Phillips. By painting, collaging or drawing over the original text, Phillips has created new work from old, and the story that emerges in bubbles through the paint is one of unrequited love and the struggle to create and appreciate art. Endlessly rewarding, whether read straight through or each page savoured as a piece in its own right, this is a must for anyone interested in the position and function of art - be it literature, painting, poetry or music - and the workings of form and language.

Synopsis:

In the mid-1960s, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W. H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began cutting and pasting the extant text to create something new. The artist writes, 'I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. I began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties.' After its first publication in book form in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic. This new fourth edition follows its predecessors by incorporating revisions and re-workings -- over half the pages in the 1980 edition are replaced by new versions -- and celebrates an artistic enterprise that is nearly forty years old and still actively a work in progress.

Reviews:

"'Utterly original, delightful and idiosyncratic' David Lodge; 'Sly, humorous, erotic and endlessly fascinating' Edward Lucie Smith, The Sunday Times; 'Turns a forgotten work into a thing of rare beauty' Bernard Levin, The Sunday Times; 'The closest thing a paperback book has come to being an art object' The New York Times; 'Intricate, philosophical, romantic... and often funny' Michael Kustow, The Guardian; 'One of the freshest and most original pieces of art literary work you are likely to see' Evan Anthony, The Spectator; 'The field of collage, of colour and line releases outbursts of words that find themselves in an altogether new syntactical space; and there, like notes, they sing a painted music' William H. Gass, Artforum"

Author Biography:

Tom Phillips RA has worked widely in many media. Among his previous books is The Postcard Century, published by Thames & Hudson in 2000.

Additional Information:

Illustrations: 368 colour illustrations Related subjects: Phillips, Tom Artists' books - England Mallock, W. H Art treatments & subjects