A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Fourth Edition - Softcover

Phillips, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0500285519 ISBN 13: 9780500285510

Publisher: Thames & Hudson, 2005

Synopsis

In the mid-1960s, inspired by William Burroughs's "cut-up" writing technique, Tom Phillips bought an obscure Victorian novel for three penceW. H. Mallock's 1892 novel, A Human Document. He began cutting and pasting the extant text, treating the pages with gouache and ink, isolating the words that interested him while scoring out unwanted words or painting over them. The result was A Humument, and the first version appeared in 1970. 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. It 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. Phillips has continued to revisit Mallock's novel, and this new fourth edition follows its predecessors by incorporating revisions and reworkingsover a hundred pages are replaced by new versionsand celebrates an artistic enterprise that is itself some forty years old and still actively a work in progress. 368 color illustrations.

About this title

About the Author:

Tom Phillips is an English painter, writer, and composer whose other books include Words and Texts.

Review:

A visual adventure, a peculiar space where the reader-spectator is invited to speculate on the meaning of words and images. -- ARTnews

A wonderful entertainment...full of humor, visual invention, and the peculiar poignancy of unnoticed meanings. -- San Francisco Chronicle

It may be the closest a paperback book has come to being an art object. -- New York

One of the more winning and witty artistic experiments of recent times. -- Washington Post

Outbursts of words that find themselves in an altogether new syntactical space; there, like notes, they sing a painted music. -- William A. Gass, Artforum

About this edition

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0500285519
• ISBN 13: 9780500285510
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 4
• Number of pages: 367