A Humument A Treated Victorian Novel Sixth Tom Phillips 9780500519035 Books
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“One of the most winning and witty artistic experiments of recent time." –Washington Post
In 1966, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W. H. Mallock’s A Human Document, and began working over 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. 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. This sixth and final edition, published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Tom Phillips’ first experiments with A Human Document, presents for the first time an entirely revised and complete version of A Humument, and will bring to a close half a century’s artistic endeavor.
Illustrated in color throughoutA Humument A Treated Victorian Novel Sixth Tom Phillips 9780500519035 Books
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A Humument A Treated Victorian Novel Sixth Tom Phillips 9780500519035 Books Reviews
I own multiple copies and give them away to worthy friends. Visually, artistically, and intellectually stunning, this masterpiece is unique in the world of art/literature. The author/artist Tom Phillips began this work in the 1960s, and first published it in book form in the 1980s. He called the result of his decades of effort The Humument and it is a completely illustrated version of W. H. Mallock's 19th Century novel A Human Document. Each page is a well conceived and compelling work of art. On each page the author leaves only a few of the original words revealed. These surviving phrases tell, in prose and poetry, the pathetic love story of Bill Toge. Symbiotically linked to the art itself, the preserved text, and its tale of Toge, reveal a story Phillips found submerged within the original text, a story which Mallock neither wrote nor intended. Phillips calls his work `mining for meaning'. Everyone who has received this book from me has had great difficulty putting it down until they had read/absorbed/experienced/lived/studied it from cover to cover. If there is such a thing as a priceless book, The Humument would be a good candidate for the category.
As a poet and artist, I am interested in the automatic art practiced here, and it's ability to reveal the unconscious issues of importance in our lives. The work hails Burroughs' and his method of drawing poetry from the chaotic texts around him. Unlike Boroughs, Phillips has used an entire novel, and some of its original author's shortcomings, and indeed the shortcomings of the genre from which it is drawn, to make individual points about the artist's current world, some one hundred years later. The book can be "read" sequentially or individual pages shown as moments of art, from an amber necklace that displays an entire life. (To borrow a phrase from Vonnegut.) I'm also interested in his method. According to the author's notes, he drew this book at random, using the first book that he could afford with his current pocket change. (Amounting I believe to about two dollars,) and then he treated the pages within. This incorporation of the everyday, and the use of simple inks has enabled a spare time, relatively inexpensive project to become a work of art relating the human condition in a manner simular to life itself, incorporating the one page at a time method of daily life, that amounts to a beautiful work. Truly the art of the proletariat, not some etherial "l'art por l'art" that can only be experienced or appreciated by the upper class. Phillips states in his intro that he has yet to find a work of such depth and vocabulary to apply other new treatments, but for those aspiring artists wishing to emulate him, I have an excellent choice, an underappreciated, yet highly available novel of the Harlem Rennaisance, Della Larsen's "Quicksand," which covers several worlds of angst and incorporates a panopoly of words.
Tom Phillips' A Humument A Treated Victorian Novel is a unique work-in-progress focused on the idea that one can create art out of found texts. Certainly Phillips' illustrations help support this impression, providing texture and layers of symbolism to a text that might otherwise come across as too minimalist to convey meaning to its readers. In this sense it is more of a visual art book than a treated novel, as I found myself admiring the abstract pictures more than the spare words of text. These added a flavor to the pictures and apparently told a love story, though I did not find a narrative in there myself.
The idea of "treating" an extant work to produce a minimalist, nebulous narrative is an appealing study in our subconscious, if nothing else. Human beings have a seemingly endless fascination with riddles, an ability to read profound meaning into even the most vague phrases. It is perhaps a test of creativity what you get out of the text is what you bring to it. Personally I got a little impatient with the whole thing, but it should be some people's cup of frothy chai.
The book was a little smaller than I expected. I would have enjoyed the art more on a larger copy.
Nice product!
Once I figured out that this was a story about Toge, this became a lot more interesting for me to read. Before, It was several meaningless poems. Together, they form the story of a man's life.
This is a beautiful work of art, I was only hoping for it to be printed on a larger format. I should have noticed when ordering that it looks more like a thick pocket book than a glossy coffee table publication (although I would have purchased it anyway).
excellent
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