A Humument — Tom Phillips

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.