A Humument, Vol. 1'
Tom Phillips
Published by Tetrad Press
London, England, 1970
Height 20 cm x width 15 cm
NAL pressmark: 95.S.44
(Image 1 of 3)

The notes accompanying 'A Humument' explain how the work was made: 'A Victorian novel (A Human Document, by W H Mallock published in 1892) has been taken page by page and altered, adapted and metamorphosed'. Originally inspired by reading about William Burroughs' 'cut up' technique, Phillips pursued his own variant on this idea by selecting a book at random and altering it page by page. He began by scoring out unwanted words with pen and ink but soon progressed to obliterating the original text with pictorial compositions using acrylic gouache. With every page the text to be left exposed was the first thing decided upon. The 'new' texts comprise, among other things, 'poems, music scores, parodies, notes on aesthetics, autobiography, concrete texts, romance, [and] mild erotica', in an attempt to make a Gesamtkunstwerk. The pictorial compositions sometimes allude to the original text, while at other times reference the 'new' text. For Phillips, the intermingling of word and image on the painted pages resembles medieval miniatures. This edition of 'A Humument', the first of many variants, was issued in 1970 by Tetrad Press. It takes the form of ten silk-screened pages housed in a green box and makes up volume 1 in a series of ten, each volume containing varying numbers of pages. As well as numerous versions of 'A Humument', Mallock's novel has been the source for many other projects, including a pair of humument globes entitled 'Terrestrial and celestial globes' also held in the National Art Library and viewable on this database.