The Bottom Line
Pros
- A special combination of poetry and art, or specialist art journaling.
- A portable, pocket art exhibition.
- A book to be dipped in time and again.
Cons
- If you don't like words in your paintings, you won't like this.
- Hard to find your favorite pages again.
- Makes you want to do the same to a book.
Description
- 370 page book. Originally published as a hardback; also available as a paperback.
- Original publisher: Thames & Hudson.
- The title "A Humument" is derived from the title of the original book "A Hum(an Doc)ument".
Guide Review - A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel
The Humument is a 'treated novel' created by British artist Tom Phillips who "took a forgotten Victorian novel found by chance ... plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems [and] replaced the text [he'd] stripped away with visual images of all kinds." The result is some 360 pages, each a poem/painting in its own right, that together form a compulsive collection for anyone interested in words, pictures, and communication. The art is mostly abstract, or "non-referential, merely providing a framework for the verbal statement and responding to the disposition of the text on the page." No two pages are the same.
For something that started out as "idle play", the book developed into a project "lasting half a lifetime." Tom Phillips had been reading about cut-up poems (where words are cut out from magazines or newspapers and used to write poems) and decided to push the idea one step further.
He decided that he'd use "the first (coherent) book" he could find for threepence. The book he bought was A Human Document by WH Mallock, published in 1892. For an arbitrary choice, "its vocabulary is rich and lush and its range of reference and allusion large." Phillips has "extracted from it over 600 texts, and [has] yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot comprehend or its phrases be adapted to cover."
Phillips started work on the book in 1966, first scoring out unwanted words with pen and ink. But "it was not long before the possibility became apparent of making a synthesis of word and image" and "painting (in acrylic gouache) became the basic technique." The text always comes before the image which "follows the text in mood." Most of the images are intended to be only "a framework for the poetic statement." The pages were not done in numerical order, but at random.
