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Tom Phillips (1976)

My whole work is dominated by Coleridge’s idea of keeping the greatest number of things suspended in a unity, the greatest diversity possible within a single thing.

—Tom Phillips

Tom Phillips is a British artist/writer known primarily as the author of A Humument, an exemplary visual narrative whose parts have appeared in several American anthologies, including my own Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973). In brief, A Humument is a visual re-working of a very minor Victorian novel entitled A Human Document by W. H. Mallock. What Phillips did is paint over parts of Mallock’s pages, so that only a resonant few of the original words shine through, shrewdly extracting from each of Mallock’s pages a personal, Phillipsian text. (Typically out of “A Hum(an Doc)ument” comes “A Humument.”) The result he describes as “an attempt to make a Gesamtkunstwerk in small format, since it includes poems, music scores, parodies, notes on aesthetics, autobiography, concrete texts, romance, mild erotica, as well as the undertext of Mallock’s original story.”

In Phillips’ hands, this technique is far more fertile than I for one imagined it to be. As Phillips justly testifies, “I have so far extracted from it over six hundred texts, and have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot comprehend or its phrases adapted to cover.” Since the book is such an obvious masterpiece, I have for years now been awaiting the complete edition, ideally in the original colors (which get lost in the black-white reproductions). This new Phillips book, alas, is not that.

Instead, Hansjörg Mayer, an otherwise first-rate German avant-garde publisher, has recently issued a spectacular volume, entitled Tom Phillips. Works. Texts. To 1974, that contains not only choice pages from A Humument (too few, in my judgment) but also reproductions, often in full color, of Phillips’ works in other media—paintings, prints, drawings, musical scores, etc.—in addition to Phillips’ own running commentary on these endeavors. This book portrays Phillips as a conscientious, hard-working, intelligent, premeditated artist who works in various ways, for various purposes, toward various ends, simultaneously.

Whereas most visual artists concentrate upon developing an instantly recognizable idiosyncratic style, it is Phillips’ heresy to cultivate visual diversity. His expository commentaries reveal not the dominance of a single vision but a persistent concern with materials—postcards, books, maps, canvas, paper, film, musical theater; so that he speaks mostly of the technical problems that were confronted (and resolved) in the making of each work.

Perhaps the sole identifying characteristic of his visual art is the incorporation of language into the face of most, though not all, of his works. This use of language, as well as his, perhaps reflects the fact that he was initially educated in literature, rather than visual art. One theme of his autobiographical introduction is how Phillips, in his twenties, transformed himself into a polyartist—someone whose serious creative work falls into and across several artistic domains. Surprisingly, A Humument was scarcely the core endeavor in Phillips’ career. It began, instead, merely as “idle play” that, as he puts it, “has been done in the evenings so that I might not, had the thing become a folly, regret the waste of days.” Fortunately, Mallock’s A Human Document is such a rich source of suggestion that Phillips has completed a second, entirely different reworking of Mallock’s pages, and is already beginning a third.

This new book, Tom Phillips, serves the function of bringing the artist’s variousness together into a single package; it is a catalogue, so to speak, for an unheld exhibition—or, even better, a one-man retrospective by itself, in a compact portable package. I find it indicative that, like the premier modern polyartist Moholy-Nagy, Phillips should find that the spine-bound book is the best medium for exhibiting the sum of his interests, which is to say the totality of his artistic intelligence and achievements. [Moholy’s exemplary polyartistic retrospective was Vision in Motion (1947)]. Indicatively again, Tom Phillips, with its commentaries, is also more coherent than the body of his disparate works; from reading it, I for one have a better sense of what his art is about—a better sense than the works by themselves can provide. (Not unlike other polyartists, Phillips is terribly uneven; some of his works strike me as much superior to others.) Phillips speaks of A Humument as “a paradoxical embodiment of Mallarmé’s idea that everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” That perception implicitly extends to Tom Phillips.

Finally, the quality of the book’s production must be praised. The reproductions are sharp, the colors cleanly separated. Tom Phillips is a worthy successor to Hansjörg Mayer’s multi-volumed retrospective of the works of Dieter Rot and his recent publication of Emmett Williams’ Selected Shorter Poems (1974).