A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel

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Limited edition prints A Humument p.12 We Are The People and A Humument p.132: Mr Glad are exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition In an interview in the Guardian the following year, he said: “I could have imagined doing a third, but that would have taken another 25. So I’d be a dribbling 105-year-old, or more likely dead, before I finished it. It was time to stop.” Seeing the book shown as a whole gave me some satisfaction, but the feeling that I could fail better than that began to nag. The first bound trade edition (1980), prepared by Hansjörg Mayer in Stuttgart and distributed by Thames & Hudson, marked the end of a dormant period. The book had become a book again and in its turn a suitable case for treatment. Tom Phillips contribution to the Scratch Music catalogue includes extracts from Irma and postcard images as the basis for a performance piece. Scratch Music edited by Cornelius Cardew, pub. MIT Press.

A Humument p.97 On The Net and A Humument p.344 Shining Children screenprints in editions of 75 and 100 exhibited Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Humument Biography

Illuminated Tweets, an exhibition exploring the development of A Humument through new media at the Saison Poetry Library as part of the Southbank Centre's Web We Want Festival A Humument became a touchstone of Phillips's oeuvre. The Royal Academy’s 2015 Summer Exhibition dedicated a full room to it. Quotations from A Humument populate his other paintings, works of art criticism, and some of the songs he wrote when returning to music in the 1990s. Irma, a central character and the muse of A Humument, gave her name to an opera – conceived in 1969, recorded in 1977 and 1988, with its full score published in 2015. A new production directed by Netia Jones premièred at the South London Gallery in September 2017. Academic paper The Transformation of Narrative and the Materiality of Hypertext by N. Katherine Hayles Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan.2001), pp. 21-39 Pub. Ohio State University Press This 50th anniversary edition presents, for the first time, an entirely new and complete version of 'A Humument'. It also brings this half-century-long endeavour to a close.

A Humument p193 By Way of Vienna and A Humument p130 Ornament, silkscreen and epson limited edition prints are published and exhibited at Royal Academy Summer Exhibition At Leiston Middle School in Suffolk students create an altered novel in the style of A Humument in response to a lecture by Tom PhillipsThe Dual Muse: The Writer as Artist the Artist as Writer Symposium Washington University Gallery of Art TP: Cage became, more than anything, a moral exemplar for me — showing, as Wittgenstein says, that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same thing (I would go farther to say that ethics is a subset of aesthetics). As for Eno, I was a reluctant and largely ineffectual teacher, and gave it [teaching] up as soon as I could afford to. Brian started as a student, and I as a tutor, on the same day. It was my first job. Brian was my best student — in fact almost the only one I can remember, except for some amazing looking girls. But that was almost fifty years ago, and the lines of age converge in that now he is just a friend and colleague, and we both believe one should sing every day (and louder sing…). He has produced and performed in Irma, and he wrote a song for a concert I gave in Oxford of music by various composer friends based on A Humument texts. His was “It Felt Like Running Away,” which he performed, and I was in the chorus, my last public singing gig… somewhere there is a recording. There is a portrait I did of him in the National Portrait Gallery, and he was at my seventy-fifth birthday party: so it’s a long story. I mention this here to show that A Humument is a chronicle also of family and friends, with things and people coming in and out of focus over the years. By the time I finish it, it will feel like that poem by Patrice de La Tour du Pin: “Ici venue mon histoire s’achève. / Quels passagers m’ont suivi jusqu’au bout?” [“I’ve come thus far, my story winds up here: / What passengers have seen me to the end?”] I haven’t got the book at hand, and since I’ve carried these lines in my head for many years, I may be in part misquoting them, as I usually find when I look up bits of Shakespeare that I think I know. Tom embraced the RA once he was on the inside but, like many other Academicians elected before and after him, he was less than enthusiastic towards the institution when he was on the outside. A year before he joined, I had taken a part-time job at the Academy to start RA Magazine. At the time, I was working for Tom producing the etchings for his major project of translating and illustrating Dante’s Inferno. When I told him what I was intending to do, his face said it all. It wasn’t an institution he or his peer group had much to do with. This changed, however, with his election to Membership. The painter R.B. Kitaj, one of his contemporaries whose work he particularly admired, had been elected at the same time, and, knowing this, Tom jokingly announced that he couldn’t possibly refuse membership as Ron had accepted. Toge at last, drawing her orchard. see the petals palpitating like the winds of her real self opening (93)