1970

Tom Philips: A Humument 1970 (book) 2011 (app)

Tom Philips: A Humument 1970 (book) 2011 (app)

Tom Philips is one of those leading artists not bound to a personal style or signature methodology. His work is fascinating, various, eclectic and always just right. A Humument is an experiment. It involves creating new texts and readings from an existing book, in this case A Human Document by W.H. Mallock – an obscure novel that Philips bought for 3 pence in a Furniture Repository in Peckham Rye.

He writes:

“Like most projects that ended up lasting half a lifetime, this work started out as idle play at the fringe of my work and preoccupations. I had read an interview with William Burroughs (Paris Review 1965) and, as a result, had played with the “cut-up” technique, making my own variant (the column-edge poem) from current copies of the New Statesman. It seemed a good idea to push these devices into more ambitious service. “

Robert Rauschenberg: Booster and Seven Studies 1970

Robert Rauschenberg: Booster and Seven Studies 1970

Rauschenberg has been a key transliterator of the zeitgeist since the early 1960s, maybe even before. I love his ‘expanded prints’ of the 1970s, especially this life-size self portrait in x-rays. Like April Greiman’s full-size body scan of 1987, Rauschenberg’s image is made of several individual images collaged together, with annotations, sketches and notes appended to the image. I remember seeing his set of illustrations/interpretations of Dante’s Inferno at the Tate (or was it the Whitechapel?) in the mid-1960s, and being bowled over by the poetry of his simple use of solvent to make rubbings from commercially printed magazine images.