I like it when people take an object and re-animate it, recycle it into art. In the case of Tom Phillips, it was an old victorian novel he found in a sprawling warehouse called Austin's Furniture Repository in and around London.
He bet his friend that if he could find a book for less than threepence, he could turn it into a long- term project. In his "Notes on a Humument'" he writes that he found A Human Document, a novel from the late 1800's by W.H. Mallock and what he thought would be a side project became a life's work.
On the pages he sketched, painted, created collages and fashioned his own story, using a consonant, a word, snippets of sentences from the text.
We happened upon his work a road trip through the Berkshires in Massachusetts to MASS MOCA, a warehouse turned contemporary art museum. We wended our way along lovely country roads, stopping at state parks and pine forests, the last of late fall corn fields, farm stands, through sweet small towns, passing ribbons of thin rivers and rocky creeks and two signs that warned us of bear crossings before arriving in North Adams.
In this former factory were works by Anselm Kiefer and Sol LeWitt, one-minute short films and sculptures two stories high. Phillips' work took up severals walls in cavernous gallery, each framed page its own work of art and part of a larger, new story. I stayed and looked and read and marveled for the longest time.
He took a ten cent book and made something else over the course of 47 years. Just the notion of that sings to me of chance.
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