RIP Tom Phillips

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

The great Tom Phillips has died. (Here is a very good obituary in the Guardian.)

My blackout work is indebted to his masterpiece, A Humument.

He was extremely prolific, and I have it on good authority that he was working up until the very end on a collage. Here is one of them:

One of the great art experiences of my life was visiting Marvin and Ruth Sackner’s penthouse in Miami, Florida to see their archive, which included a ton of Humument pieces but also really rare pieces like this globe:

tom phillips globe
I never got to meet Tom, but we did exchange emails. He thanked me for “the nod of honest debt” I paid in a talk about the history of blackout poetry, and then he sent me something remarkable, a “skeleton version” of a slide lecture he used to give, called “Raphael to Eno,” tracking the lineage of his student, Brian Eno (another hero of mine), all the way back to Raphael in 20 moves.

I don’t think he’d mind if I reproduced it, so here it is:

Brian Eno to Raphael in 20 moves, in the words of Tom Phillips:

BRIAN ENO (b. 1948) the pupil of

TOM PHILLIPS (1937-2022) the pupil of

FRANK AUERBACH (b. 1931) the pupil of

DAVID BOMBERG (1890 – 1957) who studied with

W.R. SICKERT (1860 – 1942) who studied with

EDGAR DEGAS (1834 – 1917) who studied with

J.A.D. INGRES (1780 – 1867) who studied with

J.L. DAVID (1748 – 1825) who was the pupil of

J.M. VIEN (b. Montpelier 1716 d. Paris 1809. He was head of the school at Rome and also designed masques etc. Buried in the Pantheon. Stiffish neo-classicist who studied under

C.J. NATOISE (b. Paris 1700 d. Paris 1777) who also directed the French School at Rome. Designed tapestries and decorations and was unusual in that he provided a garden of classical sculpture for his students to draw in. He was the pupil of

F. LE MOINE (b. Paris 1688 d. Paris 1737) who painted the Hercules Room at Versailles and was Premier Peintre du Roi. Committed suicide after a period of setbacks and emotional turbulence. He was the pupil of

L. GALLOCHE (b. Paris 1670 d. Paris 1761) who was also a musician. Made a journey to Rome. Lodgings in Louvre. Pupil of

LOUIS DE BOULOGNE LE JEUNE (b. Paris 1654 – d. Paris 1733) who copied Raphael Frescoes for the Gobelins Tapestry works. Also Premier Peintre du Roi. Studied under his father

LOUIS DE BOULOGNE LE VIEUX (b. Paris 1609 d. Paris 1674) who worked at Versailles and was one of the founders of The Academy. Pupil of

JACQUES BLANCHARD (b. Paris 1600 d. Paris 1638) who was called “The French Titian” and had been much influenced by work seen on a trip to Venice. He was the pupil of

NICOLAS BOLLERY of whom little is known except that he died in Paris in 1630 and studied under his father

JEROME BOLLERY who was active in Paris from 1530 onwards. He was the assistant to

PRIMATICCIO (1504 -1570) when he worked on The Louvre. Primaticcio was the head of the School of Fontainbleu and was the assistant of

GIULIO ROMANO (1499 – 1546) in the decoration of the Palazzo Té etc. G.R. the only non-English painter mentioned by Shakespeare. He entered at the age of 10 the studio of

RAPHAEL (1483 – 1520) of whom little need be said by way of explanation.

Phillips claimed Eno was the only decent student he had.

“I used to teach,” he said. “Gave it up as soon as I could.”

If you consider Phillips’ work + his pupil’s, his influence on the culture is huge.

I cannot claim to be his pupil, but I studied him, and as I have written elsewhere, the thing about the masters is they can’t really refuse you as a student. They leave their lesson plans in their work.

Thank you, Tom.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS 1965 PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

In 1965, the writer William Burroughs was interviewed by the Paris Review. He was 50, living in a hotel in his hometown of St. Louis. A short time later, across the pond, an artist named Tom Phillips read the interview, and decided to play with Burroughs’ cut-up method by doing “column-edge” poems with the New Statesman. He decided to take the method a bit further. He walked to a bookshop, and grabbed the first book he could find for 3 pence. He started blacking out the words, first with just a pen. It was beginning of a 40-year project now known as A Humument.

It’s easy to see how Phillips was inspired: this interview presents a brilliant mind at work, thinking about images and words and writing and how they go together. Burroughs claimed he was most interested in “dreams” and the “juxtaposition of word and image”: “precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines.” He was an avid user of scrapbooks, kept files of newspaper clippings and photographs for character studies, and always wrote down his dreams. He also had a really interesting method of journaling: in three parallel columns, he would record the day’s events, his memories and what he was thinking at the time, and quotes from what he was reading. He called all this “taking coordinates”—a kind of “time travel” to see if he could “project” himself into one single point in time.

Combine this interview with the terrific Beat exhibit I saw earlier this year, and consider me impressed. (I confess that I’ve never made it through any of his books—first up on my list is his collaboration with Brion Gysin [the man who REALLY deserves most of the credit for the cut-up technique…more on that later], The Third Mind.)

Some of my favorite bits:

Seeing

Most people don’t see what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: For Godsake, keep your *eyes* open. Notice what’s going on around you. I mean, I walk down the street with friends. I ask, “Did you see him, that person who just walked by?” No, they didn’t notice him.

Writers and technology

I think that words are an around-the-world, oxcart way of doing things, awkward instruments, and they will be laid aside eventually, probably sooner than we think. This is something that will happen in the space age. Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I’ve never been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege.

The origins of the cut-up technique

A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, The Waste Land was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in ‘The Camera Eye’ sequences in USA. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.

Objections to the cut-up technique

There’s been a lot of [objections to the cut-ups], a sort of a superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you can’t cut up these words. Why can’t I? I find it much easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers—doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from those who are….People say to me, “Oh, this is all very good, but you got it by cutting up.” I say that has nothing to do with it, how I got it. What is any writing but a cut-up? Somebody has to…*do* the cutting up. Remember that I first made selections. Out of hundreds of possible sentences that I might have used, I chose one.

World-building

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I’m creating an imaginary—it’s always imaginary—world in which I would like to live.

Read the complete article.

Any fans of Gysin or Burroughs out there? What texts would you recommend?

“A HUMUMENT”, BY TOM PHILLIPS

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Last January, after seeing a couple of my newspaper blackout poems, Winston Smith e-mailed and recommended to me a book called “A Humument” by an artist named Tom Phillips. In the mid-sixties, Phillips took an old Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock called “A Human Document” and started blacking out the pages to make a new book, ” A Humument.” Well, I thought this sounded pretty interesting, but was too lazy to look it up, or even Google it, and pretty soon I’d forgotten all about it.

A year later, Drew Dernavich e-mails me a link to Humument.com, the official site of the book! Little did I know that you can see every page from the book online. (There’s also a new edition you can buy online from Amazon.)

Too cool.