Unpack delight, savour the old adventure
The enduring work of Tom Phillips 1937–2022
This morning I learnt from a friend that the artist Tom Phillips has died. It is with sadness I process the news as I have followed his work all my adult life and have recently revisited it as part of my postgraduate research project (Hand, 2022). I’m moved to write something to try and make sense of how a connection to his work has ebbed and flowed through my life and why it continues to hold promise for me. I’m no expert on his work or his life; there is a very good obituary in The Guardian (Darwent, 2022).
I don’t remember how I was introduced to the work of Tom Phillips, I think I was 18 or 19 years old when I bought a copy of The Heart of A Humument (Phillips, 1985). This project became a lifetime of work based on a book found by chance in a thrift shop in 1966 (Darwent, 2022). Up until his death, Phillips produced different versions of the book by creating mini works of art from each page through a process of redaction: an obscuring of certain areas of the text to reveal new meanings and stories through the words that are left. Tiny rivers of white space form tributaries that flow through the page connecting words to each other. What drew me to this project was the combination of word and image, the way words weave their way through the pattern, colour, typography and iconography of Phillips’ often intricate artworks. Thinking about the process that gave rise to certain words surfacing and experiencing the endless ways that the same text produces new ideas and feelings has moved me to treasure my copy ever since.
When I was in the third year of a Graphic Design degree course at what was then Brighton Polytechnic, (it was here that I met the friend who has just texted me the news of Phillips’ death) Channel 4 screened A TV Dante (Phillips & Greenaway, 1990). This was a series directed in collaboration with Peter Greenaway, whose films I had become interested in after recently having seen The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Greenaway, 1989). It is hard to describe what it was like watching A TV Dante when it first screened. Images, film and sounds appear in layers and jostle for your attention. A little window pops up, and David Attenborough is talking about leopards just for a moment before another sound seems to drown him out. Now I think about it, it pre-empted the proliferation of sound, image and text that now fill our screens daily. At the time I was struck by the interweaving of poetry and commentary that connected the past and the present, and by the rhythm and pace of different images and sounds that meant something different happened each time you returned to it. I was so moved and excited by the production that I chose to write about it for my degree assessment. I think I still have the spiral-bound essay in a box somewhere.
Since graduating, and throughout the different turns in my life, Phillips’ work has been something I have continued to return to. Recently, I came across his illustrated work for a new edition of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Sterne, 2022). Once again, this is a pairing that interests me as I recall reading Sterne’s novel whilst still at school and being excited to find, among a number of unconventional features of the book, a blank page that invited me to paint an image of a character as I saw her in my own mind (Paint Her to Your Own Mind, 2016). This more recent discovery came about because I was experimenting with the technique of redaction in my current research work. I wanted to revisit Phillips’ process, to consider and experiment with the technique as a way of disrupting and producing alternative possibilities from a given text. In an informal reading group, a bunch of us (postgraduate researchers and academic staff) redacted a short article; some of us redacted the very same page. What emerged was a kind of concrete poetry, but each poem brought different ideas to the surface and stirred up different feelings. I suddenly had a sense of how Tom Phillips became so attached to returning to A Humument, trusting and being curious about what ‘something else’ might happen on each revisit to the text.
Philips is among a group of artists I am inspired by as I explore new ways of researching and teaching experimentally and speculatively. The Fluxus art movement (Friedman, 1998), for example, brought together artists, writers and musicians that were interested in experimental processes; Phillips himself was influenced by this movement and the work of artists such as John Cage. Fluxus offers a certain experimental approach to pedagogy (Higgins, 2002) which continues to inspire new methods of teaching and learning (Miles & Springgay, 2020), although it is perhaps more easy to find examples among arts courses in higher education rather than at other stages of learning or within other subject areas.
As I have been writing this blog, I am thinking about Phillips’ refusal to accept that something is complete or correct. A trust that there are “hidden riches” (Caws, 2001) to be found in things we have immediately to hand. What might we learn from returning to the familiar, the taken-for-granted? It seems to me that procedural delivery of different subjects, ideas and ways of making sense of the world in schools as metaphorical (sometimes literal) finished chapters of one big textbook puts at risk our curiosity to explore what else might be possible. A departure from this will take a trust in different ways of engaging with the world, ways that might not be so reliable in helping us reach agreement with a text but that open us up to other possibilities. Perhaps thinking with the idea of unreliable ways of working might be a step in that direction.
There will always be, in Phillips's universe, something and then something, for it is a universe continually in expansion from the centre. It is centrifugal, without fleeing anything (Caws, 2001, p. 2)
Caws, M. A. (2001) ‘Tom Phillips: Treating and Translating’ Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal. 34, pp. 19-33.
Darwent, C. (2022). Tom Phillips Obituary. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/nov/29/tom-phillips-obituary
Friedman, K. (1998). The Fluxus reader. Academy Editions.
Greenaway, P. (1989). The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover Palace Pictures.
Hand, H. (2022). Stirring up new ideas. https://www.harriethand.co.uk/stirring-up-new-ideas
Higgins, H. (2002). Fluxus experience. University of California Press.
Miles, J., & Springgay, S. (2020). The indeterminate influence of Fluxus on contemporary curriculum and pedagogy. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33(10), 1007-1021.
Paint Her to Your Own Mind. (2016). https://blankpage147.wordpress.com/widowwadman/
Phillips, T. (1985). The Heart of A Humument. Hansjörg Mayer.
Phillips, T. (2022). Tom Phillips. Retrieved 1 December 2022 from https://www.tomphillips.co.uk/
Phillips, T., & Greenaway, P. (1990). A TV Dante. Channel 4.
Sterne, L. (2022). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The Folio Society.