Eroding the Darkness: the Art of Tom Phillips by Lucy Shortis

Language Study 
charcoal on paper mounted on board 
55.9 × 76.2 cm
1963

Speaking in Tongues
pastel on paper
83.5 x 60 cm
1980

Cloak of Mercury
pastel on paper
150 x 124 cm
1991

A Humument 
Fiftieth birthday, p 50

A Humument p306

A Humument p324

Sackner Archive
painting
1984

Ma Vlast II
gouache
20 x 30 cm 
1971

Here We Exemplify (detail)
acrylic on canvas
1530 x 2570 cm
1967-68

FVZ Diary 1974

The Calligrapher Replies (detail)
oil on canvas
98.4 cm x 155.6 cm
1987

Song of Myself (detail)
wire
360 x 180 cm
1995

This article first appeared in Letter Arts Review vol. 14 No 1 1997 

In his forty-year career Tom Phillips has made art that is entranced with lan­guage and the visual symbols of commu­nication, not only lettering but also its close relation, musical notation. He has used stencils to detail process and source materials in paintings. He has hand written autobiographical material, personal epiphanies and studio diaries into his work. He has spoken through the treated book pages of A Humument and has explored, in abstract works, the shapes and forms of script and musical scores. He has made paintings about the role of the calligrapher and investigations of the beauty and expression of pure let­tering. 

He is also known as a portrait painter and has painted prominent acade­mic and literary figures. Meeting the artist makes one swiftly aware of his love of language: he will pepper conversations with quotations and can summon up great chunks of Shakepeare or Dante, offsetting any pomposity with quick wit. He is a disarmingly good mimic and his keen ear also shows in his linguistic ability and a true love of music. He is also a collector and curator of ethnographic work, particularly African art – where a common visual language has informed his work.

Tom Phillips was born in 1937 and grew up in London during the war years which may have heightened his awareness of secret mes­sages, codes, and ciphers. Although he was not born into an artistic family, he realised his vo­cation early and was encouraged and supported by parents and teachers. He studied English at Oxford where he was initiated into the end­less academic game of cross-referencing, anno­tating, and footnoting; it was there that he began his romance with scholarship. He also developed an interest in theatre and was en­thusiastically involved in undergraduate pro­ductions. (He has recently been commissioned by Shakespeare's newly reconstructed Globe Theatre to design sets for their first production The Winter's Tale.)

On leaving the university he embarked on his artistic career attending evening classes at Camberwell School of Art where one of his tutors was Frank Auerbach. When he left art school in 1963 the first drawing he made was called, significantly, "Language Study". The drawing, an abstract, still hangs on the artist's bedroom wall, and in it, Phillips says, “I saw the unwitting begin­nings of a vain but intriguing quest to find where art and the marks of script and sign, creatures of a single birth, were separated; to seek them by their common characteristics." This theme was to be explored many times in drawings over the next thirty years, the technical procedures remaining more or less con­stant. Phillips begins by working in large free abstract shapes, loading the paper with layers of coloured pastel until an almost hopeless den­sity is achieved. He then works back into the drawing using an eraser.

Phillips explains that "to erode the darkness by erasure allowed me to steal up on the marks I wanted to make by slow degrees" – a process more akin to sculpture than drawing. The finished drawings have an extraordinary depth, made more mysterious by their pallor and the ghosts of colour that are left. Although the full spectrum of colour is used initially, the marks that remain are the stronger earth tones, making it difficult not to read the vague afterburn of scarlet and blue as tricks of light giving a strange luminescent effect.

The same conjectured scripts appear as a border in "Speaking in Tongues," (1980) in which language is regarded through the Christian story of Pentecost. The abstract in the central window suggests the gathered apostles anointed with fire, one of whom appears to be climbing out of the drawing and into the world with his gift of language.

In a later drawing of this series "Cloak of Mercury" (1991), Phillips looks at the multiple mythologies of writing and language: Mercury delivering the gift of writing to humanity in a craneskin bag. The drawing, an interlacing maze of marks from which all the configura­tions of the alphabet can be derived, also inter­weaves the story of Pentecost. The maze appears to operate on several dimensions, from the bolder foreground to the paler dis­tance where flamelike tongues of red pigment are worked well back into the drawing. The Tower of Babel is also invoked by working through the maze to increasing bewilderment. The drawing is beautifully dense and compli­cated, an abstract of absolute connectedness.

In his exhibition catalogue Works & Texts (Thames & Hudson, 1992), Phillips comments that, to him, the language drawings are full of "loud silence," perhaps because, unlike other works, they contain no actual words. Phillips says this silence is "like the screams or cries in a dream that are as imperative as they are mute." It is easier to understand this when one looks at the major part that words and the cancellation of words play in his work.

Three years after Phillips completed the first "Language Drawing," he commenced an­other language-based art work that centers on a forgotten Victorian novel by W H Mallock. The book, A Human Document, was acquired from a secondhand shop while the artist was out on a Saturday morning walk in 1966 with his friend and fellow artist R B Kitaj. The book and the edition were unexceptional in themselves but for a particularly rich use of language.

Working page by page, Phillips exhumed hidden texts,reveling in the rich language but appropriating meaning to his own often ribald and allusive ends by isolating groups of words in pen and masking the rest of the page. When every page had been reworked he published the new book, A Humument, under his own imprint, Tetrad Press. (A trade edition was later published by Thames & Hudson and there have been later imprints by the artist).

It was at an exhibition of the treated Humument pages and other works at the Basel Kunsthalle in 1975 that the Sackners were first introduced to the art of Tom Phillips, the starting point of their re­markable collection. The Sack­ner Archive of Concrete and Visual poetry is probably the largest storehouse in the United States of experimental writing (as opposed to writings) and holds much of Phillips's work, including all the original Humument pages. In 1993 an exhibition of Humument work from the Archive ("The Art of the Page") was held at the Kasmin Gallery, University of Pennsyl­vania.

In his introductory essay to the catalogue Marvin Sackner wrote, "I consider A Humu­ment to be the most important artist's book of the twentieth century. It constitutes the basis for my definition of Phillips's work as ‘Humu­mentism.' Phillips's artistic treatment of book, in which each page has been painted, typed upon, drawn, or collaged to leave clus­ters of the original printed text as new poetry, is epitomised by the new poetry Phillips culled from the printed text of the first page. 'The following sing I a book, a book of art, of mind art, and that which he hid, reveal I.' Fragments of Humument texts remain a promi­nent stylistic feature of Phillips's paintings and drawings, induding his illustrations for Dante.

Although Phillips leaves the impression that his selection of Mallock's novel was fortu­itous, I believe its choice was deliberate, either as a conscious or subconscious decision on his part. For example, the story begins with the reading of an imaginary journal in manuscript, reminiscent of the imaginary tack taken by Phillips in producing A Humument. The title of the novel is relevant to Phillips's work. It re­calls the idea of Humanism, which the German philosopher Schiller emphasised as the idea of creative individual thought forming the basis of personal truth. Humanism also implies the study of the humanities, i.e. literature, philos­ophy, art, poetry, music, etc., as distinguished from the sciences.

Throughout his artistic, lit­erary, musical, and poetic career, Phillips has excelled in these humanistic activities. Thus, Humumentism is an art form that integrates humanistic activities through individual cre­ative thought that falls outside the current popular conception of artistic presentations.”

Work on A Humument has continued for thirty years, partly to facilitate the addition of fifty reworked pagss with every reprint of the trade edition which the fortunes and tra­vails of its hero Bill Toge, whose name can only be invoked on pages where the words "together" and "altogether" appear, can be updated) but mainly because through A Humu­ment Phillips has found another voice and a rich source of commentary for many other works. New, specially-made pages were in­cluded in the book Merely Connect (1993), made by Phillips (in collaboration with Salman Rushdie) while a visiting practitioner of the visual arts at the Carpenter Center, Harvard.

The book examines the plight of Rushdie using, among other elements, the parallel injus­tice of the Dreyfus affair. Alongside the Humu­ment pages run devices and investigations of language, including a treated manuscript in which, as Phillips explains, "Salman Rushdie's handwriting has been cut and reassembled to give the character of his script without, so to speak, its characters."

While the work on A Humument is con­cerned with language and not the letterforms themselves (these remain constant as they first appeared in the book), Phillips has acquired a virtuosity in the way he can isolate the text with unique flourishes of animation. A refine­ment of the comic strip bubble, showing anger, excitement, or implying wistful dreaminess, and illustrating the lateral thought processes necessary to the poetry, and indeed the humour, of the Humument treatment. This is noticeable when he is able to override existing punctua­tion or capitalization and extract his own meaning from the given.

The American writer William H Gass has described the isolating of text as “blobular spaces which seem to blend the figure of the cartoon balloon with the ban­derole or the ribbony scroll that sometirnes issued from the mouth of praying figures in sixteenth-century engravings. These spaces drip or trickle down the page where some­times we can still see traces of the original text, but occasionally they crawl amoeba-like in muck and grow as germs do in laboratory jel­lies, or fly the way buffeted balloons might through a tempest, or float like used condoms on a wider river. Not infrequently, they seem like paths or roads or creeks."

A Humument has become a study text; its wide range of references make it an endlessly re­sourceful sampler. As the critic Mary Ann Caws has commented: “This found and re-created art is highly allusive, in the most fertile vein of Surrealism, reaching on to Concretism, Spatialism, Conceptualism, and back to inexhaustible Symbolism. This art-in-process is a lot more fun than the old Tel Quel times, when it was heavy stuff; it works just as well with a light touch.”

1976 Phillips turned his attention to an­other massive project translating and illustrat­ing his own version of Dante's Inferno. The three-volumed livre d’artiste with 432 pages and 139 illustrations was published by the Tal­fourd Press in 1983 – a most expensive and sumptuous feast in which Phillips, beyond the rigours of the academic and artistic input, con­cerned himself with every aspect of the pro­duction. For his Inferno Phillips commissioned special paper incorporating his signature as watermark and he also designed (with Pella Erskine Tulloch) the vellum binding which he hand lettered.

The illustrations draw in other commentaries to the work; often many elements are combined in a single illustration. All resources were plundered to bring as much as possible to the work. Phillips's love of text and script were made manifest. He started making use of invented calligraphies, the marks and signs of a forgotten language, to form mute texts in which the unspeakable can be spoken.

In the sixties and seventies Phillips had made use of zinc packing case stencils for the text in a group of paintings that come under the general heading of "Postcard Composi­tions."

The ready-made lettering fitted alongside the ready-made imagery which used details of picture postcards, often congruent to a striped border that catalogued the colours used in the work and aligning the making of the painting with the printer's manufacturing processes. The texts in these pieces, with their precise dates and serial numbers record the barest facts of human existence: date of birth, date of death – sobering the gaiety of the colour catalogue borders and cheer­ful postcard hues. Phillips deliberately selected poignantly mundane images, "naive utopias” such as people in parks seated on benches.

"Benches" (which is also the title of the best-known work of this series, acquired by the Tate Gallery in 1973) became a leitmotif, a symbol of our mortality and would later re-emerge in the Ma Vlast series and the Dante illustrations. The image is resonant (in England many park bench­es have a small brass memorial plaque) but par­ticularly to the artist who explains that "It was on a park bench on Clapham Common that I spent much of the perplexing day on which my father died."

Phillips also used stencils in a series of pure text works that take as their starting point Marshall McLuhan's ideas that our culture cornmunicates more by the way we say things, than the content of what we actually say. These works like “Here We Exemplify" and “The Message Digests Itself” (1969) build their im­agery from the layering and overlaying of text until legibility and meaning are lost to abstrac­tion. Phillips also used this technique to create an image for the dark wood (Una Selva Oscu­ra), the midlife crisis in which Dante finds himself lost at the opening of the Inferno. The words "Una Selva Oscura" are stenciled and then repeated and overlapped line after line in three different sizes until the letters have all but entirely closed in on themselves, making fascinating shapes and minute pockets of light with the tiny remains of negative space. The different sizes of letters meant that there were six variations of crossover in the lettering and each of these was painted another colour (five colours plus background) according to a prede­termined code. From the dense thicket of the painting emerge natural repeats and logical or­ders. It is by this ciphering and the assiduous adherence to the rules of process that beauty is brought out of the chaos.

After this summatory use, Phillips aban­doned stencils. By the late seventies they had become a staple of commercial art and design, and while Phillips's early career had run con­currently with Pop Art, his art was more con­cerned with speaking through text rather than playing with the recognizable messaging and branding imagery of commerce. In Works & Texts Phillips confesses that initially his recourse to stencils was probably because of some insecurity as to the quality of own hand let­tering. "Though always fascinated by letter-forms, I had never studied how to make them formally and was intimidated by those books full of diagrammatic proportions and little cir­cles for making the serifs." The turning point came following a visit to Japan where Phillips had "seen writing regarded as a high art form not a mere craft; this somehow legitimised the making of creative mistakes rather than techni­cal errors. I began to write for myself."

The trip to Japan coincided with the com­pletion of the Dante project and his painting on some of the vellum offcuts from the binding. Enjoying these surfaces "deep-stained, with purple and russet maps of intricate veins," Phillips bought some complete skins. In Works & Texts he describes “Drawing on these taut surfaces, more like drum than canvas, I devel­oped a way of scraping back from painted marks that evolved into a carved calligraphy. The subject matter often dictated itself, so as­sertive were the stains of marbled blood and the traces of the spine of the animal. The theme of Marsyas kept retuming. One of the skins was so strongly characterful that it resisted any addition. It stood in the studio for months.

Only on return from a visit to Japan where I had been moved and shaken by the Atomic Atrocity Museum in Hiroshima did it suddenly reveal its language of scarring, exposure, and burned-in shadow. Though tired from the jour­ney and flight, I immediately started to work on it. The simple words 'Souvenir of Hiroshi­ma' plus the date, scraped back from a frenzied application of black was all that was needed." In other works on vellum he continued to ex­plore the the invented calligraphies that had come to light through his Inferno illustrations. "No News" (1985) is the staple comment of the re­luctant corespondent. Phillips carves around that immortal lie a truer story in leaps and links of broken script, and in the oblique lines and character features the artist's recent experi­ence with Oriental pen work can be detected.

Although Phillips's minute, secretive handwriting appears in many of his works with a diary format, FVZ Diaries (1974) and later the Dante Diaries, it was only after the Japan trip that a new bold hand lettering, what Phillips calls "a bastard Roman of my own evolving," appears in his painting.

The use of writing for information joined the idea of writing as art in the autobiographical series "Curriculum Vitae." In these paintings he reverses the previous procedures in which text surrounds image by placing the words them­selves at the heart of the work. The pieces were created by painting the words in rough, using acrylic on heavily gessoed panels. This allowed the artist to work out the differing spacing for each ten-syllable line of blank verse, and work in subtexts ghosted behind. The letterforms were then painstakingly carved out from the gesso using a scalpel (this technique was clearly acquired from the work on vellum). Finally the gesso panels were seated in lavishly illustrated frames. The work took seven years to complete and was shown at Phillips's 1992 retrospective at the Royal Academy of Art in London and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

In “The Calligrapher Replies” (1987) Phillips made a large painting from freehand lettering. This painting acted as a calligraphic equivalent to the counterpoint of stenciled let­tering, and follows a line of investigation from the earlier stencil paintings. The text itself is no more than a stream of consciousness ac­count of the humdrum events going on around the artist while the work was in progress. Overlaid and intertwined and knit­ted together, the words become illegible, all meaning disappears, and a kind of pure callig­raphy emerges. One is left with an equal part­nership of the positive patterns of the letterforms and the negative spaces they gen­erate. The piece also hints at a confusion and density of information, the overload of our time, through which the now meaningless letters proceed regardless. Although in some respects this work continues from "Una SeIva Oscura" there is, in the freehand lettering, a great opening up of the idea so that more room is made for random discovery.

In the early 1990s Phillips took up sculp­ture and began to find an ideal formula for making images from words. The sculpture would enable him to free himself from the con­straints of the painted surface and explore what he had earlier hinted at in the language draw­ings. Phillips writes of his moment of discovery: "On a plane journey coming back from a ren­dezvous with my future wife, I started writing in a notebook with capi­tal letters in a joined block so that the person in the next seat could not read what I was writing. It suddenly occurred to me that the letters and words were supporting each other where they joined and that if such writing were realized in wire there need be no other base or prop or element to make a text." Shortly after this epiphany Phillips received a commission from a restaurant to make a piece for their window. This gave him the funds as well as the goal to set about experimenting with the format with Leo Verryt, the foundry worker who had been working with him on sculptures. The first piece "Song of Myself” (after the Walt Whitman poem) is a lyrical autobiography in which Phillips tells in an elliptical and cryptic way of all of the aliases and guises that his art has brought him. As a conceptual piece "Song of Myself" is highly successful. It has the power to pull the viewer into a state of immanence; to heighten awareness not only of the words themselves but the fragility of the wire and the surprising strength of the whole. The light highlights the tiny copper welds and plays with the shadows of the lettering on the wall behind. These factors, combined with the shimmering sound produced when the work is touched, make it an almost magical piece. Like all great art it intensifies our awareness of what already edsts around us.

The ultimate bringing together of text, calligraphy, sculpture, abstraction, and mean­ing is in a three-part wire piece, "Golgotha”, in which the cross on which “The Word” (in the biblical sense) is crucified, is made of words (and only of words). This piece was only recently completed for this year's Royal Academy Summer exhibition.

Lucy Shortis lives in London and has had a long working association with Tom Phillips.