In 1966, at age twenty-nine, Tom Phillips began his Humument project, the “treatment” of the 1892 novel A Human Document, by the Victorian author William Hurrell Mallock. The first artist’s book that resulted was initially published in 1973 and has now gone through five editions; Phillips began a second version in 1980 and continues to work on it to this day. To create these treatments, the artist removed each page from Mallock’s novel and subjected it to playful editing, surgically removing blocks of text to form an Apollinaire-like shaped poem—or, rather, a Mallarmé-like throw of the verbal dice. Sometimes Phillips’s treated pages borrow from pop-culture imagery, sometimes old photographs are used, and sometimes figures are painted on the page. Each page has been worked and reworked, yet it all looks random and informal, as though Phillips had a divining rod that suddenly found the “right words” or else had been spooked by some hidden, subliminal meaning. In either case, a kind of alchemical distillation has taken place, with the lead of Mallock’s heavy prose quintessentialized into lyrical golden drops. All of this is indicative of Phillips’s versatility, the boundlessness of his sources, and the ingeniousness of his method.

For this exhibition, the artist presented three rows of pages, a hundred pages in each. The pages in the first row were ripped straight from Mallock’s novel, untransformed by Phillips. Below these were a hundred corresponding ink-jet print facsimile pages from Phillips’s 1973 treatment. Below that were a hundred corresponding ink-jet print facsimile pages from the 1980 version, including pages from 2014 and 2015. The project is expected to be completed by November 2016, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its beginning. The viewer was invited to compare and “cross-reference” the pages any way he or she wished, studying their design and, of course, reading them—Mallock’s as well as Phillips’s. Phillips regards the whole enterprise as a “collaboration” with Mallock, but it is clearly his own tour de force—a brilliant recapitulative integration of seemingly every mode and manner of making visual (and literary) art, at once “post-traditional” and postmodern.

The key to understanding the project is the story of how Phillips found Mallock’s novel in the first place. Wandering in a London warehouse in search of a bargain, Phillips came upon shelves of cheap old books, vowing to buy the first one that cost threepence (roughly a dime) and “make it serve a serious long-term project.” This happened to be A Human Document—a chance discovery. (Phillips also liked its title.) He admits to admiring the aleatory methods of John Cage, but a more germane reference point in this case, it seems to me, is André Breton, especially the Surrealist fore-father’s sudden, spontaneous, discovery of “surreally” exciting objects in junk shops—that is, old, discarded objects from the seemingly remote past, which have no meaning in the present and no future. It is an archetypal example of the surreal “method” of making art, grounded in Freud’s classic idea of psychoanalysis as the archaeological exploration of the unconscious past. In this sense, Phillips’s pages are dreamworks; he redreams Mallock’s dream novel to extract nuggets of personal yet universal meaning.

—Donald Kuspit