Collage

When I first considered reworking a novel’s narrative through erasure, I ended up with Tom Phillips’ Humument heavy in my hand.  Given the postmodern period in which we live, artists have looming before them the task of creating striking work when it feels as if everything has been done before.   I resolved to alter an already-altered novel, to transform Phillips’ Humument into my Um Um.

Flipping through the densely inked and painted pages, I was tempted to cover the majority of them with quiet, cool, thick white paint.  I found pleasure in cleaning up each composition, whiting out excess noise in the images, and condensing the narrative to the point where some pages now display only a single word – or even a single letter – on which the reader can zero in.  I used an exacto knife to scratch away certain words, and I have collected the dust of this text in a cigarette carton.  The second sentence of Um Um references the use of the knife: “Purple inside my um um operation, a sharp and swell tongue.”  In my narration, the knife functions as tool in the construction of my voice, just as the tongue does in the literal sense.  The remainder of this sentence extends the significance of the tongue, “softened a moment to eat a picture.”  As I constructed this Novel Very Rich To Lips, I thought of Phillips’ highly nourished pages as fuel to feed a new work of art.  Interestingly enough, in researching A Humument later on, I found that Phillips viewed William Hurrell Mallock’s Human Document as a meal plentiful enough for a hungry artist: “For my purposes, his book is a feast. . . I have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot comprehend or its phases be adapted to cover.”  This metaphor, then, has been ingrained in the piece from the start.

Through the creation of Um Um, I aimed to breathe new life into a piece that, now pale and quiet on the surface and imprinted with the thumbs of so many hands, buzzes with the anxiety and gratitude linked to artistic influence. 

Animation