A Companion to Tom Phillips

The first comprehensive scholarly collection on British artist Tom Phillips, situating his interdisciplinary oeuvre within contemporary conceptual and intermedia art.A Companion to Tom Phillips is the first critical volume devoted entirely to the British artist Tom Phillips (1937–2022) and his groundbreaking work across visual art, poetry, collage, music, translation, and performance. Bringing together international scholars from literature, art history, media studies, and poetics, the collection explores Phillips’s celebrated masterpiece A Humument alongside his broader intermedial practice. The essays examine themes of erasure, collage, materiality, identity, and artistic experimentation, showing how Phillips reimagined the relationship between word and image. Central to the volume is A Humument, the extraordinary “treated novel” Phillips developed over five decades from W. H. Mallock’s largely forgotten Victorian novel A Human Document (1892), transforming it into one of the most innovative artistic projects of the twentieth century. Accessible yet intellectually ambitious, this volume demonstrates why Phillips remains a central figure for understanding contemporary intermedia art and the creative reuse of cultural memory.