Listening to the soundtrack from the Brothers’ Quay Stille Nacht III (Tales from Vienna Woods), the first thing we notice is that it’s not a soundtrack by Leszek Jankowski, who has composed the music for many of the Quays’ best-known films. Rather, it is a sound collage apparently created by the Quays themselves, as the credits at the end of the film are fictitious.
Categories: Cinema, Literature
Tagged: Brothers Quay, experimental film, Nikolai Gogol, sountrack, Stille Nacht III
It is tempting, given the nature of A Humument, to read the textual elements of the work as so many unrelated oracular or aphoristic statements. To do so, however, is to deny the narrative qualities of the work and ignore the fact that a story is being told.
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Literature, Print Culture, Writing
Tagged: A Human Document, A Humument, Bill Toge, Tom Phillips, W.H. Mallock
“Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” is a (fictional) scholarly homage to a (equally fictional) early-20th century French neo-Symbolist poet whose crowning literary achievement was to write, some 300 years after the fact and for no apparent reason, Don Quixote.
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Literature, Writing
Tagged: conceptual literature, J.L. Borges, Pierre Menard
The loop fascinates, whether as idea, object, or aesthetic device. It spurs the mind on, sends it spinning, causes it to wonder: will this ever end? Technically, it shouldn’t, because the loop = infinity (whose symbol – ∞ – is itself a loop).
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Cinema, Literature, Music
Tagged: Furniture Music, Last Year at Marienbad, Stille Nacht III, tape loops, the loop
A Humument features a number of framing devices that, in addition to whatever narrative role they may play, further emphasize the self-reflexive character of the book. Unsurprisingly perhaps given the nature of this work, among the most common are the (book) page, the painting, and the window.
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Literature, Writing
Tagged: A Humument, framing devices, Tom Phillips, W.H. Mallock, windows
This gallery contains contains selected pages from A Humument by Tom Phillips.
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Gallery, Literature, Writing
Tagged: A Humument, framing devices, Tom Phillips, W.H. Mallock, windows
Over the course of the opening pages A Humument is given many descriptive monikers, and each of them sheds a bit of light on the sundry qualities the book possesses, the method with which it was created, and its dual nature as both an intertextual and intermedia work.
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Literature, Writing
Tagged: A Humument, intermedia, intertextuality, Tom Phillips
The first page of Tom Phillips’ A Humument is emblematic of the entire work. Textually and graphically it touches on some of the book’s central concerns and provides clues to certain of its mysteries.
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Literature, Writing
Tagged: A Humument, appropriation, intertextuality, Tom Phillips, W.H. Mallock
Kafka’s parable of leopards in the temple has always struck me as a perfect allegory of the avant-garde in that it points out the truism that in art the transgressive is ultimately absorbed into the canon.
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Literature
Tagged: anti-art, Franz Kafka, Susan Sontag, the avant-garde