David Boyd Haycock - Essays and reviews
Roger Hilton
Tom Phillips, Micro-Retrospective, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
‘
The ground beneath his feet’, The Times Literary Supplement, 17 March
2006, p. 17.
Artist and composer Tom Phillips, RA, completed his Hilary term Slade Lectures
at Oxford University on a high note, with the performance of pieces based on
his work, ‘Conclusions in Sound’, at the Holywell Music Room – an
event that is to be repeated in July at the Royal Academy in London. Judging
by the reception of his last lecture, and the eager audience for his accompanying
concert, Phillip’s stint as Slade Professor went down very well. This is
not surprising: Phillips started out reading English at St Catherine’s
College, Oxford, over half a century ago, and he is an intelligent, eloquent
speaker. It was a real privilege to hear him talking so entertainingly about
his life’s fascinating work.
Perhaps surprisingly, Phillips is the first practising artist to have held the
eminent Slade Professorship at Oxford: certainly he must be the first ever to
start his lectures with a song, never mind one in French by Baudelaire. He has
a fine voice, and his lectures, on a wide and varying set of themes and subjects,
were well performed and well received. But his was not a particularly youthful
audience: there was a smattering, perhaps, of Ruskin students. This was a shame,
as there was much for aspiring young artists to learn here.
Phillips adheres to no ‘isms’, though he admits a close affiliation
to the Italian movement, Arte Pauvre. He identifies the artist as hunter-gatherer,
and he treated his audience to an explanation of how this notion works in practice. ‘Artists
thrive on what has been discarded and art’s history starts with the colours
of the earth at our feet’, he has written. There is thus nothing that might
not be useful to his work: this includes the soil from his back garden, or the
London clay from road works in the street outside his Peckham home. As he points
out, the artist does not have to travel far to find ideas: he is then free to
embellish them, make something new, exciting and beautiful from the apparent
banalities of the objet trouve. One of Phillip’s favourite ideas is that
to be found in the book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance. Created by four artists
associated with the post-war FLUXUS and Noveau Réalisme movements, the
Topography rigorously maps a random collection of random objects found on a breakfast
table. As the Topography of Chance shows, and as Phillips demonstrates here,
in our own front room, in our own neighbourhood, we find enough inspiration for
a lifetime’s work.
As an accompaniment to Philips’s lectures, a ‘micro-retrospective’ has
been organised at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Phillips defines ‘micro-retrospective’ as
a small show of generally smaller works. Those chosen for the Ashmolean’s
corridor gallery were intended to highlight the range, diversity and chronology
of his oeuvre. It includes the first picture he ever sold, 1958’s gouache – like
a little Paul Klee sketch – ‘The City’, which is in the collection
of Pembroke College, Oxford. And it runs through some of his most famous images,
including his silkscreen ‘Dante in his Study’ (1982), right up to
some of his very latest work, including examples from his ongoing ‘Skull’ and ‘Cube’ series,
and another Klee-like work, 2006’s ‘Sudoku Study’, consisting
of little boxes filled with colour.
Phillips has taken Klee’s admonition, ‘taking a line for a walk’,
in quite a literal sense. What have been called his ‘graphic tapestries’,
or what he calls his ‘Merry meetings’, take up one whole wall of
the Ashmolean’s diminutive show: these decorative doodles orchestrated
in pen and ink cover the typed and headed pages of 48 committee meeting agendas.
One can imagine Phillips penning them whilst discussion flows back and forth
around the table. Another recent work charts in paint and collage an annual walk
he has made since 1973 around the neighbourhood of his home and studio in Peckham,
south London. This started off as a response to the then fashionable ‘land
art’ movement. At the same time, and from the same place, Phillips takes
a photograph. Each photograph charts, one frame at a time, his minutely changing
neighbourhood. It is a fascinating premise. In his last lecture he took his audience
through just one of these locations. Sadly, the Ashmolean has not space enough
to include this vital element of the work.
It does, however, boast a copy of another of Phillip’s most well-known
works, his 1984 lithograph portrait of Samuel Beckett, with the immortal lines, ‘No
matter, Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ (Dante and Beckett, Phillips
points out, both write about people in hell – except in Beckett’s
hell, there is no way out.) Phillips made this portrait in 1984, when Beckett
was in London directing a performance of ‘Waiting for Godot’ at the
Riverside Theatre. His sketchbook from this period is here, too, immortalizing
what Phillip’s has aptly described as the Irish playwright’s ‘majestic
ears’.
It is a shame that, despite these little masterpieces, the Ashmolean show does
not do full justice to Phillips’s oeuvre. There are, in fact, two better
places to go and see his work. One is a bookshop: there you can buy your very
own copy of an individual work on which Phillips admits he’s spent the
most time, A Humument. Based on a copy of the Victorian novel The
Human Document,which Phillips bought in 1966, A Humument is a fascinating collage of text and
images, each page lovingly recrafted and recreated by the artist. A bookshop
will also provide you with the chance to purchase another of Phillip’s
long-term projects, his collection of used postcards. Some of these were published
in 2000 by Thames & Hudson as The Postcard Century. Arranged year-by-year,
this annotated record of the mundane and the bizarre is without doubt a record
of the twentieth century itself.
And then many of these works (and more) can also be seen in the second place
to really experience Phillip’s oeuvre: his excellent homepage (www.tomphillips.co.uk),
which he made a point of highlighting at the end of his final lecture. It includes
numerous illustrations of his works (including the pages of A Humument), along
with links to his varied writings, criticism and musical projects. Phillips may
now be in his late 60s, but he has not failed to move with the times, and his
work, textual, artistic, and lyrical, continues to fascinate.
©
David Boyd Haycock