This two-person exhibition starts with that idea of a life's work, a project that an artist continually goes back to and that becomes both a trace of that work and a career. Both projects in this exhibition span decades and generations, and also function as re-inventions of existing texts. For the last 40 years British artist Tom Phillips has been working on A Humument, a series of collages based on A Human Document, the Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock. Phillips has altered the individual pages of the original book four times, each edition creating a new concrete text poem. For Life’s Work MASS MoCA will show Mallock’s unaltered book along with Phillips’ first edition of A Humument completed in 1973 as well as his most recent 5th edition completed in 2012. This amounts to a total of over 1,000 individual book pages.
