The Rest of Us

Making long-term, relational artworks through shared acts of public telling, A Published Event is a collaboration dedicated to movements of language, through body, duration and event. From performance libraries to hydrographic scores, our practice of slow-publishing has always been a practice of the body in time. Conceptual. Material. Oblique.

Our collaboration is also speculative. Trusting. Unsure.

We are two artists, Justy Phillips AUS/UK) and Margaret Woodward (AUS) collaborating through words and actions. Our current collaborative work, The Rest of Us (2024—) is a soft press fabrication in relations of illness and care. We live and work on muwinina country on the banks of tintumili minanya /River Derwent just south of nipaluna/Hobart. One of us has a failing heart. The other, difficulty hearing.

We like to say that we met through a glitch in the Universe. We fell in love. And then in life. We have been working as A Published Event for over a decade. And before this, we wrote, made public artworks, interpretation design, typography, books, video and installation—some of these things we undertook together and some of them solo. In 1999, Justy graduated from the Royal College of Art in London with a Masters of Art. Margaret was awarded a PhD Design from Curtin University in 2009; and Justy a PhD Creative Media from RMIT University in 2015. Between and around these years we both worked in academia, in lecturing, workshop, theory, research and leadership roles. All the while we wrote and made long-term, relational artworks from our home in lutruwita/ Tasmania. We began to recognise the importance of duration and the shift from private to public space and time, understanding more and more, our shared practice as one of slow-publishing.

Through all of this, A Published Event has always sought to expand and experiment with different modes of collaboration—from publishing 113 new and original books on one day—by (mostly) first time authors in The People's Library (2018); to commissioning and curating over 40 contemporary artists to compose a fictiōnella text for our slow-publishing geological taxonomy, Lost Rocks (2017–21). In 2019, we invited seven artists we admire to join us in thinking through concepts of tenderness. Together with Jen Bervin, Fayen d'Evie, Catherine Rose Evans, Ilana Halperin, Nancy Kuhl, Paul Mylecharane and Wendy Morrow, we named this artwork Tender. We continue to learn many things through Tender's close-knit fellowship and with the help of this group of artists, we we able to untangle some of the early conceptual knots (possible installations, DAOs and NFT configurations) of the work we now unfold as The Rest of Us. Tender's thinking and friendship continues to inform everything we do.

Our collaboration with Paul Mylecharane and Public Office began in 2015, firstly in the collation of our work into a beautiful online platform and then a series of site and duration-specific online ecosystems. Paul will always be the third heart of A Published Event—thinking, writing and building online worlds to share and distribute our ideas.

We have undertaken several significant artist residencies including: Bundanon, Australia (2024); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2022), Josef & Anni Albers Foundation (2019); Research Fellows, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University (2019); SÍM Artists Residency, Reykjavik, Iceland (2012); SOMA México City, (2012). Margaret is currently the State Library of Tasmania Creative Fellow, 2024.

We express our deepest gratitude to the palawa—First Peoples of this island land, lutruwita—and are deeply sorry for the devastation of British invasion and colonisation. We acknowledge the palawa people's rightful connection to this place and understand that sovereignty was never ceded.

No book cover. No dust jacket. No endpapers. No title page.

The Rest of Us is a soft press fabrication from A Published Event. We begin with a foreword and then go page by page. The foreword (VII) is a definition of sorts—a positioning of complexity and unsureness—but also of ambition and breadth. We are careful to retain the foreword for A Published Event's archives.

The Rest of Us is an opening—the quiet unfolding of a final and lasting book (see Babson's Dogtown erratics for new ways of reading weight and enormity). This is what we imagine for ourselves and each other—an open-ended dialogue of difficult things. Illness and care. Complexity. This book is, we hope, an invitation to gather. To read aloud. To witness, refuge and shelter. An address to do it all in the arms of others—all the while, through the expanded and divergent structures of the book.

We expect more front matter but don’t know yet when it will come.

Perhaps first then some specifics—let’s begin with the catchword, a page-matching device borne to the history of bookbinding in folios and leaves. Through the catchword, The Rest of Us carries breath from one chronic/le to the next. Traditionally a device (a word or phrase) printed on the bottom margin on the verso of a gathering’s final leaf, the catchword matched the first word or phrase of the recto of the next gathering. This way, subsequent gatherings could be arranged (matched) during binding. In a recent essay on the subject of catchwords, Daniel Sawyer writes of the adoption of these entries into early Medieval Latin books—possibly with a longer history in Arabic manuscripts (2019:142)¹. As mechanical reproduction became more reliable, there was less need to match gatherings in this way, and so the catchword became a disposable element of book design and construction. In The Rest of Us, the catchword draws the last line of the previous entry into the header of the next—something like a running head or title. Stylistically, we bring with it, a shift from sentence case to running caps—a move from quiet ending to emboldened beginning. In this artwork, the catchword—or better—the catchphrase, retains its original function as a linking text, but transforms the force of its telling by a shift in position, emphasis and style. In this sense, it becomes a newly important and relational signature, of the work. Like the original, the catchword/phrase enable readers to ‘track the interaction between the book’s text and its physical structure’ —even before that structure has been composed (143). For us, this device affords the reader a deep and active relationship with what came before—and that which is simultaneously held by another. In this way, the chronic/le’s distribution is shared and remains always connected to the past and the future in the present page.

In The Rest of Us, pagination designates duration, with the day of composition taking the form of a page number in the top margin of each blanket/page. Days are numbered from the first day of the year, beginning on the first of January, in the year 2024. Iterative and episodic, The Rest of Us unfolds in relations of illness and care. There are spurts of energy and periods of prolonged rest. Sometimes pages are composed alongside each other in close proximity. Very rarely do we go back and edit a previous entry and once published the work is passed through the soft press of a jacquard knitting machine. Although each composition creates a digital (—and therefore reproducible) page, each blanket is only ever knitted once. The only collation of pages takes place through the act of distribution—an active, collective holding—a binding of and through—the body of its readers. Creating a work that can only be held in this kind of collective readership is critical to the conceptual and practical ambitions of the work.

Rather than a navigational device borne in antiquity, you might think The Rest of Us’ table of contents as a generative invitation to what unfolds (rather than a definitive indication of what has come before). Accumulative and full of possibility, the T.O.C. is a prose of its own making. A lead. But also a memory for a future yet to come. Nevertheless, the T.O.C will carry you forward, through the days as they appeared to us both, marking what was caught, memorised and how the breath was spent on a given day. Sometimes these are nice things to be able to recall, and locate oneself. In spite of the complexity and confusion of it all.

The spine is your body. But you know this already. Some kind of multi-faceted enquiry. The binding our collective fears and desires. The urge to be held when the rest of us feels like falling apart. Writing is need. Readership is glue. Study is care (Ground Provisions). Comfort is everywhere. In the footer, a line that reminds us that we are more than one. That we are connected—despite how alone we might feel when we are afraid. And tired. And in need of a rest in the arms of each other. We are not alone. We are The Rest of Us.

For the last few years, we’ve been thinking much about relations of illness and care. The role of time, duration and the chronicle—care-giving, receiving and living in the midst of—. Through The Rest of Us, we are trying to express the complexity of publishing (making public) this particular field of relation, without falling into traps bound by individuality (reading ‘I’ as a universal experience rather than an interiorised, personal one) or sympathy or self-pity. Of course all of these things are present in the things we write and the days in which we write them, but understanding that this process of composition is also a process of care-giving—to oneself and to those who will come to embody and safe-haven the artwork in their own ways—with their own bodies—and ultimately, with the experience of their own publics—well, this is critical too.

Some recent thinkings and writings that are important to the ongoing development of this work come from artist, writer and theorist, Brandon La Belle, philosopher Jane Bennett and philosopher and artist Erin Manning. Important too, have been readings on chronic illness and disability, crip time and accessibility. We have been fortunate to make several years of critical conversation with our Tender collaborators—where ideas of collective experience and organisation (exploring in particular, Decentralised Autonomous Organisations DAOs), intimacy, embodiment and trust—have been central to a sense of steadying empowerment through publishing as art practice.

I want to share some lines from Brandon La Belle’s, Radical Sympathy (2022)¹. In his striking Introduction, La Belle brings into language an immediacy of experience that feels critical to The Rest of Us. La Belle writes: ‘In contrast to empathy, as feeling what others feel, sympathy is responsive and the basis for action, where sympathy leads to a position of “caring-for” —or, the one who cares— and therefore, works on behalf of another’s wellbeing. Sympathy is therefore motivated or prompted by an understanding for the vulnerabilities and challenges people share, and yet which some experience more than others; as a form of embodied intelligence, it underpins moral obligation and informs ethical responsiveness, lending to the capacity to sense beyond one’s immediate circles and to bring care to others'.

In Blanket², writer Kara Thompson unfolds ideas of the blanket as material object, but also as witness, as refuge, as care. The blanket's history as an object of oppression and power, disposession and erasure through trade and the intentional spread of illness is something I'll come back to (and is superbly shared in Thompson's great little book). Artists Anne Feran, Nick Cave, Kate Just, Grayson Perry. More on this later too.

Drawing on philosopher Jane Bennett’s materialist and relational thinking (Influx and Efflux), La Belle highlights the importance of thinking porosity and interdependency as care-giving. Beyond expressions of human agency, he refers to Bennett’s “currents of sympathy” as an unfolding of the impersonal and affective forces of care. These “currents of affection” (Bennett, 2019) suggests La Belle, are a way of thinking sympathy through the realm of the more-than-human—a force that is somehow electrified by ‘the interconnectedness of things’.

What is so absorbing about La Belle’s writing is his push to imagine sympathy as a force that moves between and across different registers and modes; ‘from direct to indirect action, from personal to impersonal care and concern, from sense to sensibility. It captures a dynamics of interconnectivity, figuring affective, sensual experiences that extend beyond empathetic feeling toward ethical responsiveness and reason.’ I’m thinking here too of the conceptual work of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi and the SenseLab/ and 3Ecologies Institute—so much present in A Published Event’s thinking and writing that flows through these thinkers/ makers/ histories (even when we didn’t really understand what we understood). Manning’s exploration of durational process as being ‘always more than one’ is essential to the transformative power of the blanket—as material object but also as companion, second skin, or imaginary friend.

In it’s ways of doing, we want to offer The Rest of Us as a sympathetic platform for care. La Belle’s writing steadies us to think this chronic/le as an active and ongoing event—an action and a mirror. Like: How it might be to notice these currents—to attend to them, to look and listen—and to see how we might allow ourselves to be touched—electrified in them too. Like: How we write, knit, hold and share this work, by not only learning to be-with each other, but to question the very essence of what that otherness might sense, feel and do for others too. Radical Sympathy is a sharp and highly recommended book. And it's helping us think all the ways of publishing as radical care too. As witness, and refuge and solidarity in illness. All that chronic time. All that touch. Hearing loss and heart failure. That proximity too. (JP)