Paul Carter and Ruark Lewis: Depth of Translation: The Book of Raft. NMA Publications, Sydney 1999. Perhaps this short review will be too long: I was advised that because the magazine is on-line, my writing should be kept brief. I was also warned that a couple of other potential reviewers had stumbled at the hurdle of this book ... my task, then, is circumscribed by these two limits: produce something short about something that people find very hard. Okay. My solution: a double-barrelled review. The first three paragraphs (barely 650 words) offer a straight-forward account of this wonderful book. The second part (even fewer words), develops some of the thinking provoked by the book, and aspires to no more than keeping a conversation about "Raft" going. "Raft" was/is an installation/sound sculptural piece, originally shown at the Art gallery of New South Wales in 1995. Stimulated by the (true) story of the Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow's 1922 "death voyage" – seated in an old armchair lashed to a wooden dray, dragged along the dry bed of the Finke River in the Central Desert, west of Alice Springs – Ruark Lewis and Paul Carter's collaboration is realised as an expanse of text, stencilled onto the four transverse surfaces of wooden beams – some 294 beams in all – arrayed like the planks of a futon base. The text comprises St Paul's Acts 27 and 28, in English, German, Greek, Latin, Arrernte and Diyare (Strehlow's missionary work had involved creating these translations), but decomposed into triplets – ROU NDA NDT HEF ORE –; and reassembled as a rippling tessellation, a genetic code, a cabbalist's encryption, occasionally yielding a by/ite of sense, a fragment of legibility (I recall the inhabitants of Borges' labyrinth, seeking, amongst the infinite shelves of randomly lettered books, a single sentence). The overall effect, though, is of a field of wheat, or of a smooth plane of water disturbed by the first, cat's paw caresses of a soft breeze; the serried ranks of letters are at once regular and precise, but slightly amiss: a precise, iterative imprecision. It is repetition as slight, unsettling difference; gentle plays of shadow and light, the gaps between the beams, transverse shadows, letters everywhere, half-words breaking off, a lulling rhythm of movement as stillness, stillness as barely quantifiable vibration. And throughout the gallery space, a soundscape of footsteps against the weird, dislocated atmospherics of the Finke. Depth of Translation is subtitled, simply, The Book of Raft. In a very basic sense, the book works to maintain, or, better, to sustain the work that the installation started. It is an elegant, thoughtful publication: two essays, the first by Carter, who, in addition to being a sound artist, is a heavyweight thinker and writer of elegance and erudition; the second by painter and sculptor Lewis, who is no less a poet of, once again, grace and intelligence. Carter's essay is an extended meditation on the trope of translation, a theme broadened from an original grounding in Strehlow's missionary practice to a more general set of concerns about what it is to interpret, and what these concerns might illuminate about our current, muddling attempts to negotiate cultural identity, nationhood and colonialism. Carter's essay aims to do no less than to set up, in the process of reading and in subsequent meditations, the same, disjunctive ripplings experienced in the presence of "Raft". Don't be put off by the writing's density, its Catholicism, the breadth of its purview: stay with it, or, better yet, put it down, go for a walk, pick it up three months later and start again. Allow yourself to think about it, read around it; look at the pictures, and then turn to the second essay. Lewis' writing playfully appropriates the 'making of' genre familiar to cinephiles to produce an account of the making of "Raft" – this is golden stuff, though: an artist talking through their process, folding together influences, conversations, experiments, practice. He leaps right in: from the opening lines the reader is right in the middle of something like Lewis' mind-map, but it's even more interesting than that: what a mind, what a careful meshing and cross-referencing of material, this wonderful sense of inquiry as work, of artist as manual philosopher. Lewis is so disarming a stylist, so easy-going a writer, that I find myself forgetting just how extraordinary this work, this being an artist business, really is. We get echoes of Carter's essay, and realise that they are actually echoes of a long collaboration, snatches of a mapping of minds, brief, lucid translations: identities of thought rippling up through a sea of words; to borrow one of Carter's images: a synchronisation of the oar-strokes of thinking and making. So, that's the basic review; here is some of the thinking that The Book of Raft led me to: Art is, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, notoriously hard to talk about. And yet (he continues), we do it all the time. The real problem is that we don't talk about art terribly well – that those who talk about art professionally (critics, reviewers) tend to do so for a limited readership; that artists themselves tend to talk shop, which makes the rest of us feel even more removed from the conversation;and that the average punter is left knowing what they like, and being limited to the cul de sac of simply recounting their 'experience' of the work – an unhealthily vertiginous collapse into the infinite regress of "what I liked ...", to which the only possible response is, "well, I didn't" – or, perhaps even more damagingly (and less interestingly), embark upon the dullard's project of working out what the art object in question meant: the limited forensic hermeneutics of uncovering the meaning of the work, even (gasp) the artist's intention. Depths of Translation: the Book of Raft might be understood as a very careful negotiation of (or navigation through) these very problems. It is, very simply, an extraordinary book 'about' an extraordinary artwork. Even better, it is about an extraordinary collaboration between two artists. Best, it is a book about an artwork that suggests, in fact, not what that artwork is about, in the sense that moves to close down potential readings of the work with a view to deciding what it is about, but that proposes both possible meanings that we might want to make of the work, and models the whole life of this artwork – from the history of the collaboration that engendered it through the actual physical assemblage of the work, its various local iterations in galleries around the world, to the creation of the book itself – as a contribution to the generative potential of art, and therefore to culture in the broadest sense. A work of art, on this account, does not stop with its showing; the subsequent writings (and conversations) of and about that work are part of the art itself, not meta-commentaries, but translations, with all the caveats about translation – what it hides as well as what it reveals – issued in advance. The Book of Raft challenges us to think about what it is that we do with a work of art, by maintaining an open-ness of interpretation – or an availability for translation that is not, however, absolute. A process of translation does not allow the translator to create anything: we cannot think whatever we want about an artwork. Instead, a work might set up a field of ripples, of nagging incommensurabilities – this is certainly my physical experience of "raft" – defying our capacity to put our finger on what it means, nudging us towards new versions, new thoughts, new models for being. By foregrounding the process of translation, by figuring it at every point in the process of conceiving, making, dismantling, reassembling, reflecting on and interpreting a work of art, Carter and Lewis are demanding that art and, perhaps even more importantly the engagement with art, is, 'serious', unfinished business, and that it has the potential to get cultural (in the broadest sense) work done through a capacity to provoke and to sustain a resistance to final, authoritative interpretations. In figuring interpretation as a mode of translation – a process that is always incomplete, one that involves choices of omission as well as inclusion, which forgets and hides as much as it recalls and reveals – Carter figures a model for thinking through what it might be to exist together on this particular, continent-sized island raft. This emerges as the main concern in The Book of Raft; the density of the thinking informing the work, the density of the collaboration that generated the work, and the density of experience that is constituted through the reader's immersion in the world of this book, forcefully,compellingly, experientially, reveals the magnitude of what might be at stake here, and of what we might expect, and demand – but rarely do – of art And the main lesson is that, whatever version of being together we come up with, not only will it not necessarily look anything like we might expect it to, but that it will simply be a version, a translation, shaped by all the infelicities, ripples, incommensurabilities and wonders glimpsed in the space Carter and Lewis have opened up for us. Department of Performance Studies, University of Sydney.

Reviewed by Ian Maxwell, 21 May 2001 First published in CrossLines.