American Visionary Art Museum display

Some war rugs (plus a recent salt bag from Herat) plus a couple of Navaho weavings with 9/11 references, at the opening last Friday night at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

War carpets on display at the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary art

… failed to make a point, according to critic Matthew Bown: “some works are coals to Newcastle, a misjudgment of the Moscow context. Afghan carpets featuring airplanes and other military technology have been on sale at Ismailovo Market here for 20 years.”  The carpets in the Biennale may be token representation, perhaps, but (we might ask) where was Bown when war carpets began to appear in markets all around the world 20 years ago? Perhaps Bown missed curator Jean-Martin Hubert’s point, that since the late 80s such artefacts have continued to pose challenges to mainstream art when re-evaluated as works of art, despite such dismissive accounts. See the relevant catalogue page here: moscow-biennale-afgan.pdf

anyone recognise the bird and snake motif?

the symbolism of this image?

room for debate?

See this extraordinary photograph in context at the NYT.

Nancy Hatch Dupree: an interview

Listen with Philip Adams on the ABC’s Late Night Live

cold war art

I read somewhere that artists in The West were not producing images about war or the arms race. I thought “that can’t be right?”  Then I remembered this Sydney University Art Workshop poster, designed by Nigel Lendon and printed by Pam Debenham. Never been translated into a war rug!

souvenirs from the front

a recent sighting of War Rugs on the boardwalk at Kandahar Air Field…

“….War Rugs sighted on a stall on the boardwalk KAF next to Tim
Hortons, Burger King,  Pizza Hut, stalls with cheeky t-shirts, one stall
carrying fur goods and then a spa of sorts.  The centre of the boardwalk
area also sports a hockey arena.  The rugs were 3ft x 5ft in general,
some had English writing but often misspellings and they cost only
$30US!  One rug had Chinook helicopters on it and a (blue) Canadian
flag.  Chinooks are used by the Joint Task Force and six more were
bought by the Canadian Government and arrived in March.”

goat’s hair selvedge theory

One of the folk tales which is told by dealers as a means to identify an “authentic” Baluch carpet – which since 1980 is a questionable concept anyway – is that a coarse goat’s hair selvedge is said to prevent scorpions from wandering onto a carpet. Well, maybe, but it also works for snakes! Here’s a photograph from a 1994 issue of Hali where herpetologist and Baluch authority Jerry Anderson proves his theory! But did anyone ask: what’s to stop them creeping and crawling on to the carpet from the fringe ends? I’m sure the dealer would have an answer… Read the whole Tom Cole interview on his site here…

HALI: We have heard that during the recent troubles the Baluch peoples in northern Afghanistan were either killed or driven out by the local population, who resented them. Who are they? JA: They are a mixture of Baluch and Arabs, and also Lokharis, who do not weave piled rugs but instead make those dark, dark kilims which often have tufts of wool inserted on the flatweave, and are woven in two pieces and joined in the centre. There are also Brahuis in that area who are called Baluch. There is a book written by a Russian that tells of the whole distribution of the Brahuis in Khorasan, Transcaspia, the Bukhara area and the Mazar-i-Sharif area. So many different peoples are called Baluch, or call themselves Baluch. In Farsi, the word means beggar. It also has the sense of nakedness, a person living in a tent and clothed in rags. Now the word -luch means a parasitic type of person. Ba means ‘from’ or ‘of’, so the name Baluch has bad connotations in Farsi… [The] Sistani tribal lifestyle was essentially intact until about 1980, nomads moving around in the same locales as they had for centuries. But then the Sarbandi and many other Sistanis were displaced during the Islamic Revolution.

war carpets as inspiration

See the blog of  the Chicago artist Barbara Koenen who re-makes war carpets in a surprising material…

like grasping smoke

Negotiating with the Taliban (as suggested by President Obama) is “like grasping smoke”. So says the ANU’s Professor William Maley, on the ABC today. Let’s hope the O’s comment was a throwaway line…