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!
See Ariel’s catalogue plus a walk-through of the exhibition now online.
Here’s a rug from Kevin Sudeith’s collection (see warrug.com) which is a ‘victory’ rug with a twist. I confess I didn’t look at it very closely the first time around. It follows the (very) familiar format of the ‘Victory over the Soviets’ carpets which first appeared in the early 90s and which depicts the Soviet forces heading home along the highway that leads from the Salang Pass, across the “Friendship Bridge”, through Termez, and home…
But what is the 2002 date doing there? As Kevin notes, when you translate the text in Farsi you will find that what normally reads: “The Soviet forces are exiting Afghanistan” reads “The al-Qaeda forces are exiting Afghanistan”. This shows how quickly antecedent designs and motifs of tourist art can be recycled to catch a potential market, that is, the new population of ISAF and NATO forces which began to arrive in Afghanistan from 2002 onwards.
Kevin has many variants of this style on his site, which are worth careful examination to see these kinds of variations. For example, some include the dates of both the Saur revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, plus texts which (optimistically) read “international terrorists got wiped off [overthrown] from entire Afghanistan”.
How fast does an observation become an “ism”? Here’s an example of the kind of thing Max Allen correctly describes as coeval production: examples of carpets that are clearly made within the same environment, possibly by the same people or persons, with or without an antecedent. The first was this rug collected by Hans Werner Mohm in Kabul in 1992. It is reproduced as Plate 37 in his book (co-authored with Jurgen Wasim Frembgen) Lebensraum und Kalashnikow: Kreig und Frieden im Spiegel afghanisher Bildteppiche (2000).
By coincidence, we spotted the frayed corner of the second carpet peeking out from under about three other carpets in the doorway of a bazaar shop in Herat. It needed a wash.
Comparison of the similarities and differences reveals the extent to which such coeval production reflects the individual design decisions made by makers in close proximity with each other: colours, motifs, texts move around within the common schema of the abstracted map of Afghanistan. Both are dated 1989/90. If you compare the details from the bottom of the carpet upwards, you can see how the elements within the framework are varied by the maker(s). The Herat province (bottom center) can either be represented by buildings or camels, and so on up the design. It’s as if the process allows for a degree of creative freedom, in the hands of the makers.
Follow the link to the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, where an exhibition drawn from the collection of Oaklands CA resident, Patricia Markovich, will be on display from August 17…
Accompanying this exhibition, the Museum will also display the Afghan Freedom Quilt: Silenced Voices of the Afghan Diaspora, a collaborative project sponsored by the Foundation for Self-Reliance. The quilt is a collection of blocks made by war widows in Afghanistan and assembled in the San Francisco Bay Area. Pieces sewn for this quilt are symbolic interpretations of what human rights, empowerment, equality, peace, hardship, sisterhood and freedom meant to each individual contributor. The Foundation for Self-Reliance conducts life-skills training and economic empowerment programs for Afghan women immigrants.
We are pleased to publish the following review of Oltre l’Occidente – Rappresentazioni estreme nei tessuti orientali (2006), which has been the subject of earlier discussions on Rugs of War. Max Allen is the founding curator of the Textile Museum of Canada where, since 1975, he has curated more than 100 textile exhibitions. His review follows:
Exhibition catalogues are sometimes works of scholarship. This one isn’t. Instead it is a work of narrative imagination and polemics, and as such it is a far more striking object than most of the textiles within it. Aside from the fact that everything is from “The East” – as if that meant anything – there is no coherence to the collection, nor any discernible reason for assembling it.
Here’s the map of Afghanistan war rug referenced in earlier discussions. Thanks to Enrico for allowing us to publish it. It’s plate 55 in his catalogue and the date attributed by Enrico is 1960s/70s, following his argument in the comments below. It was purchased by Enrico in 2006 in Mazar-i-Sharif. The date woven in the rug is 1368/1989 (or 1990) and (thanks to Maryam Rashidi) the text in Farsi reads “made by Afghan immigrants, Islamic Republic of Iran”. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded in 1979. So by our reasoning it was made some time between 1979 and 2005. The devil is in the detail…
One of our readers sends us a number of new war rugs which have just come on the market (characterised by yellow fields, and poor materials and skills). This is a portrait of Ghazi Amanullah Khan. This sharp-eyed reader also suggests that the image below, which features a “135″ tank (or is that T35?), might solve a part of the jigsaw puzzle posed by the “ragged mihrab” discussions. This also feeds into Kevin Sudeith’s discussions of the same motifs on his warrug.com blog.
Two new catalogues of Italian collections have been received by rugsofwar. The first, the collection of Amadeo Vittorio Bedini, in Milan, illustrates 28 war rugs. The text is in Italian, and together with Bedini the author Christen Ungennant illustrates the sources of many of the militaria elements in the carpets. The collection is mostly representative of fine examples of the second generation of war rugs (late 1980s and 1990s). We’re awaiting a translation before we can comment on the text. Vittorio assures me the AK47 on the cover illustration is a model!
The second is a wide ranging collection of textiles from the later decades of the 20th century, with 16 examples of war rugs illustrated and discussed (in both Italian and English) by the co-curator/editor/author (and perhaps collector) Erino Mascelloni, from Rome. The catalogue accompanies an exhibition that was held in Todi at the Sala delle Pietre e Monastero delle Lucrezie from December 2006 to February 2007. It’s not clear from the text from which collections these works are drawn, although all the discussions of the texts for war rugs are by Enrico Mascelloni, in a section titled “Asian Modernism”. The author makes a number of claims for an earlier time frame for “war rugs” than accepted by other scholars and collectors, or evidence available to us. He dates some of his “war rugs” back to the 1960s, in one case a rug (purchased in 2006) by interpreting an explicit date woven in the rug (1368/1989 or 1990) by the Turkish calendar! Many of the war rugs have similarly optimistic dates. I will review the text and some of its claims more comprehensively in a later post. The catalogue is published by Skira.
While we’re on the theme of helicopters (see below, or type “helicopter” into the search bar), Max Allen points us to this example – a helicopter appearing on a military patch. This is a UK/Australian/Dutch coalition Medevac patch made in Afghanistan.
Patches are of interest to the RoW project in the sense that all imagery which finds its way into the public domain (logos, postage stamps, posters, television, videos etc.) has the potential to be appropriated by rug-designers. And this is especially relevant with respect to images of militaria and other images which carry specific ideological messages.
As Max comments, military personnel sew embroidered patches on the shoulders of their uniforms to identify the unit to which they belong. The patches range from simple to elaborate, sometimes incorporating recognizable imagery and writing; until recently, official U.S. patches were colourful but are now only in in the dull browns and greens of camouflage.
In addition to the official unit patches, there are so-called “Friday patches” which military personnel wear on their off-duty clothing. Early in the various Gulf Wars these unofficial American patches were often stunningly vulgar (as in the final example below). They are not produced anymore.
Both kinds show weaponry drawn in an outline style and using isometric perspective that has been copied on (or from) the war rugs. This aircraft carrier appears in the Twin Towers rugs:
Here are some other examples from Max’s collection…
