Max Allen reviews Enrico Mascelloni: Beyond the West

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.

Kevin Sudeith’s new publication

Kevin is going to print with Pictorial War Rugs: Volume 1 (due October 15) and invites orders on his site. Await a review when I get my hands on a copy!

Hwaa Irfan

Josephine Jasperse refers us to Hwaa Irfan’s interesting online essay: “Weaving between Wars and Returning to the Soul”.

Essay by Jack Lee in Raw Vision

A short commentary and three interesting images are to be found in Raw Vision #35, the well-known journal of outsider and folk art.

Jack Lee also wrote an extended version of this commentary for the catalogue of a London exhibition held at Gallery Forty Seven in August 2001. I’m trying to track down the author to see whether we can load the full text, which brings some interesting observations to bear on the historiography of these works.

Near and Far

My essay from The Rugs of War catalogue:

Brian Spooner’s essay “Weavers and dealers: the authenticity of an oriental carpet” of 1986 perceptively explores the relationship between cultural distance and the desire for authenticity, seen through the critiques of primitivism and orientalism. In the case of the rugs of the Turkmen, he explores the crucial nexus between the makers of ‘tribal’ carpets and the influence of markets and their network of dealers on the perceptions of both makers and audiences. Since then a highly innovative genre of rugs/carpets known as ‘war rugs’ has emerged, largely at the hands of the Baluchi peoples, neighbours of the Turkmen, who have endured two decades of conflict and dislocation. In disentangling the complexity of the knowledge of such traditions in the world outside Central Asia, Spooner argues that the West’s quest for authenticity is enhanced by cultural distance from the source of these artefacts. He suggest that such claims to ‘authenticity’ are informed not by ethnographic knowledge, but by the “lore of the dealer . . . generated by the history of the trade and of Western interest, rather than by the conditions of production.” He is equally persuasive when he concludes “whichever way we turn in an attempt to explain our interest in oriental carpets, we run sooner or later into mystification.”

Tim Bonyhady

In 2003 Tim Bonyhady contributed the following essay to The Rugs of War catalogue:

Out of Afghanistan

International interest in Afghanistan was intense in the late 1980s. While the political and military implications of the mujahideen’s defeat of the Soviet Union commanded most attention, the cultural consequences of the war also attracted an international audience. An exhibition of eighty ‘Russian-Afghan War Carpets’ staged by an Italian rug dealer, Luca Brancati, was pivotal. After opening in Turin in May 1988 as the first Soviet troops were preparing to quit Kabul, these rugs went on tour to other Italian cities as the Soviet withdrawal gathered pace, and then travelled to the United States as the last Soviet soldiers quit Afghanistan in February 1989.

Jasleen Dhamija

The following essay “This Space is Mine” by noted Indian textiles historian Jasleen Dhamija, was first published in The Rugs of War catalogue, 2003.

The first time I came across a War Rug was in the late 1980s in New Delhi. It was just by chance that I saw a carpet of an indigo blue background with a beautifully worked traditional border of curling stems and fine guard borders on each side. The two ends carried the traditional gelim weave with geometric patterns, a signature of the Baluchi women weavers. But, in the main body there was a strange repeat of a pattern dominated by yellow flowers, oddly placed and distributed all over. At first glance it looked like a typical Baluchi rug with rather odd shaped geometric patterns. It was only when I looked at it again that strange, heavy ominous forms emerged. They were rows and rows of battle tanks, their turrets well defined and raised guns, and signs of engaging in a battle. The yellow flowers were bursting shells, the flower of death. I shivered and something within me froze.