anyone recognise the bird and snake motif?

the symbolism of this image?

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!

what? where?

Do any of our readers recognise the subject of this carpet?

Visions of Alterity?

These variations of the “weaponscape: field of armaments” category first appeared on the internet about three years ago, and they can be seen in the markets of Kabul, Herat, and Mashhad. They arrived on the scene at about the same time as tanks began to be replaced by Corollas as borders and decorative infills. What struck us about these designs was the range of non-war motifs (the bus border, limousines, Corollas, luxury cruisers) alongside cruise missiles (?) and vestigial tanks. The (?) is there because our iconographic analysis is closer to guesswork – they look like cruise missiles and stingers, but we’d be happy to be corrected. And luxury cruisers? In the driest land-locked country in the world? Surely these have to be there as objects of desire (or condemnation), a vision of the riches of the outside world? Nobody I spoke to knew their origins, which perhaps suggests “Made in Pakistan”?

The carpet on the left (with brighter blue, and green, with more infill details, and a shy bird) was bought in Mashhad.

Prince Harry product placement

breaking news: now that Prince Harry has been outed as having been serving for the last ten weeks in Helmand province, we can reveal his interest in war carpets… Maybe he bought it on ebay? You too can have one just like it for $0.99. There are 21 listed as “hard to find…” Now wait for war carpets with Prince Harry as the subject… And from The Guardian (no pun intended), another view… you can read the text here – and does anyone see the irony in the fact that it’s a “defeat of the Soviets” motif in the war carpet Prince Harry has his foot on?

“Victory” rug with a twist

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”.

Coeval? Not quite…

Max Allen’s definition of coeval production is something like: examples of carpets that are clearly made within the same environment, possibly by the same people or persons, with or without an antecedent, and with no visual or material distinction to suggest one is the antecedent of the other. In which case, what do we call comparisons such as this pair?

The first was bought online from a Pakistan dealer two years ago. Which means it could have been made anywhere, including Pakistan. The second was bought last month in Herat. While the major elements of the design shows a strong correspondence (the bus with the same luggage on top, the tank above the truck, the shape of the helicopters, even the inverted tanks at the top of the rug) the colours, weave structure, accuracy of detail, and the presence or absence of motifs like the handgrenades etc, all speak of different origins and traditions. Of course the conundrum is that we have no idea when the “new” rug was made – it could have been sitting in a stack in a dealer’s warehouse for fifteen years, which is stylistically (and logistically) possible. In which case the first rug could be a copy of a copy of a copy, and therefore another example of “progressive abstraction”…

Progressive abstraction

Here’s a classic case of progressive abstraction, but this time we have some provenance to provide a time-frame. Both are small-scale versions of the Salang Pass landscape which celebrates the defeat of the Soviets. The best collection of large-scale, beautifully made rugs of this category is in Verona. The story which comes with the image above has been reported previously: it was found in September in Badmurghan Street, in Herat, being used as a doormat in a textiles shop.

This rug was acquired in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1994. When you look at the comparisons you’ll see that the overall image is remarkably similar, although being better made, and more detailed (even though its colours have faded) we can reasonably assume that it was made first, and that the Herat rug is a copy. By “progressive abstraction” we mean that the process of reproduction of a given design results in the simplification or evolution of forms, and a gradual reduction in the resolution of details. This can be seen in the image which compares the border design, and in the ways the helicopters become less literal in their representation.

In the case of these two rugs, the Adelaide carpet is better made, and of better materials. It has, for example, a two-tier selvidge with a more elaborate braided structure, and the border has much finer detail in essentially the same pattern.

See also how the warp in the Herat rug is a mixture of cotton and wool, as if the maker was really short of materials. From the reverse view, even the colours of the Adelaide rug are more intense and consistent than what was available to the Herat rug maker.

Apart from the fact that the Herat rug has had a harder life, and made of much poorer materials, we can safely assume that they both come from the same region, and a time frame of earlier and later in the first half-decade of the 90s is most likely for these parent-and-child examples.

Full Plates from Lee Allane’s book

Trouble in Paradise

Lee Allane publishes this useful guide, with a wonderful Ali Khojeh rug on the cover. It’s a kind of Garden of Eden image, complete with snake, but the author doesn’t seem to notice it’s also a War Rug, with Kalaschnikovs amongst those wonderful animals and their keepers. And what is the figure-within-a-figure over on the far right hand side?