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.

Correction, comparison, progressive abstraction and mirror copies

All in one post! The first is a carpet from the Bruce Baganz collection in Texas. It’s fine detail suggests that it is an antecedent to the two rugs compared in a previous post. More importantly it reveals an error in our attribution. I plead haste and over-confidence! This particular design does NOT represent the defeat of the Soviets, and the road north through the Salang Pass, as I had suggested previously. No, a careful reading of the scripts in this more precise Baganz carpet shows that it depicts the city of Herat: the Hari Rud river, the famous Malan Bridge, even the Herat Silo, the Herat Forest, and the road to Mazar Sharif (the long way). Now compare it with a carpet acquired recently in Herat:

You will see that the major elements of the second carpet are a mirror of the first – even though some of the minor elements float around the pictorial spaces. Two things can be derived from these observations: one it is common to find mirrored figures in pictorial rugs, suggesting one is copied from the reverse of the other. Secondly, the pattern is flexibly interpreted: see how the machine gun and other elements are moved around by the maker, flipped upside down, reinvented. This suggests that either the cartoons for each element exist as separate patterns, or that the makers carry even these new designs in their memory, and as we do using Photoshop, they can flip the design to fit the spaces. Impressive!

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”…

Coeval(ism)

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.

Interpretations and debates

We don’t often debate our differences in interpretation and methods of analysis, but here’s a start. Let’s bring forward Max and Nigel’s disagreements in their comments on the previous post, and see what others think?

Next?

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.

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.

Two new war rug collection catalogues

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.

A second generation war rug

Each new discovery creates its own puzzles. This rug is characteristic of the early phase of refugee camp rugs in Pakistan marking the second generation of war rugs – dating from the late 1980s and continuing during the civil wars of the 1990s. This rug, sent by Rob Silcocks, a new reader of the blog, was found in an antique shop in Austin, where it has been sitting “for the last 15 years”. And from what you can tell from the photos, there’s some Turkmen influence in the framing pattern, and the modest kilim skirts. Which is consistent with other expatriate rugs produced in Pakistan in this era.

The texts, although somewhat scrambled, and maybe phoneticised, are revealing: “Made in Afghani refoji (refugee)” (twice) and “nojadim (?) Islami Afghanistan”, then in Farsi “Zendeh Baad, Afghanistan-e-Eslaami” (“Long Live Islamic Afghanistan”).

But then there is the question of the date: 1357 by the solar calendar is 1978 -79 AD, which is clearly not the date the rug was made, but refers to the time of the Saur revolution and the Soviet invasion. It seems to me that most rugs have dates inscribed in them are NOT the date in which they were made – a convention we might desire, but which is rarely substantiated. Some of these may be simply a case of mistaken inscription – instances of war rugs with pre-war dates will excite some theorists more than it should…

In our experience there are three kinds of dates:

1. Dates that make reference to an historical incident – sometimes substantiated by other texts, the date in European numerals, or other visual clues. However dates such as 1979, 1980, or 1989 make sense in relation to the USSR occupation, or withdrawal.
2. Dates that are mis-transcriptions (given that most weavers are non-literate, this seems fairly common)

3. The date of production. This is rare, but more common in second-generation carpets, where other texts in the same rug clearly address an “outside” audience. It’s sometimes possible to substantiate a date of production by comparison with the character of the carpet, and where it sits in the war carpet chronology, or where there’s a makers name – we have seen name, address and phone number in some carpets, and even the price!

Who is speaking?

Whereas the position of the author of “September 11″ rugs (such as this one from the Rugs of War catalogue) is always ambiguous …

… unfortunately – for whatever reason – this butane lighter seems clearly celebratory. It’s for sale on eBay.

The vendor says it was purchased in Afghanistan during a tour of duty in the US Army; it has attracted bids of over $200 US.

UPDATED TO ADD: After a spirited bidding war, the lighter ended up fetching US$797. As is not unheard of on eBay, the same vendor is now offering another “guaranteed one of a kind lighter” for sale. Thanks to our friend Max Allen for the tip-off, and also for the link to Wikipedia’s entry on Asadabad, which says:

Asadabad has been the scene of a number of incidents since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began. U.S. forces set up a provincial reconstruction team there in February 2004. The birth place of Sayeed jamal-udin Afghani.

Asadabad is one of the few Afghan cities still run openly by the Taliban. The Taliban rulers of Asadbad passed laws during the reign of the Taliban in Kabul saying that as long as they are in office they cannot be arrested for crimes of any kind. This arrangement is made possible by the mayor’s tribal relations to Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

Due to the proximity of the Afghanistan/ Pakistan border, Asadabad deals with a fairly large amount of trade goods destined for other places.

A FURTHER UPDATE: the latter auction received two bids of US$25, failing to meet the vendor’s reserve.