Deliberate Wonktitude

[Joel Greifinger Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Joel Greifinger]

Hi Paul,

The chantehs you discuss aren’t included in your post.

The weavers of this Shekarlu never intended to put the elements in neat little rows, like most of these carpets. The could weave a conventional border, but they had an entirely different agenda with the field. I love the arch that emerges from the bottom. I think that this is the sort of wonkiness that is intentional. Is this incompetence?

This looks to be not just competent, but probably outstanding weaving in terms of technical skill. Asymmetrical design elements that are technically well-executed should surely be assumed to be intentional. I don’t think of this rug as ‘wonky’, nor, would anyone with experience of SW Persian weavings. Would they?

As near as I can tell, traditional rug weavers never tore anything out.

How would we know?

If “traditional” weavers include those who produced some rugs on order from merchants, I would guess that they might tear out any significant mistakes, if they thought they might endanger the sale or the ongoing relationship to the merchant. If producing for sale disqualifies as a “traditional” weaver, most of the tribal and village rugs that we know weren’t produced by “traditional “ weavers.

Joel

[Chuck Wagner Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Chuck Wagner]

Hi

I'd still like to know the structural cause of the length distortion. When you guys are done, someone count the knots along the outer edge of the teeth on both sides of the medallion...

Regards
Chuck

[Joel Greifinger Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Joel Greifinger]

When you guys are done

[PaulSmith Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close PaulSmith]

Hi

...someone count the knots along the outer edge of the teeth on both sides of the medallion...

Regards
Chuck

I have to get out a ladder and move some furniture to get to it now, but I will do my assignment, I promise.

Also, I don't know what happened to my little chanteh comparison, but I went back and added the images again.

[Joel Greifinger Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Joel Greifinger]

While Paul is measuring, here's a bit more grist: this rug was posted on FB as having been sold by a famous dealer to one of the most highly regarded living rug collectors.

Inspired work of art? Compendium of unskilled weaving blunders? Both?

[PaulSmith Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close PaulSmith]

Hi Chuck, et al...

Hi

...someone count the knots along the outer edge of the teeth on both sides of the medallion...

All right, my eyes are about to pop out of my head, but I did the counting. From the outer edge of the teeth... on the right side there are 135 knots, and on the left it's 140 knots. The wefts do follow the tilt, and you can see that in this shot of the center field.



Regards, Paul

[Chuck Wagner Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Chuck Wagner]

Paul,

"All right, my eyes are about to pop out of my head,..."

...and you're a better person for it.

I think that small difference in knot count, by itself, is insufficient to explain all of the distortion.

Of course there could be several potential sources - warp tensions as I mentioned before, but also stuff like differential weft thickness due to inconsistent knot-line pounding. The latter might be expected if two persons were working on the rug together. If the knots seem more squashed on one side relative to the other, that's a likely cause. Warp tension, or warp shrinkage, would probably be independent of the number of weavers.

The width of the central medallion tapers as well, possibly a weft tension control issue.

On rustic looms that may have been taken down and set up again with the incomplete piece still attached, we would expect any number of oddities.

Regardless, this one certainly has its charm.

Regards
Chuck

[PaulSmith Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close PaulSmith]

So, I will continue this inquiry with a couple of small Tekke Turkmen rugs I have posted in other contexts before. We all know that Tekkes, especially as they get closer to 1900, get more precisely regular, with more and more mechanical repetition, but the older examples can show remarkable departures from that regularity. There is enough of this that, even if it were unintentional, it's reasonable to think that it was common enough to see significant variations from regular repetition that it at least must have been anticipated. And I would think, some meaning or significance ascribed to it.

This first one is truly an enigma. It has been suggested to me that this is a mid-19th-c. example, and I see no reason to disagree. So this is an older piece, pre-commercial period work. The work began at the top of the rug as seen here, and though I was told by one expert that this was an incompetently-woven example, you have to wonder when it begins at over 300 kpsi. This exceeds any fineness of weave I have ever seen in a tribal rug that wasn't a trapping. Seems pretty skillful to me, and the shape of this piece indicates that the technical weaving elements were managed, as if it were... intentionally. All the elements are condensed at that end, and as the elements lose some details heading down, the weaving actually relaxes to a more conventional c. 200 kpsi. The elements in the guls change, as do the border elements. The guls expand as the piece was woven, and subtle details were removed. More than just about any example I know, all of the design elements seem arranged to create an exaggerated perspective. This is incompetent?! I think it is a deliberate effect.


And of course, the effect as seen on the floor is dramatic...



The other Tekke is even earlier. I think this one below is first-half 19th-c. I have been told by several experts that this is "a very special piece," one of the earliest of these so-called "dowry rugs" that survives. It is unusually thick, soft, and fat pile for a Tekke, which are usually fairly close-cropped fine weavings, as with the example above. There are all sorts of alterations going on and I think this piece is definitely an example of deliberate wonktitude. She could weave precise copies--she does--but, she also creates some pretty abstract elements here, especially in the border elements. She included a band of handspun cotton across the rug, replacing the ivory wool, and it doesn't start/end with a particular element, just a bit in the middle. Obviously, she hadn't "run out" of ivory wool--it's pretty clear that she CHOSE to switch to cotton. The main gul centers change several times. The line connecting the minor guls starts wide and shrinks to barely a line towards the top. Deliberate wonktitude is all over this piece. This is incompetent? I sure don't think so.



Here's a detail image, showing the shift to/from cotton...

[PaulSmith Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close PaulSmith]

Well, I can see that my observations are not stimulating popular discussion. Alas, so be it. I have one last aspect to focus on, and then we can let this thread die its natural death, I suppose.

I raised this aspect with the previous example, where the weaver clearly makes obvious changes that she (and those observing her) must have seen. The changing centers of the guls sure seem deliberate, as does the band of handspun cotton that doesn't align with any design elements.

This aspect is not my discovery; I first saw it discussed by Shiv Sikri--first as the "internal elem" and then in his lecture "Hidden in Plain Sight" (here is a link to the lecture, but you have to join to see it... https://www.hajjibaba.org/meeting/hi...y-EfdbSO42zMmA). The frustrating part of the presentations I have seen is that he never reveals his thesis--he mainly shows the features he thinks are important, demonstrates that they aren't random events, but deliberate shifts in color/design. But as to their significance? In my experience, he is very vague about this. In the video of his presentation that I watched, he made reference to alterations at the bottom of a rug as indicating the "underworld" and alterations at the top to indicate "the heavens," but... no supporting evidence that I saw for that analysis. Still, I think that he was persuasive that these departures from mechanical repetition were not incompetence or random shifts. Here are some examples from my bunker. First, this Kaudani Baluch prayer rug with a very deliberate-looking darker camel wool shift at the top.


This next example is a kilim but if Shiv Sikri is right about the top of the piece being the heavens, this piece shows the delicious grassy fields at the bottom, then perhaps water, and then a shift into the night sky at the top... He would also probably have looked at the little ivory elements among the chevrons at the bottom as an intentional design feature setting off that part of the kilim.


There are lots of these shifts in pieces in my collection, and maybe this will stimulate the posting of more examples, but my last one is my first-half 19th-c. Chub Bash Turkmen main carpet, where an elaborate repeating pattern of guls is altered at the top to put three of an expanded version of one of the guls across the top, with the middle one having a juicy green color. This is obviously intentional, I would say. While I am loathe to pitch some version of this being a shamanic ritual in which the carpet is opened up to the heavens or who-knows-what (we've all seen these hallucinogenic readings of carpet design), I do think that shifts like this create a sense of depth/3-D in the design, and/or cause the eyes to move around the carpet--making looking at the piece a dynamic process. The significance of it is a mystery, but I prefer it to the mechanical reproduction of design elements that crept into carpet weaving, apparently as Western commercial interests began influencing carpet design towards the end of the 19th century.

[PaulSmith Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close PaulSmith]

So, I'm trying to construct some sort of Unified Field Theory of Wonktitude in my own mind, I guess. There is no doubt that there is a continuum, as there are clearly examples that are wonky and demonstrate inexperience/incompetence/bad eyesight, etc. And on the other end are examples with mechanical repetition, generally products of the increasing commercialization of weaving towards the end of the 19th century. We often see these late examples as being "soulless" or boring, since they seem to demonstrate little-to-no creativity by the weaver. She did her job. I would say that the three examples in my previous post without a doubt demonstrate a weaver(s) who had more of an investment in their work than just getting it out the door, or, uh... tent flap. She CHOSE not to repeat things exactly. She CHOSE to alter a color, add a material, put in a little animal, alter an element... Could she choose to alter the weave? I don't know, and I sure would not pretend to claim that I know what it all means, but it enchants me, nonetheless. But I think that the evidence indicates that a certain amount of wonktitude was preferable to perfect repetition and it rose above incompetence. I suspect that what it meant varied with location, tradition, and culture, but it is clear to me that it HAD meaning, though what that is I believe is out of our reach. Shiv Sikri spoke of a sort of cosmology, and I see movement and depth in the way these things are drawn, but who knows.

I think I have shown several examples where the alteration from mechanical repetition or the introduction of dramatic shifts in design were obviously included... for a reason. Deliberate wonktitude... I am trying to get at the aesthetics around that reason (which is unknowable). How does intention differ from a mistake? Did they even consider that there WERE mistakes? Joel seemed not convinced that they never tore anything out, but I sure have seen no evidence for it, in either artifacts or descriptions of weaving practices. I have seen many enthusiasts and experts project their aesthetics on these things as though there was some kind of objective measure of aesthetic Quality apart from cultural traditions. Because most of us are not from the cultures that produced this artwork, and many of us come from a heritage that brought cultural imperialism to the world, this impulse to project our values, as something beyond a desire to buy this one and not that one, makes me uncomfortable, but the fact is that of course I do it, too. It's human.

My professional training is in music, and I taught World Music courses at the university level for decades. Music isn't weaving, of course, but... I think there are parallels because I was constantly being exposed to musical contexts where my previous experience was mostly irrelevant. I had to adopt a low profile and observe, to see how the people who were raised in the music culture regarded this or that. Because of this approach, I often found that I would eventually be invited into the circle. An outsider, for sure, but I was welcome. I also saw clumsy Americans or Europeans assume a superior attitude, or just assume that they knew what was what, that their aesthetics were valid, and saw communities isolate them or feed them bogus information to confuse them--clearly a response to hubris. An example... I went to Dublin in 1979 when I was in college, to learn Irish fiddling, and I found a weekly music session with brilliant traditional musicians. I came every week, and hung out in the back, quietly trying to absorb what was going on around me. I would record tunes on my little cassette recorder, and I would come back every week with some of that learned. After about a month of this, a few of the players would invite me (I was known as "The Yank") to contribute a tune and I would do my best, and then fade into the background. Meanwhile, a couple of American ethnomusicologists showed up one session, announced their presence and what they were interested in, while several players around me muttered about these pompous boobs, and proceeded to play things extra-strange because these researchers were interested in non-standard scale tuning. So, they jokingly obliged by playing out-of-tune. When these two fools left, a flute player leaned over to me, and said--Thank GOD you aren't like those eejits! A session or two later, the patriarch of a famous family of fiddlers took me aside and asked if I would like to stay after the session for "some pointers on phrasing and ornamentation." Of course (!!), I was very appreciative, and that's how I received fiddle lessons for several months from Tomas Glackin. Now, while he definitely taught me traditional fiddle music with traditional pedagogy, I would not ever assume that what I experienced would necessarily represent the context, attitudes, or even the technical aspects of Irish music from the early 20th century, before the age of recording (which changed everything--consider jazz for instance). Certainly, catastrophic historical changes upend everything--in Ireland that was the Famine of 1845-1851--and trying to grasp the context and reality of the music before the middle of the 19th c. is impossible, in my opinion. I think the transition of carpet weaving from the family tent to the cottage industry carpet workshop of the 20th century is a similar break with tradition, along with all the other upheavals of the 20th century. All you need to do is look at the rugs and you can see that! Is anyone really surprised that a gul on a carpet woven in 1974 has virtually nothing to do with what it meant to the weaver who wove one in 1874?

One other experience that informs my attitude about tribal rug weaving is that I shared an office with a Native American shaman for several years. We joked that we were the Music Department ghetto--he taught Native American music and I taught World Music, and we were even in another building from the rest of the music department for much of that time. He was extremely generous with explaining things to me, and I was hungry for the education. When I would ask why something was made in a particular way, with this or that element--say, an eagle or horse beaded onto something--I would ask what that meant. He would smile and say that white folks always want to know what something "means" because that's how Europeans think, but it is irrelevant to his culture. He would say that physical objects are artifacts of something far more complex. It may be a symbol of a clan or someone's name or spirit guide, but its presence is also an artifact of what was going on when this thing was made. There were rituals, dancing, singing. It had "medicine," which of course meant more than aspirin or insulin or whatever, but was spiritual energy, protection, a pathway to the spirit world. His dissertation was on the silver medals that Lewis & Clark handed out to various groups they met along the way in their journey, and his focus was on the difference between the way the "Americans" viewed them (evidence of their power and authority OVER Native Americans) versus the way his people viewed them, as medicine establishing peace and partnership. Though Lewis and Clark didn't see it this way, Native Americans regarded these objects as medicine, which made their later history (being stolen from Native groups, lost, etc.) as proof of the emptiness of European-Americans' promises.

Of course, there is some ethnography and recorded observations of carpet weaving cultures in the 19th century, but there was relatively little effort carried out to understand these cultures, compared to the ethnography, recorded narratives, and field work done with Native Americans in the late 19th century and early 20th century. In spite of the staggering cultural losses experienced by Native Americans, compared to what we know about Turkmen or Baluchi people--the record is far more extensive. We know very little about these things that we collect, honestly.

I know that there are weaving scholars who have inserted themselves into weaving groups in the last part of the 20th century, and from that experience say that they understand how 19th-c. (and before) weavers approached and regarded their work. From my experience in music, I am skeptical. So we see elements in old carpets and wonder what their significance was, while modern scholars will say that because the women they worked with didn't attach any significance to these elements, that there was no significance to these things 150 years ago? I don't buy it, myself.

[Chuck Wagner Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Chuck Wagner]

Paul,

I'm just now catching up on recent threads, so please don't mistake paucity of responses for lack of interest. It's more like lack of time available to focus on TTek.

So, let me first comment on your post #23 and your remark on exaggerated perspective.

I have searched (but not exhaustively) for one particular old thread with lots of images that focused on Turkmen gul size variation in carpets and chuvals where this topic was discussed to death, and I can't find it. Yet. But I did find one discussion on exactly that same topic; I know it has come up a few times over the decades.

Here's the link: http://www.turkotek.com/misc_00044/dimensionality.htm

I've never been convinced that intentional dimensional effect in Turkmen pieces is "a thing", mostly because it can be explained with so many other phenomena: differences in how the knots were pounded, yarn thickness, adjustments to fit designs into a space as the end of the loom approaches, etc.

More in due time...

Regards
Chuck

[PaulSmith Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close PaulSmith]

Hi Chuck,

Thank you for that link. Yeah, that's the thing. That thread stumbles into the same mess that I'm in, and I guess that was before I was in the T'tek universe. This is certainly an aspect of the general condition of wonkiness, though it was often pretty subtle with the Turkmen, compared to Baluchis and Kurds. I have seen that kind of change of dimension even in torbas where, as in my example below, she had to be able to see what she had done, and she definitely subtracted knots (in both width and height) and reduced little details as she went from bottom to the top in the main guls. I'm not sure it's about 3-D, or movement, or exactly what. The "adjustments to fit designs into a space" quality--that would certainly demonstrate intention. I think these could be qualities secondary to some other agenda among the weavers, but I think it would have been noticed.


Regards,

Paul

[Dinie Gootjes Member Find all posts View Profile Close Dinie Gootjes]

Hi Paul,

I think I have mentioned before that I appreciate wonkiness in rugs, one of the reasons that over time I have concentrated on Baluch and Jaff rugs, certainly some of the groups where you find the most, and the most fun, wonky elements. You and Shiv Shikri have helped open my eyes to how many rugs actually have some kind of irregularity. As you can see also in my earlier post, I tend to try to find a 'reasonable' explanation in the weaving process, the competence of the weaver, the situation in which she wove etc., more than trying to find meaning or a deliberate attempt to introduce movement by distorting the dimension of a weaving.

I agree with you that we have no indication that mistakes in knotted rugs were ever torn out, certainly not beyond maybe the last few knots a weaver made. I think it unlikely that larger parts of a rug were basically destroyed, because unlike when you pull out mistakes in your knitting, the wool of the knots cannot be reused, so it would be a pure waste of expensive, good quality dyed wool.

But I don't think anyone has mentioned the possibility that some weavings were try-outs, sketches of you will, of rugs planned for later. We all know the many sketches artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt made as preparation for an important work. I am sure tribal weavers didn't have a box of Caran d' Ache and a sketchbook ready to try out combinations of colours, combinations of borders and field, the different effects of ground colours for field and borders, the effect of different sizes of motifs and similar things. I have seen rugs with irregularities that give me the impression that the weaver is trying out different possibilities, maybe for a later to be woven important weaving. The result could simply be used as any other rug, so no waste of material, and the weaver would know how she wanted her next rug to be. Maybe we would find her sketches more interesting and desirable than the perfect rug that followed .

The first example is a rug that Shiv used in his lecture. Excuses for the terrible picture quality, it is an iPhone image of my computer screen, made for my own reference.



It is obvious that the changes in the ground colour and the size of the diamonds here is deliberate, but was it to make an arch, as Shiv suggests, or a way to make things lively or to create movement? It is clear that the weaver is trying to get her drawing of the Memling Guls and the stars worked out, but besides that she could very well be trying out the effect of a white, yellow or peach border with a yellow or peach field. Same for the size and colour of the diamonds in that border. At the top there was no room for more Memling Guls, but a few stars, by now pretty perfect, did fit.

Another example is a rug that Shiv probably had on RugRabbit at a certain point.





I don't have a picture of the complete rug, but for me this could very well be a trying out of different colours for the diamonds and the field, with maybe a few borders thrown in to see the effect.

Paul, I wonder if the three expanded guls at the top of your Chub Bash were an experiment for your weaver's next rug?

Am I the only one to find sketches here? What do you other people think?

[PaulSmith Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close PaulSmith]

Hi Dinie,

I'm intrigued with your idea of sketches. It would make the most sense to me if the weaver were planning a bunch of rugs in a particular design, because the point of a sketch is to see the idea take shape quickly, and if you're weaving a rug, and you finish the thing, you have just spent as much time as, well, weaving a rug, so "sketching" doesn't really save time or effort, though this doesn't preclude "trying something" in the context of making an otherwise standard design. My candidate for an example of this sort of thing--making a sketch rug in anticipation of making a series--would be the Dokhtari Qazi prayer rugs. I have seen examples of apparently-older prayer rugs that used DiQ elements, and perhaps one of them out there was the prototype "sketch" for what became the fairly-standardized version. I envision the prototype hanging there in the workshop while the weavers copy it. But as a general rule, unless it was a workshop with a cartoon or an obvious wagireh, I am skeptical that there was much sketching being done. On the other hand, your suggestion that some break in the pattern, as with my Chub Bash carpet was working in a bit of an experiment--so not a complete "sketch" but a I-wonder-how-this-would-look moment... could be. Still I would think that whoever wove that carpet knew what she was doing, and was past the point of testing ideas. My Tekke dowry rug with all the different versions of standard elements could be a candidate for this status, maybe. But I don't think so. Still, it's not as though I know what the significance is.

That last piece you showed with the bands of odd design shifts doesn't seem sketch-like to me. The design is executed pretty well, and the band of an entirely different design seems both deliberate and meaningful. It is very much like the band of cotton in my Tekke dowry rug.

Precise repetition, even in clearly-repetitive patterns, seems so rare in older tribal rugs, and apparently-random elements added so common, that I believe that it must be the case that their delight in wonktitude had to have been a major factor in their aesthetics, which is why some examples seem so deliberate. It was so common that even if it WEREN'T intentional, it had to have been anticipated. I would assume that some meaning would be ascribed to it, if not by the weaver herself. It is true that I am highly skeptical of suggestions of aesthetic universals, while knowing full well (as a musician) that universals and near-universals (things that nearly all cultures share) do exist. I mean, we're human. I think that they appreciated wonkiness, maybe as much as we do. Probably for different reasons, but I see too much of it not to think that they were intentionally working to create this effect.

When I was teaching "world music" courses at WSU, I used tribal rugs as a visual example of how musical improvisation works. People think that improvisation in music means that you make everything up on the spot, but that is not really true. In fact, musicians traditionally learn to improvise by copying ideas from their teachers. The teachers give them structures, ways to conceptualize what they're doing (this is what music theory is--it isn't "theory," it's really grammar), but their skills arise out of repetition. Increasingly, they can assemble ideas on their own, and include original ideas made out of the material they have been taught. This last stage of the process is a little mysterious, in most traditions. So I would use prayer rugs as examples because the basic design idea is immediately obvious. The weaver started knowing she was making one, what colors she would use, and what design features were standard. I like to say that the best improvisation is based on choices made for decades by many masters, not just one musician. She would start in, choosing standard designs for most of it, but as she wove, she would have to alter this or that to make it all connect. She clearly had some freedom in altering elements (for whatever reason...), and as she did this, the work became more of a unique effort, a true improvisation. I think that at this stage in the weaving process, non-weaving elements could have played a profound role--ritual, ancilliary activities, other weavers. That there is ideally playfulness in this process is one of those near-universals, but in my class I could point to plenty of examples in these Baluchis where the weaver played "outside" (borrowing a jazz improvisation idea of stepping outside the expected melodic language). She put in a little dog or a bird. That is how a master musical improviser does it--they have to give the audience enough of what they expect, so that everyone knows what's going on, but then use that playfulness/self-expression to take the listeners on a little sonic voyage.

Ron, my Native American office mate, used to say that European-Americans like artifacts because we can own them and use them to get and spend money (as with the Lewis & Clark medals I mentioned). We see them as property, but they are evidence of a process, and he would say that our hunger for property blinds us to what the object is saying, which to him was far more important. I speak for myself here, but I am always struck by how much I move my eyes when looking at a weaving. Even that is a dynamic process. With gradual shifts in designs, as well as sudden shifts of color or elements, movement and depth can be perceived. Why something seems to "work" and other things don't is mysterious, but like music improvisation, the experience of it is in the moment. Sometimes there seem to be examples where things are insanely wonky, and who knows what that was about--I'm sure they had a complex understanding of aesthetics that would embrace this and discard that, but we aren't going to know much about it. It could have been a "reject," maybe? Though often, she clearly would finish the thing...that right there is intention. Anyway, the process was dynamic for them as well, and the evident depth of beauty in the best of these makes me imagine that there was a lot going on behind the scenes, so to speak.

Paul

[Chuck Wagner Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Chuck Wagner]

Hi Paul,

Speaking of Turkmen work that has a high coefficient of wonkyocity (by Paul Smith's metrics), try this one out:



Me ? The first thing that comes to my mind is the performance review:

1) Several slaps on the head from mom as this progressed
2) Planning skills in need of further development
3) Learners permit has been issued

Regards
Chuck