Martin Andersen

Editor's Note: This was the initial post in a thread that was split into two threads. Our software won't allow opening posts to be deleted without deleting the rest of the thread. But this post, also the first in the other thread, isn't really part of the discussion in this one.

Thanks.

Steve Price

Hi All

It has taken some time, but finally I have the results of the Carbon14 AMS analyze of the 6 Gul Tekke Torba we discussed here: http://www.turkotek.com/misc_00098/border_1.htm





On Jim Allen’s recommendation the test have been made by NSF-Arizona AMS Laboratory, The University of Arizona.
The calibration of the test looks like this:



And according to the university it should be read like this:

The 95.4% confidence interval is:

24.6% : 1644AD - 1695AD
50.9% : 1726AD - 1814AD
1.4% : 1852AD - 1867AD
18.5% : 1917AD - 1955AD

And I quote the university’s comments:
“If you can document the piece's provenance into the 19th Century or earlier, then the later peaks in the plot can be eliminated”

Provenance of the rug is of course out of hand, but I think that everyone with any knowledge on the rugs after seeing it would agree that the design and weave structure would make it highly unlikely that this rug was made after 1917.
This might not be purely scientific, but for me that eliminates the later peaks, and translates the numbers to ca:

32% : 1644AD - 1695AD
65% : 1725AD - 1814AD
1,8% : 1852AD – 1867AD

This of course gives a high probability to the Torba being of an honourable age. And gives good credence to Jim Allen’s judgement of age

The Torba has a number of uncommon elements. The strangest is the Chemche Gull. Since I found the rug I have looked at Tekke Chemche Guls everywhere I could, and I still haven’t seen any Tekke Chemche Gul without the bows/horns like it is here:



Best Martin

Michael Raysson

This is just my personal view, but why do we have an obsession to make oriental carpets come into line with Western perception?
Carbon dating,Three dimensionality (as in PERSPECTIVE), scientific verification (in the strict Western sense), etc. just don't (or didn't) fit into the mindset of those who made these works of art. At least for myself, one of the main reasons to collect oriental carpets is to let them put me in their world rather than for me to put them into mine. I find it counter productive to make them fit into what they are not.

Personally, I believe Oriental carpets are full of three dimensionality, just not our kind of three dimensionality. I find there is definitely a science surrounding them, just not our science. I believe that that science does very definitive and remarkable things and makes remarkable effects and that, at least at one time, the people who made them and used them were very aware of these.

If we need to date these, I believe that the best way is to increase our understanding of their rules; and that the only reason to do this is not to further our western scientific purpose but to plum their own scientific purpose, whatever that is.

Michael Raysson

Steve Price

Hi Michael

I understand your point about the tendency of collectors to force oriental textiles into our western perceptions, and I agree with it. But I don't understand what you propose as an alternative to our conventions for testing truth, which is what we refer to as "science". Carbon dating, for example, isn't a method for understanding anything profound about rugs, it's a method for trying to detemine when they were woven. Three dimensionality in our jargon means that an object has length, width and depth. What other kind of three dimensionality is there? Perspective drawing doesn't actually introduce a third dimension, it introduces the illusion of a third dimension, and there are many ways of doing it.

It's fun to imagine that our rugs put us into the exotic world of people who lived long ago in cultures so different than ours that we can scarcely imagine what their lives were like. But, do you seriously believe that we can experience what they did by having some of their artifacts hanging on our walls? I don't.

Regards

Steve Price

Michael Raysson

Dear Steve and all,

First of all, putting aside whether carbon dating is accurate or not (and I tend on the NOT side), my point is this: 1. I believe it is necessary to enter into the paradigm of those who made the rug to clearly put the piece in its proper era 2. By doing that, we have to learn to make our observations in a new (or old) way. 3. We will have to change our observations to pick up the elements that establish for the piece in question it's place in time and in the history of that people. 4. In order to do this, we will have to develop new faculties of perception and also become more intimately acquainted with those people, their history, their customs, their perceptions and with that piece, itself. 5. This involves intuition, inspiration and the hard work of acquaintanceship by observation and study. 6. We have to discover the physical characteristics that distinguish the change in eras and, as far as possible, learn how and why these happened.

If we can do the above, and if we spend long hours before the said piece, I definitely believe we can begin not just to imagine but to actually experience what these people were expressing in this work of art and learn about who they were. I am an artist and I actually believe that that is exactly what great art is supposed to do.

The alternative of trying to date a rug by carbon dating (whose accuracy, as we have seen, is at least very debatable) is that we bypass all that and learn little or nothing or real value from the piece...at best that it comes from such and such a time.

Anyway, this is my very strong opinion and experience.

Michael Raysson

Michael Raysson

Oh yes, about three dimensionality.

At approximately the same time Western artists were exploring the western idea of perspective, Chinese artists were working on a totally different way of expressing dimensionality. We call it atmospheric perspective. It works in a very different way than ours.

Similarly, there are many different ways that dimensionality is expressed in oriental rugs. Often times it is just the proximity of different colors or backgrounds and background colors which bring out medallions or other elements so that they appear to be in the foreground. At other times, repeating elements are made and colored in such a way so that when the eye superimposes these elements they take on a heightened three dimensionality. The texture and luminescence of the wool can create all sorts of sensations of light and depth. I could go on. and on. And if you wish, I will.

Michael Raysson

P.S. Steve, I was bringing up perspective and three dimensionality because a.) Marla seemed to be debunking any three dimensionality at all in oriental rugs, and b.) Jim seemed to be making the point of three dimensionality only in relation to western ideas of perspective.

Jim Allen

For the record I am four square behind the artists in this discussion. That would be Martin and Michael.

In Hali 55 I wrote about the uniqueness of two Turkmen chuvals, one Salor and one Tekke. I contrasted their perceived strong 3-dimensionality with another Salor now owned by Kurt. I took my old Tekke to Nobuko at the MET and after a lengthy examination she believed that I was right. In that Hali article I described what I thought was a loss of the 3-dimensional perspective I saw in the Jenkin's piece. It was still in the same genre but I didn't see the necessary elements to give it the same kind of strong 3-dimensionality.That piece, now owned by Kurt, was C-14 tested along with my chuval. The Jenkin's piece has been tested, I am told, but the results are not shared with us by the Textile Museum. The Salor chuval Kurt owns was dated by Jull and his notes on this piece indicated an early 18th century date. Not a confident result but his impression. My chuval was one of three of the eight pieces tested that Dr. Jull felt was confidently pre 1700 AD. I think most observers would say that I had hit the nail squarely on the head. Nobuko certainly felt that I had. Before this time I had lived and "worshiped" my chuval for over ten years before I wrote the Hali 55 article. Exactly like Michael describes... IT educated me. I did try and explain what IT told me in technical terms to try and satisfy people like the flat landers writing in opposition to my ideas here. Obviously I failed in that endeavor. Since that time one other Tekke chuval with the exact same layout as mine has been sold. I would like to talk to the owner of that chuval if anybody knows who bought it. I have already alluded to the different approach to this subject by artists, space cadets, and I feel Michael has very well represented their point of view. I do not believe the scientific method has ANY place in this discussion. Using its formalities will not result in moving the field of aesthetics concerning the alien art form of Turkoman weaving one inch forward. I spent years reading every written account of the Turkomen in situ. I did immerse myself in their lives as much as I possibly could. I visited Turkmenistan and made friends with a few Tekke. I began to feel like a Turkoman through my studies and "worshiping" their oldest weaving. After some twenty years of this kind of study I began to see them virtually decade by decade as I became more and more familiar with the minute changes in their iconography as it evolved. The Tekke I met were super interested in my ideas and one of them worked with me over the next few years developing cartoons to try and replicate the old masterpieces. So far they have failed due to the loss of dye information and the impossibility of obtaining similar wool. I could write a whole book just about the evolution of the Tekke torba or to a lesser extent the Tekke chuval through the centuries. I can't prove anything to anybody but myself and the people who believe in me. That is a pretty large number actually. The proof of that statement can be seen in how many people are participating in this discussion and the number of times it has been accessed. I am pretty sure it has already achieved some of the highest numbers ever seen on Turkotek in a very short period of time. This is an extremely interesting discussion and I wish more artists, like Michael and Martin, would add their own contributions to it. Thank you both for participating.

Jim Allen

I received the following note from a textile conservator concerning our discussion. This note was received on my facebook page. Yes, I have brought this discussion to the attention of a wide range of artists and dealers through facebook.

Elise Yvonne Rousseau
"Compelling debate... Dr. Greg Hodgins would most certainly conclude, that the empirical data of both C-14 and tree rings are needed to corroborate any evidentiary date close within the past three hundred years--As Jurg Rageth has done in his study of Turkmen Tent Bands. Mass infrared spectrometry can narrow the speculation as well."

As I said, a LOT of people are following this discussion.

Steve Price

Hi Pierre

Possibly this Turcoman looked at the picture in the same way that persons sometimes, when staring in a state of abstraction at the paper on a wall, forget what I may call the positive design, the intervals between the objects delineated striking the eye more than the objects themselves..... (O’ Donovan. The Merv Oasis. Vol II. Page 413-414)

Jim has cited this passage a number of times as evidence that Turkmen didn't perceive two dimensional images the same way that we do. It's pretty clear that they didn't, and I think it's likely that O'Donovan's suggestion that they see the negative space rather than the positive space is correct. But it isn't the only possible explanation of the obvious difference in how they perceived the images on his newspaper page.

Given that we can be reasonably certain that our perception of such images differs from theirs, can we train ourselves to perceive things the way they do? It might be possible if we could be sure of what the differences are. For example, O'Donovan's images were monochromatic, and maybe that was what caused the perceptual difference. The real world isn't monochromatic (at least, not to those of us who can see colors), so seeing monochromatic images on a printed page was a new experience for them. Our ability to recognize and interpret such images is probably a learned skill, and they never had the opportunity to learn it. Maybe the Turkmen folks would have had no problem at all if the images were in color. I'm not asserting that this is the case; maybe it is, maybe not. But unless we know what the explanation for the Turkmen perceptual result was, we can't train ourselves to apply it in forming our own perceptions.

Regards

Steve Price

Pierre Galafassi

[quote=Jim Allen]The reference should be when Edmond was well in favor with the Tekke, rather late in vol. 2. Do you recall him visiting the Salor yurts and commenting on the silk hangings inside? I am thinking it was around there. It was only maybe two lines. I have an original 1882 edition.

Hi Jim,
O’ Donovan describes a Yomut kibitka (1) and a Teke one (2), but no Salor one, at least not in my book.
A. Burnes, 50 years before, indeed described a rich Sarakhs Salor kibitka and was highly appreciative (3). But still no weaving Khan there neither.
Regards
Pierre

(1). O’Donovan. The Merv oasis. Travels and adventures east of the Caspian during the years 1879-80-81. Vol 1. Pages 208-209.
(2).ibid. Vol 2. Page 140.
(3).A. Burnes. Travels into Bokhara... in the years 1831-32-33. Vol 2. pages 59-60

Jim Allen

Your quote I have used extensively to make an important point about Turkoman perception. The newspaper illustration, those serdars were looking at, was made of black lines closely spaced together into what we naturally perceive as a black positive image. We naturally see the black positive image because we are literate and trained from an early age to make sense of tiny black shapes against white sheets of paper. The black shapes are letters formed into words and this facilitates our making sense of a collection of black lines shaped into figures like the colonel. The Turkoman's visual apparatus is 180 degrees different from this. They live on the rolling steppes and are not literate eg. they don't read. Their vision isn't myopic like ours but far field attuned. In Darwinian terms their maximum visual facilitation regarding their survival concerned their far field acuity. Is that a bush way out there ahead or a man waiting to kill me? I learned in medical imaging that the maximum ability to distinguish two points closely spaced was in the reverse polarity, that is light shades of gray against a white background as we see in digital subtraction angiography of the thyroid. In the early days of ultrasound imaging the studies were done in reverse polarity but this was "unnatural" for technicians to learn. It took months of practice just to begin getting used to the images while dark gray pixels against a black background were easily acquired. In layman's terms when the blood in the aorta is presented as black it looks normal while if the blood is shown as near white this seems unnatural. To bring this point back to the serdars looking at the lineographic picture of the Colonel returning from the Afghan wars, their eyes were naturally drawn to a cacophony of wild skewed image of various shapes or shsrds of white forms. It was like looking at a mirror broken into thousands of pieces. It was like me looking at an aorta filled with white blood, it was unnatural to the point that they COULD NOT SEE the colonel.

I realized right then and there that in classical Turkoman weaving the PRIMARY SIGNIFIER in any design complex was the white forms and NOT the colored forms. Many many times in my lectures I have advised Turkomaniacs to READ THE WHITE FIRST. If the white doesn't read meaningfully then the piece is late and not traditional.
I could give any number of examples but the important thing to me was this insight allowed me to literally read Turkoman iconography. You have to understand that white figures are usually interdigitated with forms created by other colors. If you don't then you are only seeing half or part of the design complex. This is a BIG point in learning to read their design complexes. In fact I would say that it is necessary. One last point some Turkoman weavers used red in the same way others used white. I call their work red positive design. I have examples to show but I have a Dr.'s appointment right now. Later friends.

Steve Price

Hi Jim

... an important point about Turkoman perception. The newspaper illustration, those serdars were looking at, was made of black lines closely spaced together into what we naturally perceive as a black positive image.
Except for the word "naturally", that statement is correct and factual. Any of us can confirm it any time we choose to do so.

Most of the rest of your post is your conjecture of the basis and significance of the facts. They might be right, they might not be. It begins with your conjecture about why we are able to easily make sense of certain monochromatic images (personally, I doubt that learning to read black letters on white backgrounds at an early age is the basis; it certainly isn't self-evident that it's true). You then build from that to the notion that they developed their distance acuity rather than our near-field acuity through evolution by natural selection (I doubt that this could possibly have happened in the short time since people began writing words as letters on paper and I doubt that noticing predators off in the distance was trivial until fairly recently in evolutionary terms). These lead you to conclusions about Turkmen perception that depends on the correctness of this stack of conjectures and, ultimately, to your conclusion that in classical Turkoman weaving the PRIMARY SIGNIFIER in any design complex was the white forms and NOT the colored forms. ... If the white doesn't read meaningfully then the piece is late and not traditional. That is a very long way from the only demonstrable fact in the chain: that a group of 19th century Turkmen were unable to perceive the images formed by black ink on a white background although Europeans could perceive them easily.

With your guidance, I've looked for and seen the white figures that you see in Turkmen guls, but have never been convinced that the weavers put them there knowingly. I can see all sort of things in clouds and in the world around me that look like objects with which I'm familiar, but I don't think Nature put them there with those objects in mind, and I think you agree with that.

We are wired to make sense of some pretty simple forms: for something to look like a face, even a face expressing emotions, it only needs a few suggestive details. Here are examples:



That is, a form that wasn't created to look like anything tangible can be perceived as a face, ship, bird, tent, bow and arrow, etc., etc., and so forth. This isn't a just characteristic of humans, by the way. Many birds will respond to a balloon with circle painted on it as if it was a predator.

Regards

Steve Price

Michael Raysson

Hi Steve and all,

It is true that everyone is not equal here in this discussion. Everyone's intuition is not the same. Everyone's experience is different. Everyone's understanding is different. Some know more than others. Even the rugs are not equal. Some are great, others not. Some are ancient, others not so ancient.

The Turkmen culture is (was) not the same as our culture. Their science is (was) not the same as our science. They look (looked) at things differently.

What is the same is that we are all human beings and I believe that counts for a lot. That means that however different we are, there exists the possibility, on the highest level, of mutual understanding and illumination. Art is one means of doing this. Oriental rugs and carpets (at least the great ones) are meant for this type of communication. They are meant for full participation by the observer, that is, a two-way communication. They are not passive.

It is true, Steve, that most rugs have no documentation, no records, nothing of that sort according to our understanding. I like that. It forces us to take another tack. That tack is not easy, nor do I believe that everyone has the same capacity to learn and connect. Nevertheless, it is possible. My point is that by trying to follow the thread by means of the tools we are used to will not work, or will work badly. I believe that the way I outlined has a better chance of success in this endeavor, or at least some hope of success. It is not a foolproof blueprint by any means. For some, any means are doomed to failure. For others, a way will be found.

Having said all the above, I hope it is understood, Steve, that, yes, I do believe there is a way of "segregating good intuition from bad intuition", but "anyone's intuition is" not necessarily "as good as anyone else's". By that, I mean that there are inner and outer prerequisites, qualities and levels of understanding that make intuition more or less reliable. The obvious conclusion being that we should work on developing those things which strengthen intuition. Certainly gamblers are not good examples of intuition and inspiration. Einstein, on the other hand, is. Obviously, the difference is intelligence, study, comprehension, experience, etc. Everyone can't be an Einstein. Neither is everyone a gambler. The object is to be more on the Einstein side than the gambler side. Of course, it is those most on the Einstein side who move the study of oriental rugs forward the most. Also, all scientists can't be Einstein. That doesn't mean they throw up their arms and give up. Einstein is still the template.

"How do we get from where we are to that?" as the cabbie said about getting to Carnegie Hall: "Practice, practice, practice!" or "Study, study, study!"

Physical characteristics in the scientific sense...Two people look at the actual physical rug. The eye of a TRUE connoisseur sees one thing the inexperienced eye sees another. Same rug. Different eyes. We have to learn to see through the Connoisseur's eyes. Probably this means we have to change our way of perception. Also, I mean that when the true connoisseur looks at the very physical aspects of the rug, such as weave and structure, color and iconography, wool quality, etc....each one of these open an understanding for him or her that most of us do not possess and probably cannot even imagine.

I hope it is understood that there is no substitute for long experience and for true knowledge gained on the field. Long familiarity with these weavings, their structure and its evolution looms large. But there is also no substitute for inspiration and inner connectedness.

Michael Raysson

Steve Price

Hi Michael

Einstein is a good example. His ideas weren't accepted by his contemporaries because they knew he was brilliant, inspired, and tireless in his pursuits, and he certainly had no inner connectedness with them. His ideas became accepted and revolutionized physics when their predictions were confirmed by observational and experimental evidence. Likewise for Galileo, whose name came up in this thread earlier.

Being human does give us a lot in common with Turkmen of the 19th century and earlier. But I doubt that it allows us to actually experience what a Turkmen experienced (or even that they all experienced more or less the same things).

Let's conduct a little exercise. You and I have never met, but I think we're both of the same gender, living at the same time in the same country, have the same milk language, and have engaged in dialog with each other. That is, I believe that you and I have far more more in common than either of us does with any Turkmen woman or women living in the mid-18th century.

What do you know about my perceptual world? Do you know whether I prefer bright or subdued colors on the walls of my home, for example? What odors I find pleasant or unpleasant, or what asssociations they elicit in my brain? What my innermost fears are? My attitudes about death? My religious beliefs and attitudes? Do you know what my psychological baggage is, or how it got there? How my experience affects my political leanings? How I interact with those I love? My sense of ethics? Whether I am a thrill seeker?

I suggest that you don't know any of those things about me, any more than I know any of them about you. Yet, we have much more in common than either of us has with anyone living in western or central Asia at any time. Why do you believe that if I read, study, travel, and think enough about mid-18th century Turkmen women, I will not only know the answers about them, I will be able to feel what they felt; in your words, I will have an "inner connectedness" with them?

Finally, you wrote: Oriental rugs and carpets (at least the great ones) are meant for ... full participation by the observer, that is, a two-way communication. They are not passive.
I don't know of any reason to believe that this is so. In fact, it has all the hallmarks of projecting our contemporary western view of art onto the central and western Asian weavers of past centuries. There are lots of people who would argue that oriental rugs, even the great ones, aren't works of art but of crafts. That is, that they were created to serve practical ends, not to be expressions of the souls of those who created them.

Regards

Steve Price

Jim Allen

I have conferred with an ophthalmologist about the plasticity of the visual mechanism and everything I described the human eye and brain can accommodate. As for my statement that the desert adapted nomads saw in this strange reverse polarity one only has to study 13th and 14th century black and white art done by desert adapted nomads. I have several good examples I can scan in to show you. What you notice looking at these ink and paper drawings is that you DO NOT SEE the objects until you really study the picture. One notable picture is of a partridge in a mountainous landscape. The first thing a literate westerner sees is a cacophony of strange forms. The very reverse of the serdars looking at the colonel in the newspaper. The drawing is done in reverse polarity! It is amazing to look at! This effect is only obvious in the earliest drawings because after the novelty wore off the art works changed to suit the clients taste. The clients were the Timurid's.

Yes Kurt I have the fax and I will show it to David when next I see him. I will copy it and give him a copy. You COULD ask Jull's secretary for a copy as I gave all the information necessary for you to identify the original. You were the payer in this operation we undertook and I am quite sure she would be happy to help you. I would have preferred you do that rather than imply that I am a liar. I think you have wandered over the line in abusive language aimed at me. After 25 years you ought to know I wouldn't try any such BS in a public forum like this. I quoted it, just like I said, word for word.

Steve Price

Hi Jim

I never doubted that such plasticity was within the range of human visual perception. Nor do I doubt that O'Donovan was telling the truth. My skepticism is entirely about your interpretation of the cause of the perceptual difference between us and the Turkmen that O'Donovan described, and about your extending that interpretion by building several layers of speculation upon it.

It's interesting that 13th-14th century drawings by desert nomads used negative images but changed that practice soon thereafter. O'Donovan's encounter with Turkmen who couldn't recognize monochromatic "positive" images occurred in the last quarter of the 19th century. Incidentally, I don't think O'Donovan reported that these Turkmen could recognize "negative" images, although he suggests that possibility.

Regards

Steve Price

Michael Raysson

Hello again,

Steve, as a matter of fact, I do know a lot about you from reading your ideas on Turkotek. Just your replies to my contributions here tells me quite a bit! But, further, if you were to send me a piece of art which you had worked on for months and months, as the Turkmen weavers did, I would then know a lot more. A lot more. The Chinese and the Japanese would have a great dispute with you. They believe that any work of art is filled with "Wabi", that is, the expression of the soul of the artist. This goes equally for what you would call a work of craft, such as pottery, etc.

Forgive me, Steve, but the fact that you have lived so long with oriental rugs and still consider the possibility that they may not be works of art tells me volumes. I have absolutely no doubt that the rugs (at least the ancient rugs) are filled with the soul of the weaver (the artist), the soul of the people (the Turkmen) and their culture. They tell us the way the Turkmen looked at the spirit, the way they looked at the world and the way they looked at themselves. If there are any reasons for seeking out ancient rugs, this is foremost: that the older they are, the less they are contaminated by comercialism, and the more we can learn about these things (and experience them).

To continue, I am convinced that some or many of the Turkman rugs were conceived in much the same way a mandala is conceived. That is, the rug was made as a doorway into the spirit realm and, in the same way as a mandala, it was expected for the viewer to participate in this entrance.

You may ask how I can say this, what proof do I have. I would say to you, what proof do we have that a landscape painting is meant to take us into a pastoral world or what proof do we have a portrait of Rembrandt is supposed to take us into the soul of the sitter. Because that is what they do! I say that if you do participate in deep contemplation on one of the great examples of this art, you will open this door. If it doesn't happen, I would say, as a devout Christian would say, if you stood before a great alterpiece, and said it does nothing for you, "You don't get it!"

I not only consider great oriental rugs as high art but consider them among the supreme works of art. I have spent 50 years of my life studying art and creating (I hope) art. This is my experience.

As for projecting concepts of western art, all these concepts are much more of the East than of the West.

Finally, as a professor, you must know that there are students who do all the outer trappings but just don't get it. I never was able to get Algebra (after a certain point) or Chemistry in high school. This does not mean that Algebra and Chemistry are bogus. The problem was either with the teacher or me or both.

Steve Price

Hi Michael

I didn't say that I think oriental rugs are craft rather than art, I said that some people hold to that position. I should have added that some of them are ruggies with notable collections, since my point (not well expressed) was that there are folks who care a lot and know a lot about rugs who don't think the women who wove them were artists. My personal opinion is that the best rugs are the work of artists but the majority are the works of craftspeople.

As for our respective views of whether antique rugs from central and western Asia are a venue of two-way communication between us and the weavers, I propose that we simply agree to disagree. The likelihood that either of us can persuade the other of the correctness of our beliefs is remote. Trying to convince me that a Tekke juval or torba can tell us the way the Turkmen looked at the spirit, the way they looked at the world and the way they looked at themselves is like trying to teach a pig to whistle or to housebreak a horse. It's not only a waste of your time, sooner or later the activity will probably annoy the animal.

Regards

Steve Price

Jim Allen

BF Skinner taught pigeons to play ping pong and Mr. Ed was house broken. Never say never my friend. I have lots more bullets in my 6 gun and I think Michael does to. I have counter augments to just about every one of your assertions but I am going to have to slow down and choose my words more carefully. Up until this point I have written my posts directly into the box. (like I am now) Bergel published maps for every period of Turkoman occupation all over Central Asia. That shoots down one of your assertions that we don't know when and where they were. The Russians knew and that data is now published in English. I don't think you have made any counter arguments that can't at least partially be nullified. The space cadets aren't going to give up easily this time. I would even argue about the primacy of the SCIENTIFIC METHOD. As far as I am concerned most MAJOR scientific discoveries have been made riding the train, sitting on the crapper, talking a long walk, anything but the scientific method. The real "method" is INSPIRATION. Many times this inspiration has been described as proceeding from dreams into the waking state. Many if not all inspired discoveries are then and only then written down as IF they had been discovered using the scientific method when in fact a minor number of truly paradigm bursting discoveries have proceeded smoothly from hypothesis through experimentation to operational theory. The scientific method is more rationalization than working model for the advancement of science. I think Khun wrote about this but I am not just making this up; I have read this in some respectable publications. I bet you know all about this in fact. God did not give us the scientific method and science has not extinguished God. There is room here for both sides to get a fair and open hearing. Agreement is optional and certainly not mandatory.

Michael Raysson

Dear Steve and all,

I hope you understand that I enjoy exchanging views on oriental rugs and the object is not just to argue or discuss these with you (or to get in a tangle with you), but rather to put my views forward and get some feedback from the other people on Turkotek in general. I feel that there is a real debate on certain aspects of oriental rugs and how we view them. I think this is an important debate and feel it is necessary to explain my views in a clear way that answers all the arguments that you might put forth and also carefully covers where I am coming from and why.

The important thing to me is not that you and I are at an impasse. For me, what is important is that we can express these views in this open forum and let others also weigh in. Whether you and I agree or disagree is not the point.

with regards,

Michael Raysson

Steve Price

Hi Michael

I agree with everything you said in your last post.

Regards,

Steve Price

Steve Price

Hi Jim

Meaning no disrespect, I find so much misunderstanding and misinformation in your last post that I hardly know how to frame my reply. I'm going to take it point by point.

BF Skinner taught pigeons to play ping pong and Mr. Ed was house broken.
Nonsense. Skinner taught pigeons to hit ping-pong balls with their beaks, but there's not the slightest reason to think they were playing ping-pong. Mr. Ed wasn't housebroken. Housebreaking is training an animal to constrict the external anal sphincter when rectal distension initiates the defecation reflex. Horses don't have external anal sphincters or any other voluntary muscle at that end of their GI tract. Mr. Ed couldn't really talk, either.

... Bergel published maps for every period of Turkoman occupation all over Central Asia. That shoots down one of your assertions that we don't know when and where they were. The Russians knew and that data is now published in English.
No disagreement that we can know where various Turkmen subgroups were at different times. How do you get from that to knowing which subgroup wove a piece and when it happened?

I would even argue about the primacy of the SCIENTIFIC METHOD. As far as I am concerned most MAJOR scientific discoveries have been made riding the train, sitting on the crapper, talking a long walk, anything but the scientific method. The real "method" is INSPIRATION.
No disagreement about the origins of most major (and minor) discoveries (and errors). But no discovery becomes "major" until it propagates into the world. That doesn't happen until the revolutionary (not always the innovator) demonstrates that it withstood attempts to disprove it by observation or experiment. That is the "scientific method", and it's been the predominant way of testing truth since the Renaissance.

The scientific method is more rationalization than working model for the advancement of science.
Sorry, that just isn't true. Advancement in science requires acceptance of the idea by others. You can have the most brilliant insight ever, but until you persuade others that your insight is correct, it doesn't exist as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Until that happens, nothing external to yourself has been advanced.

God did not give us the scientific method and science has not extinguished God.
Many scientists are devoutly religious, and seamlessly change their methods of testing truth as situations change. They don't use the scientific method and belief in miracles or the power of prayer simultaneously. It's a very interesting phenomenon. We aren't going to debate religion here, though.

There is room here for both sides to get a fair and open hearing. Agreement is optional and certainly not mandatory.
Actually, there isn't. If someone announces that Martin's torba was created in 5 seconds by an angel who deposited it under the pillow of the picker who brought it to the west, the idea will be dismissed. If the person who proposes it argues that nobody can prove that he's wrong, I'd reply as follows: "You believe that nobody can prove that you're wrong. But you presented an untestable hypothesis; that makes you wrong by the rules of at least one system for testing truth, which happens to be the one most widely accepted in the developed world." As you note, agreement is optional, not mandatory. But prolonged discussion based on that person's proposition isn't mandatory either, nor is providing him with a forum on which to express what I'm sure you agree is an absurd belief.

Regards

Steve Price

Martin Andersen

As the tread is still alive, I cant help another post

Even though I would love to be considered a true space cadet, I do also love the in-betweens so I will try to make a flat-landing on this.

As a flat-landing understanding of Jims hypothesis I find it self evident that the old nomadic Turkmen people must have had another visual perception of spatiality than a rational flat screen reading individual of today. Crowing up and constantly moving around in an open radical horizontal environment and living in a curvatured yurt totally decorated with patterns is very different situation than the boxes, squares and illusionary representations in which we are moving around. And I would suppose that the contemporary Turkmen individual today has a perception which rather close to our. So sometime in history there has been an alignment – and personally I find it strait forward that the general boringness of post-russian Turkmen rugs could be seen as a cultural expression of this. And I find Jim’s attempts on going deeper and more detailed into this bold and fascinating.

As for all the more specific readings and interpretations of meaning into this I agree with Steve that we are in rather deep water. In these interpretations it is of course almost impossible not to superimpose our own cultural notions of art, craftsmanship, spirituality ect. on the silence of the weavers. And I agree that these interpretations quickly might say more about us than about the rugs. On the other hand, no rugs are harmed by this, and Jim sure has a special ear on their details.

I still hope for more comparative material regarding the specific designs on the Torbas of this tread.
I have just found this from the former Pinner collection:


ex Pinner



I wonder if Pinner would also refer to this border as Peikam? Because if so then the definition is rather wide and would of course include a lot of Torbas, both Tekke and other tribes, like this Kejebe piece:



They are of course the same basic design as the Hoffmeister border, but they certainly are very different stylistic.

Best Martin

(ups, cross-posting with Steve - I see it is all getting a bit heated)

Filiberto Boncompagni

Hi Martin,
If that is true, why Turkmen only had a “different visual perception”? For the same principle it should happen to other Central-Asian nomadic ethnicities as well as Australian aborigines, African nomads and North-American natives.
If there’s evidence about that, I’ll be ready to agree. Otherwise I’ll remain highly skeptical.

Incidentally, I have a personal request: I invite posters to make a more parsimonious use of quotations. Please refrain from quoting whole posts: it’s making this long thread much longer and scrolling it down the whole time is a bit irritating, don’t you think? Thanks!

Filiberto

Martin Andersen

Hi Filiberto

Well I thought it commonly accepted that visuality is cultural coded. And I certainly also think that Australian aborigines among others have had a visual perception very different from ours. Of course not necessarily different as in black and white, but different none the same.

Best Martin

Jim Allen

Steve I wrote that last post tongue in cheek. I did half believe it though. Conditioning pigeons to hit ping pong balls was a nice feat and amazed a lot of people. I didn't know the poor horse had no control over his crapper.

Martin I took the liberty of photoshopping your torba. I made it look approximately how it would have looked if only 100 years old. The effects I so readily saw are more apparent in this picture. I hope this pleases you and gives a larger audience a chance to appreciate it.

Now it is more obvious that the vertical line upon which the stars are "spinning" is shifted to the right. This is but one more visual trick to make the gulls pop out in space. The increased visual density of the top row of gulls enhances this effect greatly and they seem to be coming forward, up, and out of the frame IMO.

Steve Price

Hi Martin

The fact that visual perception is subject to shaping by external influences seems to be a fact, and I don't recall anyone even suggesting that O'Donovan didn't witness a result of that in his encounter with the Tekke.

Going from that to some of the positions it's led others to insist are correct is a pretty big leap. What we actually know, assuming that O'Donovan wasn't pulling our leg, is that the Turkmen he met in 1881-1882 didn't perceive certain images printed in black on white sheets of paper. From this, he surmised that they might have been acculturated to perceiving negative space, although he doesn't report drawing something in negative space to see if they could perceive that image or looking at whatever images they had among their possessions to see whether they were done in negative space.

There are a number of other possible explanations, so us linear thinkers can't get beyond listing plausible possibilities. On the other hand, there are those who believe that they are able to reach firm conclusions and even to invoke evolutionary explanations for why those Turkmen perceive things as they do as well as why we perceive things as we do, all apparently by intuition and inspiration. Unfortunately, the hypotheses leading to the conclusions are untested and the evolutionary explanations fail even the simplest tests.

Regards

Steve Price

Steve Price

Hi Jim

I didn't know the poor horse had no control over his crapper.

I always invite my students to think about how different our world and cultures would be if humans didn't have external anal sphincters. The ramifications would be extremely wide ranging and important. Even something as simple as the public toilets being social gatherings in ancient Greece (if you've visited Ephesus, you may recall being in one) would have been impossible.

Regards

Steve Price

James Blanchard

Hi all,

With some trepidation...

First, I think it is interesting that despite the more recent emphasis of this discussion, the initial posts by Martin and Jim with respect to the age of Martin's torba focused on fairly traditional ways of estimating an old age:

--- Design elements (Martin pointing to the border design and minor guls).
--- Structure (fine weave, floppy handle, wefting).
--- Colour (Jim indicating that the colour was similar to other old examples).

I mention this only to remind myself that most folks, even those who look beyond the usual ways of assessing things, embed those more creative views within a larger set of observations and inferences.

Second, although I have previously been skeptical of some of the more subjective viewpoints regarding the circumstances of weaving (i.e. stoned Turkmen women weaving objects to create "waving" guls which are observable when under the influence of drugs), I have no doubt that the design and drawing of older Turkmen weavings distinguish them from more recent weavings. It does not take an inordinate amount of experience or practice to make these broad distinctions. My wife, who does not share the same level of interest as I or other collectors, is still able at a glance to comment "I don't like that one so much... the drawing is much too 'stiff'". Almost invariably, she is able to distinguish between ones that most sophisticated collectors would see as being "late" and "commercial" from those that are earlier and probably more "traditional". Similarly, I am not nearly as experienced or knowledgable as most of those who have commented on this board, but I was one of the first to post a comment on Martin's torba with a "WOW". That is the first time I have used all capital letters to comment on a rug on Turkotek. I sensed, and still do, that his torba is of a high and uncommon class of weaving. I didn't pretend to know how that related to age. My point is that I think that even relative novices like me and my wife can see the differences without having spent an inordinate amount of time or "spiritual" effort. I am not trying to diminish the expertise of others, but I am cautioning against making this seem more than it is.

Since this seems to be a thread of various theories about how and why older Turkmen weavings differ in terms of drawing (after all, this is "drawing" in the most basic sense, constrained by a narrow range of available colours and the construction knot-by-knot). Let me offer a theory that is somewhat more prosaic than some others'. Turkmen weaving is perhaps the most prescribed of all. When a young women begins weaving she knows exactly what the designs must be, regardless of her own artistic sensibilities. She knows exactly which major and minor gul, which border, and the layout which is determined by the size of the weaving. She evidently did not have a "blank canvas". Even her palette was defined for her... lots of red, some blue, a bit of secondary colours and white. She spent much of her time weaving many objects with exactly the same design and layout. Creating a thing of beauty within such a strictured idiom left her with few options. But she could play with spacing and perspective. So to create dynamism within the rug she could vary the dimensions and spacing of the elements. Over time, weavers probably developed techniques that effectively created this dynamism. Were they deliberately creating depth? Maybe so. Were they just trying to create a more interesting and less "stiff" drawing? Maybe so. I just don't know how we could ever know the reasons for these decisions, though it might be fun to speculate.

Why did Turkmen weavings lose this property in later and commercial eras? Again, I think we can only speculate. Perhaps during the later era the production was just focused on consistently and efficiently creating the "design", without much concern about whether the result had a pleasing "je ne sais quoi". After all, they were just trying to sell the product, and the buyers didn't seem to need creativity.

Like many collectors, I enjoy contemplating why a rug attracts me so. What makes it "special". I also enjoy the "storytelling" aspect of rug collecting, and how these objects have an intimate connection to other foreign cultures and distant eras. It is all rather romantic, and if it weren't it would be hard to justify the "premium" that we collectors pay for the beat up old rugs that we hang on our walls. However, I start to get nervous when things get too too serious.

Cheers,

James

Kurt Munkacsi

Hello Jim - let me offer my sincerest apologies if you feel I crossed a line and insulted you personally. I did not intend that and was only changeling your academic standards.

If you have a set or C-14 results from Dr. Jull that show the chuval is indeed 17th century, the same age as the Ardabil and Cairene carpets that were tested along with it. I will be the first to acknowledge doubting you.
Please send a copy to myself, Steve, David or anyone else you might choose and let's get them posted on the forum and close this part of the debate once and for all.
Also you have mentioned the monumental work that Swiss collector and researcher Jürg Rageth is working on. As you are aware Jürg has compiled C-14 test results for well over 100 Turkmen pieces and has done extensive dye analysis on many of them. The "Tekke" chuval will included in the book with both the Arizona and Zurich C-14 test results. If you have another set of corrected results from Dr. Jull please send them to Jürg so the publication is a accurate as possible. (Dr. Jull's office won't release any info to me because my name does not appear on any of the original paper work)

Again my apologies if you feel I insulted you.

PS: still waiting for you to supply some background on Dr. Carriere's dimensional studies you so often cite.

Chuck Wagner

Hi all,

I'm sorry. I don't buy this "intentional dimensionality" suggestion. And I am a very visual person, one of those who can relax my eyes and look at a dots-only autostereogram for 1 second and see the intended image.

You can ignore my observations on Paul's example as long as you like, but the bottom line is that all these features are actually a function of on-the-fly design implementation with periodic "oh-shit" moments for the weaver, whereupon the proportions of the rest of the motif are adjusted to reduce the number of such moments in the future.

That a relaxed-eye image of a regularly repeated pattern appears to give depth to the image is due to the contrast generated by inaccurate overlay of the overprinted motif images (the field color competes with the edge of a design element) - and often enhanced when a dark section from one motif is co-imaged with the light section of another motif.

While I agree that the true meaning of art varies with the eye of the beholder, I do not think the one can reasonably read a message into an error. To suggest that a series of ill-proportioned design elements are actually a planned autostereogram or some attempt at perspective rendering is certainly anyone's right, but at the cost of ignoring the obvious, IMHO.

Regards,
Chuck Wagner

(Steve - we need a Grinch smiley as well as a pie-fight smiley)

Filiberto Boncompagni

Hi Pierre,
Right. Perhaps Jim meant “UV-light made restorations stand out” because that’s the use of UV-lights after all (I mean, with objects d’art).
Regards,

Filiberto

Steve Price

Hi Pierre

Inexpensive hand held UV lamps have been around for ages. They were used to detect fluorescent compounds in every lab that did paper or thin-layer chromatography (fluorescent compounds absorb light at one wavelength and emit light at a longer wavelength). UV has a shorter wavelength than any color in the visible range).

Many dyes are fluorescent, and a UV lamp is commonly used as a way to detect areas of a rug that have been repaired or restored. If different dyes were used in the restoration than those in the original, it will usually be obvious under UV light. One that was in the news in the past few years was the Turkish carpet belonging to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.


Hi David

I look at rugs more or less as you and Marvin do - the aesthetic is the most important element for me, too. Some other folks have very different interactions with their rugs, of course. In any case, the marketplace is such that older rugs command higher prices, so it's worthwhile learning what we can about age attribution.


Hi Kurt

I believe the entire corpus of Carriere's published work on fractal analysis of Turkmen weavings is the report of his results on two juvals, presented at ICOC in Philadelphia and published in the proceedings of that conference.

Regards

Steve Price

Pierre Galafassi

Hi James,

I do share your "more prosaic" theory.
To your question "Why did Turkmen weavings lose this property in later and commercial eras? Again, I think we can only speculate. Perhaps during the later era the production was just focused on consistently and efficiently creating the "design", without much concern about whether the result had a pleasing "je ne sais quoi". After all, they were just trying to sell the product, and the buyers didn't seem to need creativity.
One could speculate that a quasi systematic use of the "carton", even by former nomads, killed whatever creativity was left. A friend of mine told me that many Afghan Ersari weavers are addicted to the "carton" and need to be strongly "motivated" to work as they did a hundred years ago.
Best regards
Pierre

Pierre Galafassi

[quote=Filiberto Boncompagni]Hi Pierre,

Right. Perhaps Jim meant “UV-light made restorations stand out” because that’s the use of UV-lights after all (I mean, with objects d’art).

Hi Filiberto and Jim,
Yes of course this is an old use of UV light, standard in museums, and hand-held UV lamps are dirt cheap.
I was alluding to hand-held colorimetry devices: these are relatively new and indeed not cheap. Those equipped with the complex software which allows to calculate color constancy are the most expensive.
regards
Pierre

Michael Raysson

Reading the Those Who See It posts and the the Those Who Don't See It posts, I am astounded. Then I remember about paradigms and consensus reality. Certainly, it seems to me that those who express deep faith in scientific reality and the western scientific paradigm have trouble and those who seem to be outside it don't. By IT, I mean, here, dimensionality and also the aspects of spirituality that some of us see in oriental carpets.

Personally, I feel that the inclusion of drugs and such-like into the process muddies the waters. For my money, these things are there sure and certain, drugs or no drugs. One just has to open their paradigm to include them. Further, I think the fact that the "scientific thinkers" want the proof to fit their reality, rather than widening their reality to take in other kinds of proofs and other kinds of realities is a big hindrance to them.

I remember Paul Bowles, who lived as an ex-patriot in Morocco, saying in the introduction to one of his books, (and I am paraphrasing) that people would give many reasons for coming to Morocco, but in the end it all boiled down to seeking magic and mystery. In my mind, the reason for collecting oriental rugs is the same, that one is seeking magic and mystery. I believe that the deep addicting quality of the rugs comes just from this, magic and mystery.

Martin Andersen

Hi Marla

I know that an artisan is not an artist, and it seems you prefeer a more craftmansship approach to your work. I am a professional artist myself and know a lot about interpretation and over-interpretation of works of art. I also know that the artist themselves are not always conscious aware of all aspects, formal or informal, of their work - actually a lot of very stupid artist are capable of producing very surprisingly intelligent and refined pieces of art. I suppose a part of the explanation is that they are doing their work in a cultural or collective artistic frame that is larger than their own personal understanding.

Anyway the weaver of my little Torba, if she is just a sloppy weaver, cant complain about the amount of attention we have given her mistakes

with a lot of respect
Martin

(ups, cross posting. this was only a response to your first post)

Marla Mallett

An "artisan" can certainly also be an "artist." In tribal societies where nearly every woman was expected to produce weavings, and copy-work ruled the day, no one can expect each product to be a work of art. Thus the term "artisan" seems a more proper catch-all term.

Martin Andersen

Fine by me I have no trouble seeing rugs as art. Generally the Torbas as I understand are not regarded copy-work, on the contrary they were very highly appreciated and kept from generation to generation. I would think the weavers did the best they could in these pieces.

Michael Raysson

I am sorry for you.

Chuck Wagner

Michael,

No need for sorrow. Without trying to speak for Marla specifically (she can handle that one), I still feel comfortable pointing out that we folks who do not agree with the dimensionality hypothesis can still relax our eyes and see the optical effects, and clearly. We do not disagree that the effects are there. We simply state it is more likely that this claim is a world class case of correlation without causation. The effect exists, we simply do not agree that it is installed as part of some mission to provide some hidden insight into the Turkoman equivalent of Valhalla.

I find it curious that such claims are not equally applied to Baluch, Quchan Kurd, Uzbek, and other weavers who also weave pedantic regular geometric designs, have ancestors, and access to dim smoky living quarters.

Moreover, I find it particularly interesting that cultures that literally take a fistful of coca leaves and jam them between their cheek and gum failed to tumble onto the whole perspective thing. There are thousands of examples of PreColumbian and Southeast Asian textiles that await similar analysis.

I can hardly wait...

Best Regards,
Chuck Wagner

James Blanchard

Hi all,

This discussion is interesting on a number of levels.

I have no trouble viewing high quality tribal weavings as art. But they are art of a particular sort. Though it might joint a bit pejorative to refer to them as "copy-work", one must admit that Turkmen weavers were highly constrained in their artistic expression by a prescribed design idiom. So when a weaver is a novice, she is learning the craft of rendering the prescribed designs in the prescribed formats from more experienced weavers in her family/clan. Over time, she is able to develop various approaches in the placement of the designs to enhance the visual appeal of the weaving. Within the rather narrow colour palette and scheme, she can also make choices to create abrash to enhance the result. She likely learned many of these techniques to enhance the aesthetic appeal through observation and/or instruction, and her own artistic sensibilities.

Was she trying to create depth or extra dimensions? Waving guls that appear during drug intoxication? A spiritual icon? I am not sure how any one of us can know. What is evident is that different people who deeply appreciate these objects today evidently do so from their own varied perspectives. Are some of these subjective ways of appreciating these wonderful things superior or more enlightened than others? I suppose that depends on how you view knowledge and ways of knowing things.

For my part, I don't think that great rugs possess inherent magical or spiritual properties. However, like great art, they can appeal to our senses in ways that transcend societies, cultures and time periods. Some appear to believe that this reflects a transcendent spiritual connection with these objects. Others believe that this is due to fundamental aesthetic principles that are embedded within the human psyche and "hard-wired" into human perception (see http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/life.carpet.html).

I don't collect rugs seeking "magic and mystery". I appreciate their beauty. I appreciate the incredible skill displayed. I enjoy how getting to know rugs means getting to know more about those who wove them. I like the "connection" to other societies and cultures (having lived in Asia for a large part of my life). I don't find that my approach hinders my ability to fully appreciate rugs, nor does it reflect my belief system more generally. And I think that my aesthetic taste in rugs is similar to a large proportion of experienced collectors, including those who approach rugs more "spiritually".

I am not sure if discourse is enhanced by the "some see it and some don't" approach.

James

Jim Allen

You are a perfect example of a person who years ago would have collected nice Turkoman weaving that was as regular and symmetrically perfect as possible. This of course means that is is as two dimensional as possible.This aesthetic was still dominant as late as the 1980's. But Marla, as far as I know, you have never collected Turkoman weaving. I know you don't buy Turkoman weaving for resale and if you did you would lose your shirt. The aesthetic you espouse is as dead as a Dodo bird. Just look at what brings good money at auction today. You will see two types of Turkoman weaving that brings the most money. One type is the rare and unusual piece. Buying this type of Turkoman weaving is highly speculative. You can hit a big winner or make a big flub up. The second type of highly valuable Turkoman weaving, in one way or another, is full of space. Not everybody describes this space the way I do. Many people simply speak of the space between design elements and they use terms like expansive, spacious, and full of grace or awe inspiring. The type of Turkoman weaving you are espousing is just plain dead and in fact is virtually unsellable. You aren't doing anybody a favor by trying to resurrect a long buried aesthetic notion. Why you would try and project yourself into a discussion about a type of weaving you know the least about is a mystery to me.

James Blanchard

Hi Jim...

Now I am a bit confused. Does it boil down to commerce? Do only Turkoman weavings possess transcendent aesthetic properties?



James

Jim Allen

Turkoman weaving is technically the finest NOMADIC pile weaving on Earth. Essentially all classical Tekke and Salor pre- 1750 weaving is knotted at 300 KPSI at a bare minimum. These artifacts are super tight and super supple. I have been told that this level of knotting is limited by the tensile strength of the hand spun wool. It would take higher warp tension than the hand spun wool can take to weave finer objects. I had this all explained to me by Manus Sirinoglu who is a fourth generation rug merchant and silk rug manufacturer from Turkey. One of his family members actually wove a silk rug at 2,000 kpsi. He tells me it took three or four attempts to actually finish one this tight because the warps kept breaking. If you know much about Kum Kapi rugs you know the Sirinoglu name. The point of this is to explain why Turkoman rugs would exhibit aesthetic effects other types of nomadic weaving don't. The Turkoman of classical periods didn't sell their weaving unless it was an emergency. The main carpets were probably more woven "documents" than they were dirt coverings. I see them as tribal and clan identifiers and ritualistic objects. The chuvals and torbas actually satisfy all the requirements of a language. In the context of a clan each individuals work would have instantly identified the weaver as a specific individual, just like our voices do for us. These bag faces would also represent the weaver's virtue to the world just as our language and our skill in using it does for us. Thirdly these weaving's represent the weaver to the world at large plus serve as the basis of an appeal. They represent the virtues of a girl and the foundation of a dowry. In other words they are an appeal to others for love. Weaving skill. like embroidery skill in England and earlier America once did, was perhaps the primary way a young maiden represented herself to the world. In very old Yomud main carpets I see encoded information concerning how to live and survive as a nomad in a large and menacing world. Well if I start interpreting various Turkoman design complexes I will be writing all night. In conclusion Baluch work was predominantly for selling and their designs were predominantly borrowed from others. This is why they will never be very valuable. If you know many Kurdish people you know that goes double for them. The Turkoman are nomadic ROYALTY. I do know that there are a FEW extremely fine and wonderfully woven Baluch pieces but this is the extreme rare piece where it is the norm for any and all truly OLD Turkoman weaving. I know I am going to catch hell for writing this here but somebody needs to say it.

James: Later Turkoman work, after 1882 in fact, was mostly made for sale and all the romanticism was lost. In fact it was dying well before 1882. There is only room for one nomadic group atop the aesthetic pyramid representing weaving greatness. For quite a while now this group has been Turkoman. The only way I know how to demonstrate this fact is by referencing auction sale data which is available to us all. .

Steve Price

Hi Michael

I'm well aware of the limitations of the scientific method, and I don't see it as being all knowing or all powerful. It has a pretty good track record for generating technological, artistic and humanitarian progress (along with many other kinds) during the 500 years or so that it's existed, and that makes me more comfortable with it than I am with other systems except when it comes to things that I think are matters of faith and, therefore, entirely individual. Its main usefulness is that it helps me (and others like me) decide what not to believe.

Obviously, you aren't someone who believes everything. How do you decide which ideas to discard?

Regards

Steve Price

Marla Mallett

JIm,

Wait a minute! Since when has technical virtuosity ensured aesthetic superiority?

Steve Price

Hi Martin

I don't think anyone has denied that it's possible that Turkmen consciously employed dimensionality in generating designs, layouts and motifs. Certainly, I haven't. What I've disputed is the assertion that it isn't just a possibility, but a conclusively demonstrated fact. As a corollary, I also dispute the extensions made from it; for example, that the weavers used it to a greater extent or more effectively before the 18th century than in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Regards

Steve Price

Jim Allen

If my words can be construed to mean that technical virtuosity is strongly related to aesthetic achievement than I apologize. There are a lot of Hereke silk rugs that are very tightly woven and that simply make me sick to look at.

The connection I meant to make is that..... why would any nomadic people weave simply utilitarian pieces at such fantastic levels of technical wizardry? It could conceivable have been for their extended usefulness but I prefer to believe it is more like the drive behind our desire and need to develop language skills. Language identifies us, allows us to relate to the world around us, and serves as the basis of an appeal to others. I see Turkoman weaving as an extension of this process. Remember they were illiterate. Their designs were coded in some way and stored in their brains, much like our language is!!!!!

I know this sounds weird but I have been thinking about this for 20 years now. When you see Turkoman weaving as an extension of our need to learn to read and write you start to get a sense of the drive behind their technical and aesthetic striving. IMHO.

Jim Allen

If you were referencing Bolivian shoulder throws etc. then you have missed something. The people I know who sell this material all talk about the "dimensionality" imparted to these weaving's by the juxtaposition of incredibly well chose colors separated by usually white spacer rows. Some really good jijims also have this same depth and they also use white in a similar fashion. I am out of my comfort zone here and Marla can probably tell you a whole lot more about their aesthetics. Marla and I both have a special jijim we cherish and never show others . I think she uses hers on her bed and I keep mine in a very special place where I can easily take it out to touch it and look at its incredible beauty. I don't even know what group wove mine and I don't care. It MOVES me!

Jane Collins

In human development motor skills and language skills begin to converge at a parallel time frame
to enhance earlier pattern recognition. In a certain milieu unencumbered by the strict imposition of learning to 'write' or read, in the way we consider it, the propensity towards 'art' coming through all the senses would allow for its practice and learning or a translation into energy for exploration - just as O'Donovan describes (male and female 'occupations). A fact of learning then, and we can learn to see!
Extraordinary discussion!

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Jim,
I am here Jim and enjoying the various opinions.
After having misquoted O' Donovan (known by other Turkotekers too) you have quoted a customer of yours quoting Pinner quoting a Russian who might be famous only in his own datcha. The chase has been fun, but I won't spend 200$ to check your sources again.
I'd rather take your word that grandFATHERS with arthritis and Salor Khans are obvious weavers for "300KPSI-at-a-bare-minimum-" torbas.

Best regards
Pierre

Filiberto Boncompagni

“grandFATHERS with arthritis”. I like that

Besides, I infer, weaving requires skill. Acquiring skill requires time. Weaving grandfathers – or male weavers in any case – being such a common phenomenon should then having be spotted more frequently by our O’Donovan(s) et all.

So far, instead, we have only a reference by O’Donovan which I’m still unable to locate (now I found the whole text on the web) and the other clue is a “grandfathers” quoted by Pinner, which could stand for “ancestors”.
Notice that usually we use “ancestors” and not “ancestress”: it could be the same for the use of “grandfathers” at the place of “grandmothers”.
Regards,

Filiberto

Martin Andersen

Hi Steve

Just trying to follow the logic of my stylistic argument:

If we agree that we see some kind of spatial effects in the rugs, why do we need any other proof than the rugs to accept that the Turkmens worked with it?

Wouldn't that logically make us need proof outside the rugs before we could accept that the Turkmens worked stylistically with red colour?
The red colour might also have been unintentional

I of course certainly understand that there regarding age and interpretation is a lot of deep water around this.

best
Martin

Steve Price

Hi Jim

Marla and I both have a special jijim ... I keep mine ... where I can easily take it out to touch it and look at its incredible beauty. I don't even know what group wove mine and I don't care. It MOVES me!
That's pretty much my reaction to the art I like enough to live with. It's a very different reaction than what Michael's been describing as our proper interaction with ethnographic arts.

Their designs were coded in some way and stored in their brains, much like our language is!!!!!



Hi Martin

If we agree that we see some kind of spatial effects in the rugs, why do we need any other proof than the rugs to accept that the Turkmens worked with it?
I can, with very little effort, see faces all around me. Just about every object that includes two more or less parallel elements plus another element beneath them can be seen that way. I don't spend much time wondering what the guys who designed my kitchen appliances or the front of my car were trying to communicate about humanity with those designs. The fact that I can see face-like forms doesn't mean that the guys who put them there were intentionally creating faces. The fact that I can see dimensional (perspective) effects in some Turkmen weaving isn't proof that the Turkmen "worked with it" (I'm assuming that you mean, consciously and intentionally).

Wouldn't that logically make us need proof outside the rugs before we could accept that the Turkmens worked stylistically with red colour?
The red colour might also have been unintentional.
I doubt that the predominance of red in Turkmen weaving was unintentional. That's not the same thing as saying that I know the reason they use it so much. Perhaps, in the distant past, they discovered or were taught how to dye wool red, and weren't very good at blue or yellow yet. This might have simply started a tradition of using red that still exists. Do I know that to be true? Of course not. That's why I don't try to convince anyone that it must be.

Regards

Steve Price

Jim Allen

Car designers quite intentionally arrange grills in conjunction with headlights to create the illusion of a virile animal or some other subconsciously coded car enhancing life form. They intend to make the car look like something that represents the car to the niche they are aiming it at. Liquor advertizers and the military often take this a step further. When I was studying this in school we looked at an Army ad that featured a tank with suggestively raised gun barrel with the word SEX carefully worked into the shadows surrounding the canvass at the base of the gun. This was really mor ein vogue in the 60's but it is still seen occassionally today. WE had a ball studying and cataloging what kinds of things were drawn into the ice in glasses seen in liquor advertisements.

There was an Islamic prohibition against representing the human form. This led to calligraphic writing evolving a style that included such flourishes that the writing itself started to resemble living things. Today examples of this style are worth a lot of money.

The Turkoman were early adopters of Islam but there world wasn't that different than ours regarding this subject. Jihadists intend to ram Islam down our throats even if they have to kill us. It was accept Islam or die for the Turkoman. They kept on with their shamanic beliefs and animist practices. AS for the faces you see in weavings and by weavings I mean all Islamic area nomadic weaving, you DO see faces everywhere and the better and more powerful these faces seem to an observer the more money they seem willing to pay for it. This fact has resulted in rug sellers taking their detail shots to emphasize the quality of any "faces" they find in their wares.

The question is how did the Turkoman memorize their designs. I would think by the simplest method available. Remember that some people in this area of the world memorized the entire Koran. Take a look at any chuval gull. Think about our do-ray-me-so-fa-la-de-do as representing the musical scale. Look at the back of the chuval gull. Now let’s consider how one might most efficiently memorize the sequential arrangement of knots that make up the gull. Starting at the bottom center lets assign a sound for every color used in the gull reading either to the right or the left. A special sound might be employed to indicate the end of a line. The number of knots in each row can be transformed into a string of sounds where each sound designates a color of wool to be tied into the gull’s progression. It doesn’t take that long to assemble a code of individual sounds that determines the lower left or right quadrant of the gull. Now imagine the weaver had to memorize this string of sounds that I like to call a chant forwards and backwards. With this mentally encoded chant learned forwards and backwards the weaver has all of the information needed to reflect the one quadrant twice to recreate the entire gull. I was thinking about this when I said that “Their designs were coded in some way and stored in their brains, much like our language is.” At any rate you must come up with a hypothesis to explain how the Turkoman weavers memorized the exact replication of their gulls using only their memories because this is how they carried their designs around, in their brains.

Sort of tongue in cheek JA

Michael Raysson

I have been trying to put myself in the head place of Marla and others to see what the problem might be and how to explain it. The following is my way of relating to this:

First of all, to think that only westerners, who made and invented perspective, consciously knew what they were doing and others just didn't have knowledge to understand what they did, is arrogant and incorrect. Before perspective, in the West, we think that perhaps they were less skilled at art. Not so, they didn't do perspective and they didn't try to achieve solidity because that was not necessary to what they were trying to say. In fact, it was detrimental to what they were trying to say. They were trying to put forth an abstract idea, say of the trinity or of the Christ or of the evangelists, etc. They were trying to put forth an idea of devotion or of awe, etc. They were trying to portray spiritual states (pardon me for saying this). They were trying to portray states of being. And they were trying to convey this to simple, illiterate people.
So, they used symbols, abstract figures, simplified compositions, etc. They even used color in a very symbolic way. They studied how to do this in a way that would connect to their audience. In addition, they even conceived ways of making buildings that would also inculcate these ideas. These were very skilled people.

In the same way, the rug weaving people were intelligent and skilled artists who had definitive things they wished to convey in their art. Because most of them were nomadic, they did not paint pictures or other things that would just be difficult and unnecessary baggage. They made a conscious decision to put the main expression of their art and cosmology into their weavings. We do know for a fact that some of these were extremely highly prized just as we prize our great works of art.

The rug weaving people, in this case, the Turkmen, also used abstract symbols (taken from nature and myth). Human figuration, in their case, was minimal or nonexistent. They were interested in nature and myth as a means of unlocking and symbolizing the mysteries they saw around them and inside them also, in conveying who they were. The symbols (guls) of their tribe were almost always there as part of the picture.

As part of the cosmic-ness of their cosmology, They were interested in time, space and dimensionality. But, once again, space and dimension represented by perspective or solidity would be counter productive. In a way, Marla is right. They remained faithful to the two dimensionality of their symbols and figures. However, they wished to express the deeps of time and space, so they placed these two dimensional figures in ways that clearly showed the depths of space and time, that is so that our eyes could clearly see this. They were also interested in dimensionality. But more often than not, this was spiritual dimensionality. They consciously devised ways of spiritual dimensionality in their weaving. In order to perceive spiritual dimensionality, the viewer must attune their mind to the weaving. Otherwise, it does not work. This takes time and conscious effort (or effortlessness). If one has not developed spiritual sight, I am afraid they just won"t get it. It would be like telling people there are little creatures in the air without a microscope to show them.

Filiberto Boncompagni

Yes, Michael, what you say is all very interesting but forgive me if I ask: how do you reached your conclusions? How do you know the Weltanschauung of an illiterate culture that’s mostly gone?
Regards,

Filiberto

Joel Greifinger

Michael,

If we all got a look under the microscope, and only a few believed they saw the creatures or believed what they saw were creatures, we should conclude, at least tentatively, with due epistemic modesty, that we lacked evidence for establishing the existence of those creatures. I may have visions of little creatures, and they may be a part of my beliefs (my truth), but they should not be mistaken for the consensually justified beliefs we regard as The truth.

Joel Greifinger

Paul Smith

Michael--

You build assumption upon assumption and run with your conclusions as though they were self-evident, then set up "straw men" you can call arrogant and incorrect. We all know next-to-nothing about these people! In spite of your elaborate fantasies about their spirituality, you are projecting virtually everything you write...a very Eurocentric tradition, I might add. Don't forget that however "spiritual" they may or may not have been, they were without question very nasty slave traders! Plenty of evidence for that! Why not tolerate a little ambiguity here, entertain the possibilities, and enjoy the beauty in front of you without having embark upon a campaign. There is a lot of room between Those Who See It and Those Who Don't, and more places in that continuum than Those Who Think They See It.

Paul

Steve Price

Hi Jim

... you must come up with a hypothesis to explain how the Turkoman weavers memorized the exact replication of their gulls using only their memories because this is how they carried their designs around, in their brains.
Here's my hypothesis: they looked at the weavings around them and saw the guls, motifs, layouts and motifs. How's that for out-of-the-box thinking!



Regards

Steve Price

Filiberto Boncompagni

Steve,



Your lack of fantasy is so pitiful!

Filiberto

Marla Mallett

Michael,

This discussion began with a simple analysis of certain Turkmen weavings, and with the assertions of a couple of people who stated that Turkmen weavers purposely put "three-dimensional effects" into their weavings. Jim Allen, for one, had specifically described what he saw as foreshortening "devices" injected in a couple of weavings (in a HALI 55 article). No one (certainly not me) has suggested that modern Western art forms are superior because they may utilize a variety of perspective devices. If anything, I suggested that the best woven art forms have normally AVOIDED such usage, and that suggestion raised a firestorm. So where is the Western "arrogance" in this?

Oh...but now the tune has changed: It's now "spiritual dimensionality" that we must read into these works!? Those weaving errors or inconsistencies were actually purposeful--injected to create "spiritual dimensionality????

Steve Price

Hi Filiberto

Einstein, who everyone seems to agree was a pretty clever guy, said:
Every problem should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

It's just a corollary to Occam's Razor, but lots easier for most folks to understand.

Regards

Steve Price

James Blanchard

Michael,

If I accept your proposition that those who are so inclined can see the spiritual dimension in weavings, I am still left with a puzzle because different people with this "spiritual vision" report that they see different mystical elements in the weavings. If these objects are truly imbued with transcendent spiritual properties, then shouldn't there be some consistency in what "spiritual seers" see? If not, then does it mean that the "spiritual meaning" is entirely dependent on the subjective vision of the viewer? In that case, there doesn't seem to be much use in arguing for a connection across time and cultures.

Or is your viewpoint that what you see is correct, and if others think that they see something else then they are wrong? In that case, why should I credit your experience and vision over that of others?

Finally, I hope you don't have the misapprehension that those who don't see a spiritual dimension in Turkoman weavings are not otherwise spiritual. There are those that see spiritual things in all sorts of objects, ranging from flora and fauna to inanimate objects, both manufactured and naturally occurring. Do you? If not, is it because they don't possess spiritual properties or because you just haven't developed the "vision" to see that?

Martin,

I think you know that I agree with the proposition that older Turkoman weavings have a different approach to drawing that makes them more beautiful and intriguing. So if you ask me, I would say that on balance I am inclined to think that we could use criteria related to how design elements are placed and spaced and combined to help identify older weavings. But as I pointed out earlier, these perceptions are going to be inevitably conflated with other clues to age, such as specific border designs, colours and structure (as you and Jim noted in the initial posts about your torba). So there is a risk that we might tend to see and credit dimensionality more in weavings that have other features that would "tell" us that the weaving is old (like the drawing of a border or other design element that is the same as on another example that is known to be very old).

Here is a case in point. I have a small Tekke mat that I think most knowledgable experts would say is not earlier than 1880 or so, and many would say it is considerably more recent (Jim, I expect that you recognize this one). But as you can see, the drawing of this rug might indicate a purposeful attempt to achieve perspective and various other dimensions. The gul sizes change, the internal colour schemes are varied, and the dimensions of the borders and the end segments differ. In your opinion, was this intentional? If so, does it reflect greater age? Or is it done more crudely than older versions? Does your opinion of its age relate to other clues, including the design and shape of the guls or colour? My point is that I think that experienced folks can see an "older" piece based on drawing and other clues. Personally, I can also see how these differences create dynamism and perspective in older pieces. They drew better rugs then, and probably did so because they cared more about the aesthetics of the rugs.

James

Michael Raysson

Paul,

Form my point of view, these things are self-evident. From yours not.

The first part of what I just said, is deliberately taken from western
art history, not just the top of my head. It is not assumptions. It is art history. Not necessarily our popular art history, but read carefully about medieval and early western art and you will find it written.

As for the second part. 1. We know that the Turkomen took their symbols from nature and myth. No assumption there. 2. We know that their guls are ever-present on their weaving. No assumption there. 3. That they were interested in time and space is perhaps debatable, but probably generally agreed on. What is more debatable here is HOW they were interested and whether the representation of time and space was consciously intended or not. I have weighed in that it was consciously intended. You can disagree.
The only really controversial part, I think, is spiritual dimensionality. To some of us it is as clear as the nose on your face, to others such as yourself it is pure obfuscation. I might add what Joel has said that for him and many others the fact that we see creatures in a microscope is still a matter of faith
in consensus reality.

In my opinion, the assumptions come mostly from your side.

Michael Raysson

Jim Allen

Since you have referenced Einstein again let's all remember thart he said, "imagination is MORE important than knowledge". I hopw you don't seriously think the Turkoman replicated their designs by copying. That is a horrible idea. Just look at what happened when theTekke had to weave Yomud box and flower borders. A great deal of them are upside down and I think this dsproves your hypothesis out of hand. Why were they forced to weave them....big discussion but if copying was the norm one would hardly expect to see so widespread a mistake.

Kurt Munkacsi

Michael

"1. We know that the Turkomen (by the way the accepted spelling is Turkmen) took their symbols from nature and myth. No assumption there."
WHAT!!! I've been looking at and studying Turkmen rugs for over 30 years. How can you say that with such absolute certainty? I wouldn't to presume to be such an expert for an instant. The Turkmen who know the truth have been gone for more then a hundred years and they left no records (other than the weavings of course)

2. We know that their guls are ever-present on their weaving. No assumption there.
We can see there are guls on a lot of their weavings but not all. Ever see a tent band?

3. That they were interested in time and space is perhaps debatable, but probably generally agreed on.
If by "space and time" you are referring to when their next meal might be and where they were going to set up their next camp, then they probably did think alot about space and time. If you are referring to Einstein's space and time or metaphysical space and time you can't even be remotely serious into using the phrase "but probably generally agreed on" May I ask you by WHO?

I might add what Joel has said that for him and many others the fact that we see creatures in a microscope is still a matter of faith in consensus reality.
You know you can a purchase a microscope fairly reasonably these days and see for yourself.

Steve Price

Hi Jim

Since you have referenced Einstein again let's all remember thart he said, "imagination is MORE important than knowledge".
Actually, that's a general rule of thumb in academics. Academic professionals aren't valued by their peers for what they know, they're valued for what they've added to their field. But I think Einstein would have laughed in your face if you told him that imagination without verifiable predictions was a path to scientific progress, especially if you suggested that you learned it from him.

I hopw you don't seriously think the Turkoman replicated their designs by copying. That is a horrible idea. Just look at what happened when theTekke had to weave Yomud box and flower borders. A great deal of them are upside down and I think this dsproves your hypothesis out of hand. Why were they forced to weave them....big discussion but if copying was the norm one would hardly expect to see so widespread a mistake.
Oh, I see. You're right. How could anyone possibly weave a design upside down if she saw it rightside up? The only conceivable way that could have happened is if she had the design memorized and got out of bed on the wrong side that day. Yes, that makes perfect sense. I don't understand why it didn't occur to me until you pointed it out.



Steve Price

Kurt Munkacsi

Steve, Jim - you both are probably right. There were a lot of weavers making these pieces and they probably did everything you can image. Some of the master weavers probably worked from memory using designs they learned from their mothers and grandmothers. Other weavers probably did weave by copying, making knot for knot copies of other rugs. Some might even have woven from cartoons. Some probably made rugs for the use by their family, some on commission from other families, some probably made rugs for sale in the bazaar.
I just don't think there were any single hard and fast rules that all weaves obeyed.

Steve Price

Hi Kurt

I hope you recognized that I was being facetious. Jim and I can't possibly both be right: his position is that weavers never copied designs, and he cited what he believes to be proof. I think the likelihood that your view is right is nearly self-evident.

To briefly return to the subject of inspiration and hypothesis testing in the advancement of science (and, in my view at least, in the advancement of any other intellectual activity). Here are some words attributed to Edison (1890):
During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. ... I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.

A few years earlier, he said it more succinctly:
Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

Regards

Steve Price

Joel Greifinger

Michael,

Perhaps you misunderstood me because you missed that I referred to "justified beliefs". When you make a truth-claim, you implicitly assert that, "I am justified in my belief that..." What constitutes justification varies with the type of assertion.

If you say, "I see little creatures under the microscope", no further justification is called for. Assuming that you are sincere, your statement about your subjective experience is all the evidence necessary to make the statement true. However, if you state that "There are little creatures in the air that can only be seen under a microscope", the norms of justification shift. Merely subjective testimony no longer meets the criteria for assigning the property of truth to your statement. While philosophers of science have spent a good deal of effort debating the fine points of exactly how to characterize the methods both necessary and sufficient for assigning that property in both the physical and human sciences, there is a consensus that it entails some notion of objectivity. Any justification based in a method that privileges the observations of those who can see something because they have the faith to believe it to be there is using a different set of epistemic rules.

I'm not claiming that all societies have used our set of epistemic norms. Clearly, most historically haven't. Nonetheless, it has been the shift to exactly this Enlightenment view that has yielded much of what almost all of us prize most about modernity. To echo my sense of what Steve said much earlier in the thread, I'm not discounting personal faith, just trying to maintain the distinction between it and truth-claims about the public life-world.

Joel Greifinger

Martin Andersen

I have a stupid rug weaving question: Does anybody know on what kind of loom the Torbas were produced? I wonder if the weave was rolled up during the process, or if the weaver was able to see the whole piece as the weaving progressed? I assume she was - just wants to be certain.
Also I think I have seen a photo where both Torbas in a pair were on the same loom, can that be correct?

Best Martin

(and no offence to anybody, but I suppose we all know that Jim’s suggestions and speculations are not hard edge science. Isn’t it a bit over the top to make 2/3 of the postings in this tread to be about philosophy of science? Couldn’t we keep it a bit closer to the rugs?)

Rich Larkin

Michael,

You said the following:

Somewhat later, you said:

These comments are representative of your thinking as expressed in this thread, and I could have selected other passages. I get your point that you are speaking of a way of knowing different from what is achieved by scientific methods. Of course, it remains that after applying your methods, you may come up with what seem like insights, but which in fact (if you knew the facts) have little or nothing to do with the insights, beliefs, understandings, intentions, etc., of the weavers of the rugs. Does this concern you? Do you have means of testing and validating your results in these endeavors? Once you've worked your way to your conclusions, do they then seem to you, in retrospect, self evident? To be someone who "gets it," it it necessary to have gone through the exercise outlined in the first quote, above? Or are there seers who start out "getting it," and the entry into the alien paradigm is built upon that base?

Rich Larkin

Michael Raysson

Dear Marla,

I don't believe I was addressing you personally when I said that. However, I would say that it was the "spiritual dimensionality" that raised a firestorm.
From my point of view, people here are making assumptions all the time that may not necessarily be true. Nobody jumps on them because these are consensus assumptions which are generally accepted as true. When I say something, it gets jumped on up and down the line because it is a minority point of view, not generally accepted as true. I never said everyone has to agree with me or that God has spoken from my mouth. I am merely putting forth my viewpoint in a definitive a way as possible.
Personally, I would say the way people react here is reflective of "Western arrogance", meaning that if I express an opinion contrary to the current paradigm, I still must prove that opinion in terms of the current paradigm.
And if I don't, I am somehow guilty.

I have not weighed in on Jim's assertions one way or the other, except to say that I do totally believe that the Turkmen used spacial depth and three dimensionality in a non Western way. I further stated that I agreed with you in that they stayed true to two dimensionality in relation to solidity and perspective, only not (as I have just stated) in space and depth.

As far as weaving errors or inconsistencies, these have to be taken on a case by case basis.

I only add, as an addendum, that, I hope we all understand that the Turkmen were among the greatest weavers of all time. Their skill is legendary. Understanding this, it is hard to believe that they would not be consciously aware of what they put into their weavings.

Michael Raysson

Dear Rich,

As I have stated above to Marla, I am merely expressing my opinion. Of course, I am stating it in the strongest way possible. I never have said that God has spoken from my mouth. You and all are welcome to disagree.

I do think I stated that by going about it in the way I suggested by no means guaranteed success. I think I also stated that people's abilities, etc varied greatly and this includes me. I never said I was the greatest knower of rugs. What I did say was that the way I suggested, in my opinion, had a better chance of success and would gain one a better understanding.

I do feel that I am inserting a viewpoint that is often missing in these threads. Take it or leave it.

Michael Raysson

Dear Kurt,

First of all, you know that every time I have used the term Turkmen except for once. Mea culpa. You possibly also know that I said elsewhere that guls were ALMOST always present. I was just using ever-present as a way of emphasizing their ubiquity. Of course I have seen a tentband, what to speak of an engsi or asmalyk.

Don't jump on me if you have been studying Turkmen rugs for 30 years and never noticed their symbols came from nature and myth! (of course, I am sure you will find a few exceptions).

No, I am not referring to Einstein. I believe I have said elsewhere it is a great mistake to reference the ancient Turkmen by our own paradigms.

On the other hand, you certainly must have heard that the Turkmen are going to have their first space satellite.

Michael Raysson

Dear Joel,

I am not arguing for or against modern science.

I am arguing against using modern science to understand the ancient Turkmen and their weavings.

Michael

Rich Larkin

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the response, but I wasn't asking rhetorical questions.

Rich Larkin

Michael Raysson

Dear James,

If we have two or three people look at the same rug, we will get three or four different opinions (as we have seen). So why not different reports on the spiritual side?

I have no desire to judge who is spiritual or not. However, if people jump on me here, I at least have to defend my views.

Once again and again, I am merely stating my opinion, people. One that I think is sadly lacking here, but still just an opinion.

Michael

Steve Price

Hi Michael

Mary had a little sheep,
She took it to her bed to sleep
The sheep turned out to be a lamb.
Mary had a little lamb.

It deals with love and the bond between animals and humans at the physical, emotional, and spiritual levels. It shows the immorality of sexism - the main character is a woman and she isn't simply an object, she has a name and she is assertive. The word "little" appears in two of the four lines, expressing an eternal truth, that size is unimportant. It uses the simple word, "had" with two distinct meanings, showing us how much nuance there can be in language and, by extension, in the many ways objects and words can be used in our interactions with each other. It's profound and gives the reader who truly understands it a spiritual bond to the truly important things in life. Only the unenlightened will fail to be transported by it; they are to be pitied.

Regards

Steve Price

Michael Raysson

Dear Filiberto,

What you ask is good. However, to explain where I have come from would take a very long time. With some exceptions, I am putting forth observations. I have tried to explain these observations as clearly as I can and to some extent why I think they are true.

Sometimes, I think I made a mistake here. I thought this was a public forum where one could give their opinions and debate them with others. I assumed (always a problem) that others would take what I said in that manner. I never stated it was God's Truth. However, since it is a minority opinion, I have expressed it as strongly as possible and as clearly as possible.

I agree with what you are getting at. The Turkmen are a mystery. I like that! I also understand, as someone else has stated, that they had a bloodthirsty nature. I can handle that. In addition, unlike the Turkish rugs which appeared ubiquitously in Western paintings and records, the Turkmen
are little noted in the west.

As said above, given the mysteries, etc. I have still weighed in. I would have hoped I explained enough in my entries. Apparently not. From my point of view, given where I am coming from, it will never be enough for a lot of people there. Bottom line is I love their work.

Steve Price

Hi Michael

If we have two or three people look at the same rug, we will get three or four different opinions (as we have seen). So why not different reports on the spiritual side?
If we have several people look at the same rug, unless they're impaired, they will agree on its physical properties: its weight, dimensions, the materials of which it's made, stuff like that. If they're ruggies, unless it's an out-of-mainstream rug, they'll probably agree on when and where it was made. All of that is, or can be traced to, objective information. So, we will usually agree that it's all true.

More esoteric properties - really, inferences from combining other information with the rug's objective properties - might be agreed upon or might not. It all depends on the evidence on which it's based. On such properties, most people with an opinion will fall into one of these categories:
1. "I'm not sure, but the following evidence favors XXXX, so that's probably true." If the evidence is reasonably convincing (in the objective sense), the proponent will gain many adherents.
2. "I'm sure, because the time I've spent studying this and related issues convinces me that it's so. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about." There are some circles in which this works great, but this isn't one of them.

Of course everyone here recognizes that there will be different opinions about the spiritual content. They also realize that there is no way to decide which, if any, is correct beyond the internal psyche of the individual with that opinion. I don't think you (or Jim or anyone else) has taken any flak here for expressing your internal reaction. The sort of thing that draws fire is stuff like this, from post #106
Oriental rugs and carpets (at least the great ones) are meant for this type of communication. They are meant for full participation by the observer, that is, a two-way communication. They are not passive.

I don't see a word in there that implies that you are expressing an opinion. It reads as assertion that these things are facts. This is confirmed by your words in post #110, so I conclude that leaving out words like "I think" or "I believe" or "Isn't it interesting to wonder whether" wasn't just careless omission.

Since the question I asked yesterday was ignored, I thought I'd ask it again in case that was an oversight. Obviously, you aren't someone who believes everything. How do you decide which ideas to discard? If you'd rather not answer, that's OK, of course.

Regards

Steve Price

Jim Allen

Your Tekke rug is nice and looks like it is made from excellent materials. I don't think it is a mat. I personally call longer rugs like this sleeping rugs. Earlier examples generally have an "X" motif worked into the border. I take this as a talisman menat to ward off evil from the sleeper. The Tekke were in dire straights at least ten years before their final defeat at Merv. During this period they were weaving like mad and the work was excellent as was the wool and dyes. The main rugs had piled elems and they made some really large ones. I have heard that they also made some large silk rugs but I have never seen one. Kurt tells me they were sold in Persia where they got the most money. The Tekke needed money for armaments to fight the Russians. They were especially desirous of cannons. This leads me to think that your rug is circa 1875. Looking at it I see what you mean and the colors do the most to establish space in the weaving. A rug made for sleeping may or may not have been for sale. The Tekke lost everything of commercial value after their defeat. The Russians and the Persians all wanted to get their hands on their wealth and that was almost entirely carpets.

I have been down this road you have trod on here at Turkotek and I flipped out the first time and got banned from posting. This time I knew what to expect. Winning anybody over is basically not an option. Stating your opinion is an option and I feel that if I put out good ideas they will eventually take root. Believe it or not I can detect major changes in Steve's attitudes. He was viscous with logic towards me originally but now I would say we are friends. It helps to know that, of the posters, none but Kurt actually collect Turkmen weaving to the exclusion of everything else. Kurt is under the influence of an evil genie in a cyclotron. I am trying to find him a favorable jin to help him find the yellow brick road again.

Martin: I would post the two torbas you asked to see but I bought all of Marvin's published torbas and still own #50. I think it would be breaking the rules to post it. Please buy the book. It is small and fantastic. There are a lot of lovely rugs in it but of vastly more importance are the scholarly articles that begin the book. Read Dr. Woods article several times and read each and every footnote closely. I tried to memorize it and it well definitely educate you. All Turkomaniacs owe Marvin a heartfelt thank you for his work on that book.

I asked earlier about who bought the "pair" to my old Tekke chuval. Surprise surprise I have been informed. Now to get him to send some weft to Dr.Jull. A little birdy tells me I will be duisappointed with Rageth's up coming book. That depressed me a lot. There has been a little bit too much shooting the messenger type posts relative to my posting. I was of the opinion that Pinner was of the highest caliber writer in the field and if he quotes a source it is precisely because he believed it. I am having trouble finding messengers now.

For those of you who might want to read more of my rhetoric concerning Turkman rugs please visit a-bey.com. Michael you can find my contact info there and I would like to carry on with you after the thread closes. I already have Martin's contact info.

We are wearing Steve out so let's all go through the last few days posts and reread them. A lot was put out there with no comment. WE all could use a few days rest and time to catch up.

Steve: I can definitely sympathize with you and the great deal of work you have been doing. If it makes you feel any better I have gotten a pile of emails from people who have been closely following our discussion with great interest. Let's all give Steve a break and leave out all future emotional and personal baggage generated from these discussions. Most of US are old farts and shouldn't be thin skinned. I am perhaps the worst as I wear my heart on my sleeve.



Goodnight everybody!

Michael Raysson

Hi Steve,

1. O.K. Give me different "spiritual" descriptions of the same thing by people on a specific rug and I will comment on that. Otherwise, I feel I am just walking into a trap. I will repeat that this thread seems to have a lot of very different takes on a single rug. I have also seen huge differences by ruggies in attributions on rugs as to age and place on a regular basis. I have one rug which I showed to four experienced rug people and got four very different attributions.

2. The flak I received from 106 was small compared to the flak I got for other (pardon me) observations. As for 106, this is, of course, my opinion, but I will tell you I am surprised. I guess I thought that everyone who was a real ruggie spent long hours before their rugs. I would have thought that they would have put a lot of deep attention into this contemplation so as to learn as much as they could about that rug and to absorb as much as they could. After that, I would have thought it was a small step for most ruggies to gain some sort of intimate and mutual relationship with that rug. Wow! Was I wrong. Or if not, why does that statement "draw fire"?

3. As for 110, I thought your tone was facetious and patronizing. I replied in kind. The questions you asked were not the kind you thought I could answer, obviously. They were meant to turn me off. I was not going to turned off by what I thought were bullying tactics. Sorry. Explain to me that you were really serious about that exercise and expected me to answer.

4. I can only answer why I believe in something on a case by case basis. I don't have a template for believing and disbelieving. Ask me about a specific belief.

5. To be honest, it seems to me that many of your questions are simply entrapments and not sincerely asked.

6. I can't speak for Jim, but I do know that I feel I have taken flak for expressing my internal reactions. I will think twice before entering again.

Michael

Steve Price

Hi Michael

Give me different "spiritual" descriptions of the same thing by people on a specific rug and I will comment on that.
There's nothing about which to comment if the "spiritual" descriptions are, as I believe they are, purely internal responses by each person shaped largely by his experiences. They are no more subject to constructive debate by casual acquaintances than the correctness of their respective religious beliefs.

... Oriental rugs and carpets (at least the great ones) are meant for ... full participation by the observer, that is, a two-way communication. They are not passive
This wasn't offered as your feeling or opinion but as cold hard fact; it hardly rises above primitive superstition. Frankly, I'm surprised to see it in the belief repertoire of a 21st century educated person in the developed world.

... I would have thought it was a small step for most ruggies to gain some sort of intimate and mutual relationship with that rug. ... why does that statement "draw fire"?
The notion that there is such a thing as an intimate relationship with an inanimate object is absurd, but not nearly as absurd as the notion that it can be (and ought to be!) mutual. I'm pretty firmly committed to the notion that my rugs don't give a hoot about whether I love them or not.

I don't have a template for believing and disbelieving.
Exactly.

My questions that you quoted in#110 were, as you correctly noticed, things you couldn't answer. My intention (a failure) was to make it as obvious to you as it is to me that if you know rather little about my inner world, you really can't know much about the inner world of some Turkmen woman living in an unknown environment at an unrecorded time by pondering the torba she wove. You and I have much more in common than either of us has with her or any of her peers.

Finally, if you see being asked to present support (in the form of evidence external to yourself) for what you present as facts is bullying, you're in the wrong forum. Nobody - not me, not you, not anyone else - is immune from that. I think it's the most constructive thing we can do for each other. Just my opinion, but it is the way things will continue to operate here because it's my opinion and it's shared by the group that sets policy for Turkotek.

I suggest that you try your hand at discussing these things with Jack Cassin. He shares your belief that Turkmen women were highly sophisticated artists and that he is able to divine all sorts of stuff from their weavings. In fact, he believes that they not only developed and used three dimensional perspective, but a fourth dimension as well. He also shares your distaste for this forum, so he'll probably be a more sympathetic venue for your ideas.

Regards

Steve Price

Michael Raysson

Bullying is bullying, Steve. I have presented evidence. It just isn't your evidence. The rules of your game are set according to your world view and apparently someone who doesn't have that view loses.

Just as a final exercise, why don't you take this test:

1. Prove and present conclusive evidence that the Turkmen DID NOT deliberately weave their rugs in such a way as to open spiritual dimensions.

2. Show that the Turkmen were not sophisticated and skilled artists who were conscious of space, time and dimension in their rugs. Give conclusive evidence.

3. Prove that the Turkmen ( and other artists) did not imbue inanimate objects with a magical life. Give conclusive evidence.

4. Prove conclusively that spatial dimensionality in Turkmen rugs is mainly or wholely caused by accidents or screw-ups.

5. Prove conclusively that it is not possible to enter the paradigm of the ancient Turkmen.

6. Prove conclusively that it is not possible to gain considerable understanding of the Turkmen solely by looking at their rugs. Prove conclusively that it is not possible to learn something about any culture solely by looking at their art.

7. Prove that intuition and inspiration are not integral parts of understanding oriental rugs. Give conclusive proofs.

8. Prove that Kandinsky, Klee, Picasso and DeChirico, the founders of 20th century art did not say much the same thing as I am saying. Give conclusive proof.

By the way that Turkmen woman who wove the torba was an artist. For me, that means I have more in common with her than you.

Martin Andersen

Hi All

I know its closing time, but I cant help one last far out speculation, which I should have posted before:

Steve pointed out the absurd in the discussion of foreshortening on the base of wall hanged rugs which obvious have been intended for the ground - the main carpets.

It seems as a general rule that most Guls on the main carpets, which were on the floor, were rounded and squarish - and as a general rule most Guls on the wall hanged Torbas and Chuvals were actually considerately intentional flattened in their design. One could say that in the visual environment of the Yurt the overall shapes of the Guls on both walls and floor have corresponded.


main carpet

Personal on a lot of old Torbas I see a very strong emphasis of the horizontal centreline of their design. And the wide format of the bag is in itself also underlining this.
I have always found that the Torbas very wide format for a bag and its missing closure system makes them rather strange bags for a travelling people. How much stuff couldn’t be dropped out of a bag like this if it were used for transportation?

If the Torbas both in their format and in their layout is some kind of pictorial flat representation of the horizon, then one could see them as an open air living people dragging their outside environment into the inside of their home.
Depicting horizon, heaven and earth in the simple image of a bag.

Best Martin

Filiberto Boncompagni

Hi Michael,

Steve is probably going to give you a long and detailed answer.

I’ll try to give you my opinion first: this is looking again like a debate based on articles of faith.

It’s like someone believing in God, challenged by skepticals to prove God’s existence and asking them, instead, to prove that God doesn’t exist.

We’ll never reach any useful conclusion in this way.
Regards,

Filiberto

Filiberto Boncompagni

Another point I forgot to add: discussing hypothesis is a very nice way to make some progress in general knowledge. However, to convince others of the validity of those hypotheses, one has to find objective proofs.

Personal, “spiritual” insights are not objective proofs. Everyone could have them and there is no way to tell which one is right without some real evidence.

If someone says “my spiritual insight makes me formulate this hypothesis” it’s OK.
But if there is no evidence, the hypothesis stays as such, it doesn’t become a fact and nobody can pretend that others must see it as a fact.

Filiberto

Martin Andersen

Hi Michael

You have taken a fair beating in this tread, and it is not that I like to jump on this wagon, but I have to agree that Turkotek is not a very well suited forum for discussions on private metaphysics, such discussions simply totally distracts the focus away from the rugs.

Keep loving the rugs
Best Martin

Steve Price

Hi Michael

Regarding your post #210.

Neither I nor anyone else can prove or disprove any of points 1-5 unless time travel, teleportation or mindreading become a practical reality. They are untestable hypotheses. The rule in the world in which I live is that I must reject all untestable hypotheses or I get painted into the ridiculous position of having no logical alternative to believing everything I think. I understand that this rule forces me to reject some things that might actually be correct.

Your point 6 has two parts. I reject neither of them, and can prove within a reasonable level of certainty that (even) I can learn a lot about the weaver's culture from her work. Your assertion has been that you can learn everything about her and her culture. That, I reject.

My answer to point 7 is the same as it was for 1-5.

My answer to #8 is that I suspect that they did share the view you espouse. That doesn't prove that the view was correct, only that it led to constructive outcomes or, at least, didn't prevent them from happening. I'll be glad to provide a much longer list of people who, by applying a system that explicitly rejects such views, have generated constructive outcomes that affect both of us. For a preview of part of that list, just visit the website of the National Academy Of Sciences of the USA.

Regards

Steve Price

Michael Raysson

Dear Dr. Price,

Thank you for your many lessons, including that making art (and collecting it) is not spiritual but humping lambs is.

As I fly out into the sunset on my magic carpet, I promise not to go over your house.

Michael

P.S. You concede that the founders of 20th century art probably agreed with me. You counter that the National Academy of Sciences doesn't. My last question: Which category are oriental rugs in--art or science?

Michael Raysson

Dear Filiberto,

Your analogy is apt. However, if a person of faith gives ample proof that God exists and the skeptic insists that proof be given only in a way they can understand, then, of course, they will never get an answer.

The point is that in order to see God, you must make yourself fit to see God.
In the same way, I am saying that in order to understand the Turkmen and their weaving, you must change your perceptions in order to see that.

Michael

Kurt Munkacsi

Michael
Might I ask you a few questions:
How many Turkmen rugs have you looked at?
How many have you actually handled and examined in person?
How many Turkmen flat woven textiles have to seen?
How many of their embroideries have you examined?
How much the exquisite jewelry made the Turkmen have you seen?
How many of their everyday items, belts, hats, boots etc have you studied?
Can you describe a Turkmen hat?
How much time have you spent in a yurt?
How many first hand accounts of interaction with the Turkmen have you read?
How much of their history do you know?
Have you ever met or spoken with a Turkmen?
Do you speak Turkmen?
Can you describe their national flag?
How much of their culture have you actually immersed yourself in?

You speak like someone that came to the Miami for an afternoon and spent it in a luggage store.
Then went home and claimed to understand the spiritual and artist soul of our culture from that afternoon in the luggage shop.

Filiberto Boncompagni

Hi Michael,
Thanks. To me the fact that the skeptic is unconvinced means only that the "ample proof" is not ample and is not a proof - for the skeptic, of course.
Skeptically,

Filiberto

Steve Price

Hi Michael

Some of the subject is art, some is science. Collecting art has spiritual aspects, but those aren't the same for every collector: that is, they aren't external to the individual collector.

My friends, neighbors and family include Jews, Roman Catholics, assorted Protestants, Unitarians, Atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Quakers, and Sikhs; probably others that aren't coming to mind. They all understand the destructive outcomes that would result if they visit each other's houses of worship and introduce their own religious convictions to the congregation. They do occasionally engage in dialog or banter about their respective beliefs and belief systems, but they keep peace by respectfully agreeing to disagree. Part of what you call my bullying was my proposal that we do the same. That proposal is still on the table. But it includes recognizing that this is not Hyde Park, where anyone can get onto a soapbox and say anything without being asked to provide verifiable evidence that the truth of his statements of fact can be demonstrated objectively. If our rules of evidence are unacceptable to you, please find someplace that suits you better. They are unlikely to change here.

Regards

Steve Price

Michael Raysson

Filiberto,

My reply is that the skeptic is probably not REALLY interested in knowing whether God exists or not.

Believingly,

Michael

Steve Price

Hi Everyone

We are now on the threshold of debating the existence and character of God. That's going no further on Turkotek.

This thread is closed to additional posts.

Steve Price

Filiberto Boncompagni

Removed by the author