| sprice@hsc.vcu.edu
Dear Erol, You make an interesting point, but I think we could go even
further. Photos of rugs are two dimensional objects, but rugs themselves
have a property that is very important to me sometimes, and that is their
tactile properties. Tactile properties require a third dimension or they
don't exist. Going even beyond that, the changing appearance with changes
in the position of our eye and of light can be important, too. The
magnificent Salor trapping on the cover of Mackie and Thompson's book
comes to mind. It's in the Textile Museum collection, and was shown at one
of their rug conventions a few years back. The method of showing it was to
have two people hold it, one at each end (it's about 7 feet long), and
walk across the front of the audience with it. The changing appearance as
it was being moved was enormously attractive, and I can only imagine what
some Turkmen stuff must have looked like on the sides of animals in a
procession. And this could bring us straight to another problem faced by
collectors of tribal arts (not just rugs): the objects are out of context
and this affects their appearance. In that sense, they are all only
fragments. African masks on pedestals are quite different than African
masks being worn by a dancer in full costume. But that's another topic for
another day. Steve Price |