| sprice@hsc.vcu.edu
Dear Yon, First, let me say a word or two about the reproduction of the
embroideries as images on our monitors. I've seen only two of these five
in person, the second one (from HALI) and the fourth (from ORIENTAL RUG
REVIEW). They are very much more beautiful than you might guess from the
monitor images. The other three look pretty much like they do in the
pictures that I scanned. Is that true to the original? I don't know. Are
these related to the dragon and phoenix carpets? I suspect so, but it's
hard to be less vague than that. When I refer to the artist not
understanding the motifs, I mean that the embroiderer was reproducing what
she thought were the essential elements of the traditional design, but
lost them because she failed to understand what they are. Whether this is
degeneration or progress, I suppose, depends on what we believe her
intentions to have been. That, of course, is unknowable. Is it so easy to
copy something you don't understand? It is, if you copy it literally. Not
so if you try to capture its essence. Let me offer an example, from
African art. A few years ago a millionaire art collector, reputed to have
commissioned a number of fake objects of art (I have first person
knowledge of this occurring in at least one item), was murdered. His
estate was auctioned off locally, and I attended the sale to see what I
could find in his African stuff. Now, there is an African tribe known as
the Senufo who make a peculiar kind of mask in which what look like flames
are emanating from an animal's mouth on each side. It is known as a
"firespitter" in the marketplace. There was one of these in the estate
sale, but instead of flames from the animal's mouth there was an extra
pair of long ears on the cheeks. What does this have to do with anything?
Well, the rumor was that the millionaire periodically sent photos of
African masks to carvers in China, who were asked to make things similar
to them and send the products to the millionaire. He's bury them in his
backyard for awhile to convert them to "antiques", then sell them or
donate them to museums. How did the firespitter turn into a four-eared
animal? It seems reasonable to suspect that the Chinese carver, having no
idea what the extra appendages at the corners of the mouth were, assumed
that they were ears and attached them to the cheeks. That is, the carver
didn't understand what he was making, and part of the essence of the
traditional design was, therefore, lost. Presumably, the same carver could
have created a perfet copy if commissioned to do so. I would take the
position that the commissioned fake was degenerate, not a departure into
an original new direction. Steve Price |