I would like to relate some personal experiences. In North Georgia there is a thriving carpet and upholstery fabric industry, and I assumed when I began my small textile gallery business in Atlanta 25 years ago that executives from those companies would be likely customers. Was I wrong! Those guys who produce miles of wall-to-wall carpeting with perfectly regular repeat motifs found the irregularities in virtually all ethnographic textile art to be very disturbing. They never seemed to understand when they directed their designers to lift ideas from ethnic weavings and to "clean them up" for their own use, why the results were so deathly dull. Subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle variations introduced intuitively by handweavers to relieve the monotony of repeat patterns in a pleasing way can be a major aesthetic accomplishment. Some individuals with a cultivated sensitivity can do it well, while others never learn, and so produce contrived or awkward looking results.

Unless you have sat for hour after hour, day after day, week after week in front of a loom, it must surely be difficult to understand what a large factor PURE BOREDOM sometimes becomes. It must be hard to appreciate that maintaining a lighthearted, free-wheeling and improvisational attitude toward the work is one way to make the process more interesting. Otherwise, the moments of pure creative joy are very brief. I think that romantic interpretations can easily miss the point. Just about every serious artist friend of mine -- whether painter, sculptor, weaver, or artist in another medium -- has experienced reviews by critics who misinterpreted his or her work, and read in things that were not intended. Such an experience may be hilarious, but it can also be quite distressing. This is precisely why artists and craftsmen are normally so reluctant to interpret or read "meaning" into anyone else's work, and prefer instead to merely react to the formal elements -- to let the work communicate directly through purely visual means. If we do that, it becomes obvious that variations within otherwise monotonous repeat designs on rugs or textiles help to make them interesting human products -- unlike printed wallpaper or hotel lobby carpeting.

Incidentally, I wonder if there is not someone out there who has talked with Turkmen or Kurdish weavers about the anomalies in their rugs? I have only discussed such things with Turkic weavers in Anatolia, and so only know what they have told me over the years.

Marla

Thank you for acknowledging the weaver/s intent in some of the examples I have posted. I could post a lot more.

In any event, I take your points and have no doubt that many of the irregularities, anomalies, improvisations that we see are just what you suggest, ways to relieve boredom and even subtle variations to relieve the monotony of repeat patterns. It is funny, though, how so many weavers become bored or intuitively insert subtle variations to relieve their monotony precisely across the second row of the rug's major/minor motifs.

What a shame that it is impossible to ask the weavers who wove these rugs 120 or more years ago.

Best regards, Michael Wendorf

Sorry...I didn't want to bore folks by repeating the points I made earlier about why awkward changes or errors often occur quite naturally in the second register of a drop repeat pattern.

Asian weavers who made rugs 120 years ago may have had different ideas from weavers today about the points being discussed, but these same kinds of features occur in the work of traditional groups of isolated Anatolian weavers. I've found those women quite willing to talk about them. Women have inevitably remarked to me that areas of clumsy design articulation were the work of young daughters or nieces. They have often credited a distinctly different small motif in border or field to a friend who came by: "Oh, Fatima made that." Or a sudden shift in the pattern: "Zeynep showed us how to do that one." They have pointed out sometimes that a friend has put in her own mark, and a couple of times when women have learned that I was also a weaver, they have asked that I add "my sign" to their weavings. Most women have tried their best to make a social activity out of weaving, whenever possible, and so cherish input by their friends. I have always thought it rude to point out obvious errors and ask about those, but occasionally women have done so themselves, saying that they were distracted. But they have also often giggled about curious shifts in color or motif, dismissing areas of experimentation as "more interesting" -- the same thing they have coached their husbands to say if the pieces were taken to market. And young girls have told me that their mother often helped them get a piece started, and then turned it over the them, since she was very tired of weaving. Believe me: 20 year of continuous weaving can indeed be enough to produce total burnout! I've also gotten the impression more than once that defiance was sometimes expressed visually -- usually by girls who wanted to be somewhere other than at the loom. According to Leonard Helfgot, the same thing has routinely occurred in South Persian workshops, where small children forced to work long hours have delighted in adding funny elements or "mistakes" to annoy the boss.

So, to sum up, it appears to me that there are a whole range of explanations for the odd things we find in our favorite rugs. This is not to say that literal meanings or "symbolism" is not there at times. Repeatedly Anatolian women have identified small motifs in their rugs as good luck charms. For example, they have often explained the small horizontal brocaded S's inserted randomly in their kilims or cicims -- saying that they "would have many babies!" I simply object to having inexplicable features romanticized, while legitimate attempts at aesthetic solutions are minimized, and the cooperative, social nature of the production ignored.

Marla

Regards, Yon

It may not be as remarkable as it seems that friends show up at the same time in a rug's construction. If a nomadic family just set up for summer, they would all get settled in and their first rug of the season would be just about to the point where the design was becoming evident. Things would have gotten into a routine that allowed visits to each other, many with just that purpose. "I am going over to your brothers place to see how my sister in law is making out on that new rug she just started, dear."

One Baluch balisht I own has a jog in the borders on one side only, near the bottom of the field. Upon looking at the back, as Michael has suggested (and Marla has pointed out) it is obvious that a jog of one knot width was going to be needed to make the rest of the rug symmetrical side-to-side as the main element was begun. However, as Steve has noted, the weaver may have begun the rug INTENDING to have to shift the borders one knot width to fit the design in symmetrically. So we have no way of knowing whether this was done purposely or by necessity.

I have one question, Yon: Does the hypothesis include a feature of many multiple medallion rugs that begin with a partial medallion and then continue with full medallions the rest of the length? Is that partial medallion an internal elem?

Partially yours,

Patrick Weiler

A few messsages up, you wrote: Let me echo Michael's observation: Remarkable how often those friends show up just at the right moment to put their mark just at the spot we'd predict!

If I understand your hypothesis (and as recently as yesterday I thought I did), "just at the spot we'd predict" can be anywhere on the lower third of a rug; field or border, unilateral or bilateral. I suppose this is just a difference of opinion, but I don't consider that to be an exact spot. Indeed, existence of an exact spot at which the phenomenon occurs consistently would make a pretty compelling argument.

Regards,

Steve Price

As for designs being more well articulated at a rug's top end, what is more believable -- that "tradition" proscribed that, or that practice and repetition resulted automatically in more skillfully rendered motifs?

Marla

Regards, Yon

I have maintained from the beginning of this discussion that your Yomud pieces with the stray single knots are the best defined subclass illustrating the phenomena, and I have seen nothing that explains them away as incidental or accidental features.

One problem of treating all of the things that I believe to be diverse phenomena into one large one is that it confounds any attempt at analysis. I think treating them as simply another form of some historically continuous practice that includes the Pazyryk carpet's bottom border peculiarity cannot avoid getting mired down and paralyzed.

The problems is that most of the other characteristics are vaguely defined and, in any case, no evidence beyond anecdotal has been presented to show that they are any more common in one part of a rug than in another.

I hope someone will define the characteristics crisply enough to allow anyone to unambiguously identify them so a little data can be accrued. I tried to do it using the rugs in Azadi's Belouch book, but am unable to report numerical results because I was so often unsure about whether what I saw fit the criteria for the kinds of irregularities to be included. However, I did find a small number in which it was unambiguous. Some near the bottom, some near the top, one that was dead center in the vertical direction, and one that consisted of two adjacent irregularities that, when joined, formed a diagonal. Without some unambiguous definition and some statistical data, I doubt that we'll get much farther than having some people converted and others remaining nonbelievers.

Regards,

Steve Price