Joel Greifinger

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for taking some of the clunkers out of the bunker and opening a salon that fits comfortably within my collecting experience. As you suggest, there are lots of categories of ugly, but in this thread, I'd like to see if we can accumulate a sub-set that I am particularly curious about: rugs that you know any competent collector will find very ugly, but that you nonetheless really like. These are the sort of rugs you can show to regular people (i.e. non-ruggies) because they will often like them too, but would quickly get you shunned at your local rug society or draw polite disdain if you posted them on your favorite on-line site "where rug enthusiasts can connect."
To get it started, I submit the following yastik. I can't say that it was one of the first pieces I bought, before I had seen the light and had forsworn the horror of bad orange. Although it was bought online, I saw the colors for what they were, and liked it that way. Of course, by now, my tastes should have matured and I should be able to regard the piece with mild nostalgia for my former naivete and so gracefully expose my early foible. But the truth is, I still like it.



Can other folks see the inner beauty of some of their "ugly ruglings"?

Joel Greifinger

Patrick Weiler

Joel,

You have now introduced the rug community to another new term in rug descriptions:
Mutant.
"That is a serious Mutant version of a design which I formerly considered attractive and collectible."
It would previously have been described as a "degenerate" version, however your piece takes "degenerate" to an entirely new level.
The weaver probably flunked out of Pakistani Bokhara weaving class.
I now need to drink some Milk of Magnesia in order to quell the discomfort.
It does have a surfeit of Quirkiness, though.
Thank you for sharing!

Patrick Weiler

Steve Price

Hi Folks

Darwin wrote Origin of Species before anyone knew even the basics of genetics, and used the word "monsters" for what we'd now call mutants. It somehow seems relevant to Joel's use of the word.

Incidentally, I don't think Joel's yastik would qualify as ugly in a color-blind world. It's the aggressive orange and the gray background that are so jarring to our oh-so-evolved sensibilities.

Regards

Steve Price

Dinie Gootjes

Hi Patrick and Joel,

Great fun, this Salon, Patrick. It seems to show that we, ruggies, are mere fallible humans after all . Painful.

Joel, here is a rug which should have been the crowning glory of our Baluch collecting, but notice the modal verb.

I spied this glimpse of Baluch birds on an obscure selling website.



Of course the hunt for the elusive Bird Baluch was on. The seller did not want to bother with taking more pictures. But as her price was as low as the information density of her picture, we took a gamble and bought it. The following pictures tell the rest of the story: fading and bleeding all around:





All our non-ruggie friends love it. I do too, with some reservations .
By the way, when I talked over the phone to the lady who sold this rug, I was reminded that recognizing this design as birds is in part learned behaviour. When I asked whether there was anything else but birds on the part of the rug that was invisible on her picture, she told me somewhat testily that there were no birds on it, only rectangles. She had lived with the piece for more than 30 years...

The second item also involves a Baluch and a hunt. The Baluch is a very nice little bag face which should not have to appear in this Salon at all. It has soft, silky wool, darkish but unusual and pleasing colours, a simple, well executed design and an extremely regular, competent weave. The hunt is for the two-legged varmint who "improved" the design by tracing three sides of the ivory square. With indelible ink.





Any hints for the removal of either the varmint or the ink would be appreciated.

Dinie

Richard Larkin

Hi Dinie,

How interesting that the lady indignantly rejected the theory of birds. If she'd been holding out for reindeer, I might understand, but rectangles? Notice that the same or a similar herding dog as showed up on my Boteh (grenade) rug is all over yours. It must be a breed prized by the nomads. Or maybe those are reindeer, and sled dogs with them.

This particular kind of Baluch piece raises a sub-issue in the context of Patrick's quest for the ugly and odd. It is the rug that happens to sport a (temporarily?) trendy design, and thereby manages to travel above its proper station in the marketplace, however ugly it may actually be. I think many asmalyks fall under that heading, too, etc. Patrick's/Joel's notion of "mutant" can be consulted in this regard.

There is at least one odd duck in your mix for certain, viz., the "varmint" who needed to blacken in the square frame. Are we looking at the work of a mischievous little brat whose backside needed a good tanning? Did he get it? We'll never know.

Rich Larkin

Joel Greifinger

Hi Dinie,

Your Bird Baluch bagface provides a useful way to illustrate the process of socialization into ruggiehood. Not so very long ago, my first and probably enduring reaction to the piece would have been to find it playful and charming. I would have appreciated neither the trendiness (referred to by Rich) and resultant desirability of the design nor have bothered to turn the piece over to compare the colors on front and back. Since on my computer screens I can’t seem to discern the bleeding (which, if more obvious, might have been an unfortunate distraction) it would have seemed a strange choice to include in a discussion that was even remotely about ugliness. So, at this distance and not in my own possession, I still quite like it.


These days, however, when a package is delivered containing a rug that I have purchased online, I begin even before it is out of its plastic garbage bag (the universal wrapping) to closely inspect for bleeding, tip fading, color changes suggesting traces of fugitive dyes or any suspect ‘hot’ hues. All of this before I even lay the piece out flat to take in the overall look and feel of the rug. If any of the initial micro-investigation turns up even mildly affirmative results (“Uhh, nooo! There’s some tip fading!!) it will take an act of will not to careen into disappointment and negativity. This may be even more intense if the piece is otherwise very pleasing ("Oh well, it’s got great, soft, lustrous wool.”) and reaches operatic proportions if the shipping charge for returning it would be a substantial proportion of what I paid in the first place. Did I mention my propensity to try to get "bargains"?


But here’s a rug from before all the angst that comes with membership in the club. Actually, this one doesn’t have a trace of tip fading, no fugitive dyes, no bleeding. It's sin: the colors are very saturated and hot as hell.

This might be another example of Patrick’s mutant category. It is a perfectly well-drawn version of a Chahar Mahal design that Edwards (Pl. 355) attributes to the Armenian village of Hajibad. It just happens to look like it has ingested psychedelics




This happy number now performs productive service as a rug pad for a quirky, but by no means ugly, old Luri.

Joel Greifinger

Patrick Weiler

Dinie,

Would you please return my black felt-tip marker?!
I once contemplated buying a bag face which, upon close inspection had been Magic-Marker "repaired" in several worn areas, with iridescent green. I did not buy it, but probably because it was pre-internet and I could actually see the tragic damage perpetrated upon it.
As for the bird baluch, your lament about the seller not wanting to take more pictures reminds me of a Kurdish salt bag I bought on e-bay. I asked for a photo of the back, but "it is in a glass-covered frame and I don't want to take it out".
Needless to say, a single picture of the back would have shown that the piece was actually radioactive.
I still have radiation burns from handling it.
On occasion I am tempted to bid on a bird baluch, but Steve Price owns one of the nicest I have ever seen and none that appear on auction sites has ever approached that pinnacle of perfection. My plan is to wait for the next economic depression, when formerly wealthy, evicted rug collectors are sleeping on the tattered remains of their 18th century silk Heriz rugs and I can get one for a song.
Your bird baluch is lovely at a distance and probably fulfills Joel's criteria for a piece which non-collectors would admire but die-hard collectors would disdain.
Joel, your Chahar Mahal reminds me a bit of the Bakhtiari I showed in the Salon. From the photos it appears innocuous enough, but that first peek into the black plastic bag elicits a groan of disapproval.
In an effort to placate you, here is a piece which not only collectors would ignore, but the general public as well. It is a "Shiraz", likely of Arab origin. It is probably mid 20th century, with what appears to be about a century of wear.

It is missing several rows of knots at both ends, the awful orange is everywhere, the condition is horrible and the design is pedestrian at best.

It does, however, contain a few ugly ducklings swimming about and it suffices as a bedside mat to keep the toes from getting too cold on a frigid winter morning.
When I become elderly and blind, I will not know that I am walking on a wretched wreck of a miserable mess of rug weaving.

Patrick Weiler

Filiberto Boncompagni

Voila’… This is half of a (probably) Kurdish kilim from the Van area. I apologize for the poor quality of the pictures: they were shot with my previous 1.3 megapix digicam.





The second photo gives a better idea of the colors.

Marvelous radioactive orange and fluorescent pink, aren’t they? The design is also superb example of graphic-inducing motion sickness.
I bought it because it was very cheap and we could use it to make cushions.

Compared to a good Van kilim, one could certainly define it as a mutation, or a monster... Perhaps I was attracted by what of the original model is still visible in this “degenerate” version.

To these days the fragment is resting in a trunk, untouched. Should I consider again the cushions option?

Regards,

Filiberto

Patrick Weiler

Filiberto,

That rug is proof positive that psychedelic drugs were used in eastern Anatolia a hundred years ago!
I am quite surprised that immigration officials allowed you to bring it into the country when you moved a while back.
I hope the box you keep that in was purchased from Pandora.

Patrick Weiler

Richard Larkin

Hi Filiberto,

It's a small point, but on my monitor, that orange doesn't look too bad. From here, it could be the amber orange one finds and prizes in those kinds of rugs. I'll take your word for it, though. There are OK pinks out there, as well, but I guess your kilim doesn't have them.

Anyway, it's odd when somebody challenges somebody else on TurkoTek to deny the proposition that the rug belonging to the somebody else is ugly.

Regards.

Rich Larkin

James Blanchard

Actually, I wouldn't dismiss "non-collectors" so swiftly. My wife and two daughters are what you might call "non-collectors", and they have saved me from the occasional disastrous purchase that seemed like a good "tribal" piece, or a "collector" piece. When a reasonable "non-collector" says "that's really ugly", it can sometimes snap us back into reality.

Joel Greifinger

But James,

If I allow regular (i.e. non-ruggie) folk to influence my purchasing decisions, how will I feel certain that the motley assortment of sometimes authentic but thoroughly dilapidated weavings folded under all of the beds in my house will grow apace? They might let “reality” dissuade me from giving a home to yet another fragmented, down-to-the-foundation antique near-treasure.

Joel Greifinger

Filiberto Boncompagni

Psychedelic drugs, Pat? Nah, more likely shoddy work. And I have a lot of Pandora’s boxes because here we have a bakery-confectionery chain with that name.

Rich, the colors of the second picture should be quite faithful: I spent a lot of time in calibrating them. Then again, it was years ago and a different screen. I should dig the piece out for comparison but we are going away for a few weeks…

In any case, it isn’t only a matter of colors: see the crooked design and structure? Well, if rustic-ness is a quality - and that is what attracted me - this piece if a rustic masterpiece. Or monsterpiece, rather.
Regards,

Filiberto

James Blanchard

Joel,

It's a good point. My advice is not to ask someone unafflicted by rug collecting neurosis if you are seriously considering that fragmented dusty bundle of knots that is luring you. They'll almost never "get it", but we must realize that this is how we end up with some rather ugly pieces from time to time.

A social experience that is somewhat unique to tribal/antique rug collectors is when friends and acquaintances who are not aficionados visit your home and see your floors and walls furrily festooned with fabulous tribal finery. The uncommon response is "my, what lovely rugs you have!" The common response is something like "so... are these old or rare, or something?" They really want to give you the benefit of the doubt, and we must realize that they have not had the opportunity of being acculturated into the wonderful world of antique rugs and textiles.

James

Richard Larkin

Hi all,

James touches on an issue that often comes to my mind. Contrary to prevalent rumors, not all my rugs are plug-ugly. I like to think some of them actually look pretty good. Yet, it is quite rare that anybody visiting the house says, "These rugs are really nice." Or even, "What can you tell me about these rugs." When I say "anybody," I'm talking civilians, of course. Is there actually an infectiious disease that can be found in the lab that those of us who really admire Baluch peacocks share? Does one have to test positive to notice 19th century rugs hanging on the wall? (James should be able to settle those questions.)

I used to occasionally give a rug talk with slides, etc., to clubs and such. I had a 5 x 7 Kashan, ca. 1950, with the central field in gold silk and the border field in white silk. The design was in wool, about 12 perfectly respectable chrome dyes in a sort of mille fleurs design. I admit I brought that rug specifically because when I unrolled it, and the overhead lights washed over that silk, everybody went, "Oooh!" Pretty crass, I know, but if I had brought the Baluch ToL prayer rug, nobody would have blinked.

Rich Larkin

Dinie Gootjes

Patrick,

Return your marker now? Sorry, I've got one more side to do.

We also once contemplated buying a bag which had been improved with a marker. We then went ahead and bought it :: The hot colours in the centre were hidden with a dark blue marker. This one was not light fast, unlike the one you lent us. I don't know which would be preferable in this case.





But to get our self respect back: here is company for your winged lady with the headphones. These ladies hung their wings out to dry and use Bluetooth headsets. But though I downloaded the picture, I did not load ourselves down with the original.



Very respectfully yours,

Dinie

Joel Greifinger

James,

To illustrate my point (or, more accurately, beat a dead horse) I submit these photos of a Caucasian soumak. I am unable to post pictures of the overall rug, because it's humongous. I'm sure you'll be able to extrapolate to the larger effect.





If I had had a regular person (my wife, say) standing behind me as I was about to make that last minute bid in the ebay auction that brought this item into my life, she might have pointed not only to its raggedy state but its general aesthetic deficiencies. If that had happened, my finger might not have hit the 'Place bid' button in a timely manner and I would have been deprived forever of having what was surely a potentially semi-near-treasure folded in a large stack under the bed providing a comfortable breeding ground for the moths-in-training to attack its nearby neighbors. Pass up such opportunities? And choose to re-enter the 'cave' of one's pre-enlightened, non-ruggie state? I shudder to think...

Joel Greifinger