The Rugs of War exhibition is surprisingly unsettling, though it’s hard to say why. Rugs, woven by Afghan refugees and natives, embody a history of astonishing violence. But far from being real, this violence is stylised and symbolic. It hangs on the walls, two-dimensional Kalashnikovs and Blackhawks trickling through the colour wheel like rain. And yet, when you look at these images something extends into you. The rugs, though rooted to the material, transcend it, and gazing into them feels perilous. There is something sensitive here, and for the Westerner, a distinct feeling that – somehow – the rugs are looking back.
What makes this seductive composite of beauty and danger? The rugs are aesthetically pleasing, no doubt about that, but woven behind these simple depictions is a dazzling array of representation. Two square metres of woven fabric is transformed into half a million hand-knotted pixels, each one containing emotion, politics, gender and war. More than that, however, each rug is a dynamic representation of globalisation and the powerful relationships we have with the third world.
The emotion is perhaps the most readily accessible. The dialectic of war began creeping into Afghan rugs with the Soviet invasion of the late seventies. Classical formations and patterns, when examined, transformed into guns and tanks. War was leaving an indelible mark on both the art and the livelihoods of Afghans. Though originally war rugs were not a commercial venture, the presence of soviet officers looking for souvenirs put a definite – albeit small – demand on them. Along with the guns, Cyrillic script began making an appearance. As the war drew on, however, Afghan refugees found new homes – and markets – in Peshawar, Pakistan. As the representations intensified, another, much larger, consumer group was born: westerners.
Aid agencies, journalists, and military all wanted unique items to bring back home, and, slowly, war rugs begin making their way into the developed world. Collectors, agents, and eventually auction houses and galleries bought the rugs, increasing both demand and variety.
When you see a war rug, this dichotomy flies to the core of your experience. The personal; the breath-takingly personal, collides with the mercantile. In the wake of the War on Terror, rugs depicting the World Trade Center and the events of September 11 sprung up. This was not an Afghan concern, rather, it was their market’s. And so we are faced with dissecting personal from profit; what do these rugs say about Afghanistan, and what, equally piercingly, do they say about us?
The rugs, for Westerners, represent a looking-glass self. A representation of Afghanistan – not how we see it, nor how it sees itself, but how it sees us seeing it. For better and for worse, this cat’s cradle firmly puts the emphasis back on Westerners. How do we see Afghanistan? Why is there a demand for these rugs and what right do we have to analyse them?
Ambiguous authorship only muddies these waters further. The war rugs could have come from a dozen hands, or one. What we are witness to, is a truly collective creativity. Who, really, made these rugs? A person? A tribe? A country? This answer, is of course, all of them. Themes coalesce and develop through these rugs and years, both independently and in symbiosis.
Classical patterns give way to asymmetrical representations. Earthen colours are drowned under pastel explosions and yet the core remains the same. These rugs are embodied – not with a casual depiction of warfare and its accessories – but with the staggering preponderance of it. For a Westerner, war has become a set menu of discourses and modes. Filtered through television, angry editorials and a yearning/disgust for the past, our experience with war is undeniably second-hand and unavoidably fictionalised.
The rugs represent a silent comeback to this. Hanging on the walls, they are doors to an experience that both shames and attracts us. Globalisation has given Westerners a powerful key to these otherlands because – despite the tangled skein of representation and lies – we have experienced these events. In one way or another, we know them, and looking at the rugs we can use our experience to bridge a frequently unassailable gap.
This is not to be confused with an exoneration, however. Western complicity is bound to every thread in the exhibition. The rugs may have been woven by Afghans, but we built the guns, and in the case of Afghanistan, we also built the war(s).
Staring at the choppers and mortar explosions, we are forced to construct our own looking glass self. Is this what they think of us? we ask. The question is unanswerable and alluring, but the exhibition strives to quell our speedy construction of an Other. Yes, this is in a sense “tribal” art, and a whiff of Orientalism is unavoidable. But our distance is an illusory victory, and the rugs deftly twist it into something resonant, and supremely valuable.
When we see this art, we are seeing the local, and the personal. But through our shared experience – the concept of a shrinking globe; an international community in the true sense of the word – this becomes our personal, and our local. The rugs are unique because, by and large, this is a phenomenon attendant on globalisation, but unlike the first-person screams of the internet; magnified, specific and informal, this is not a bourgeois phenomenon.
These events have touched the creators’ lives in a horrifyingly personal, devastating way. We cannot capture that. It is a concrete reality we are lucky is inaccessible, except as an abstract form. But, the Rugs of War are abstract. Married to a world of personal emotion, politics and control, they suck us in without a choice. Unsettled, we peer at the threads, hoping to see through them and into a truth that we can reconcile with our condition, but a twist of the light, and the mirror becomes a window. What lies on the other side? Hopefully, the future.
The Rugs of War exhibition was a joint venture by the National Institute of the Arts and The Centre for Cross Cultural Research at the ANU, curated by Nigel Lendon and Tim Bonyhady. The catalogue can be viewed at www.anu.edu.au/ITA/CSA/publications/publications.html
