The War Rugs Edition
On craft, demand, and history
Colin here. I was browsing King Kennedy rugs the other day and wondered about the deeper backstory of some of the “war rugs” on the site. Instead of your typical woven rug patterns, there are images of opium, drones, and AK-47s. Another set of rugs hints at the lasting legacy of wars: unexploded ordnance rugs made of life-sized images of dangerous things lying around Afghanistan.
According to the Conversation:
The earliest rugs seem to have emerged shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 from refugee camps in Pakistan, where millions of Afghans had relocated. Featuring guns, helicopters and tanks, they were small and shoddily made with coarse wool. Rug sellers and souvenir shops pitched them to workers for non-government organizations and Western government officials…
Why is this interesting?
Many of the rugs were woven in the country and intended for sale as souvenirs. Most originated from Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif, cities with a concentration of foreign workers and, in pre-war times, tourists. The temptation of the media has been to cover them in a poetic way: the weaving of personal trauma into a product is a very tasty narrative for a writer to bite down on. But that may be reading too deeply into the situation.
Ultimately, it is the novelty and market demand that is shaping the rugs—which are brought home as souvenirs or traded on sides like Etsy or eBay. Rug merchants want to sell, so they follow the trends, which are then passed on to the weavers.
The Verge summarizes: “Do they come from the initiative of the weavers themselves, or of middlemen on the lookout for new markets?” asked anthropologist Brian Spooner, writing about war rugs for an exhibition in 2011.
We now know the answer is the latter.
It is tempting to read deeper into emotional scars, embuing meaning into the craft, but it is it seems that everyday supply and demand forces are shaping this particular output. With that said, it is interesting to see the refraction of years and years of war put back into something we normally thoughtlessly adorn our floors with. (CJN)
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Thanks for reading,
Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN)
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There were similar weavings coming out of Laos and Vietnam after the conflict there. Twenty-five years ago at a folk art show I bought a small quilt with helicopters and guys in black pajamas.
In that case, I think it was definitely created to satisfy demand from Americans. For one thing, quilted wall hangings are not an art form practiced in southeast Asia. And the subject doesn't seem like one that the locals would want to commemorate and use their homes.
I was just rereading Noah's great article on 2x2s - it's actually the reason I just subscribed - and thinking about how you could get a 2x2 into the article. One axis would be the source of demand, local or remote. Not sure about the other axis. But once you start reading about 2x2s, you turn into the baby with a hammer.