digital art and progressive abstraction and

The war art of Afghanistan provides the most direct link between ancient and modern in the history of art. Now there’s a claim… The precursors of digital art to photoshop in one step? Read on…

One aspect of the work I’m doing at the moment is to look at the way the process of the reproduction of Afghan “war” carpets creates a culturally specific mode of abstraction. Imagine our surprise when the progressively degraded image of the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre re-appeared as a Triple Tower image! Such mini-carpets are produced for what remains of the tourist trade – the kind of artefact which is offered at the front gate of ISAF installations to NGO employees or soldiers (like Prince Harry). Works such as these are mostly copied from the back of an earlier example, or made from memory. This hand made quality (constructed from tens of thousands of knots, built on a loom from the bottom up, file by file) results in a process of abstraction. By this I mean that what were originally very specific pictorial representations – often derived from photographs – become a less and less meaningful array of pixels through the process of copying. Making copies from copies from copies means the once finite pictorial and textual data becomes progressively scrambled – or reverts to pattern, of a kind. This is a classic instance. See how the missile below becomes the flowers above, or the “S” of USA is tipped sideways and patterned, a very familiar motif found in “traditional” and pre-war carpets…

Each knot in an Afghan carpet is a furry pixel – the earliest form of digital art – and clearly this most menial process of manual reproduction proceeds independent of the communicative intent of its original source image or cartoon. The example above has appeared recently on the internet (wouldn’t we like to track one down!) and the example below is how they first appeared in 2002. Now maybe a hundred generations apart  (including Max Allen’s observation that variation happens coevally, a kind of lateral evolution), from this evidence the iconic significance of the original has clearly become lost to those who make them.

In this multi-layered montage the map of Afghanistan is inserted behind the all-too-familiar image of the aircraft smashing into the World Trade Center. In the middle foreground of this image is a motif derived from a US PsyOps (Psychological Operations) propaganda leaflet, showing the flags of the United States and Afghanistan linked by a white dove. In the lower foreground is the deck of an aircraft carrier, launching cruise missiles toward Tora Bora, plus other elements which relate to the subsequent intervention by US-led forces. In many such contemporary carpets, the visual structure is entirely consistent with the way in which contemporary propaganda posters are now being produced in Afghanistan – a dvd with a six-month Photoshop on it costs $12 on Chicken Street – so you see plenty of sophisticated Photoshop-layered images like this on the streets of Kabul…

Apparently souvenir mats such as these are still being mass-reproduced, purportedly by Hazara people in the northern provinces. Over just less than a decade it is likely tens of thousands of these contemporary war carpets have been reproduced by hand in who knows what degraded and exploitative circumstances. As such they are prime examples of what is understood in the outside world as ‘tourist art’: the lowest common denominator of hand-crafted artefacts. Their economy makes no sense to anyone. You could buy them on eBay for 99 cents. In the absence of tourists Chicken Street in 2007 was a rather bleak remnant of a once vibrant marketplace. However these examples do provide some vital clues as to the nature of innovation in other examples of the war carpet tradition.