Matmee — Thai Silk Ikats, part 7: Some thoughts on the art and — art in general
In my last post wrote:
“From speaking to and watching the weavers at work one can see that their work is a source of happiness to them: 1) it allows them to experience the satisfaction of flow (concentration upon successful execution of a challenging task); 2) it affords them the aesthetic pleasures of a) looking at beautiful colors and surfaces and b) of bringing things into an order (think of the pleasure of reassembling a picture puzzle); and
3) it is perhaps their only activity in which they can earn cash and admiration for something they do: within the silk world, good weavers are famous; outside of it, in the eyes of the world, they’re just ordinary rice farmers.”
In fact, the relationship of matmee weavers to their work is very much typical of the relationship of all traditional artists to their craft.
Likewise, the experience of the end-user of matmee has all the characteristics typical of the way traditional arts are and have been consumed world over: collectors’ appreciation centers around three factors: a) technical evaluation of the quality of the work and b) of its various technical features, both of which require (and display) non-arbitrary expertise (a piece of silk either is a good work or it is not; the dies either are or are not natural; a weave either is or is not typical of Surin, etc.) and c) a kind of experience of rapture when looking at the dazzling patterns and color combinations.
Traditional arts have worked this way universally – from Patancas to Ibaragi, from weaving to fresco painting: the primary concerns are with technique (its development, acquisition, understanding and command); acquisition and display of a large body of lore; and the experience of rapture in appreciation of the end product.
(By rapture I mean a psychological state induced by the way shapes, patterns and colors interact with our cognitive apparatus on a non-verbal, non-theoretical level. A good work confounds and astonishes the consumer, it literally boggles the mind – makes a powerful but incomprehensible impression, providing a kind of out of the mind experience (“je ne se quoi”): a sense of wonder).
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Current western theories of art, which have evolved over the last century in response the phenomenon of modern (“conceptual”) art – such as that art is a kind of game (Gadamer), whose rules are negotiated as part of its conduct (Danto), etc. – do not really apply to traditional arts. (Perhaps one could say that they are not specific enough to pick out traditional arts, but it also seems that they are not specific enough to pick out anything: after all, almost any human activity – driving, for instance – consists of negotiating the rules as we go along, etc).
Indeed, traditional arts are best understood in contrast with modern art theory and practice. Main differences lie in two areas, in the area of denotation, and in the area of aesthetic experience.
Denotation
In terms of denotation, discourse in the traditional arts is
1. specific (type of die-used, say)
(Traditional art does not afford the critic the opportunity to display general erudition or verbal playfulness or intellectual originality. A critic either knows something specific, or he is a fool).
2. non-arbitrary (x is or is not in y technique)
(It is expressly not true that an unlimited number of mutually contradictory judgments and opinions concerning a single work are possible: the technique determines unmistakably what is to be judged as good and or bad).
3. never touches on interpretation
(Artist’s “intention” – “meaning” — if any — is given a priori by the genre: Madonnas are for worship, kris are for stabbing, etc. “Traditional arts means nothing”).
Aesthetic Experience
Appreciation of all traditional arts evolves around the work’s ability to spark a mental state which I propose to name rapture – a baffling cognitive response to the work, distinctly non-verbal (“otherwordly”) — indescribable and therefore generally not discussed — but nevertheless essential to any work to be considered of value.
This is not to say that aesthetic rapture is entirely absent from modern art (some pursues it and achieves it) but it does seem that modern art practice is rarely interested in aesthetic rapture; its main interest lies in sparking an altogether different mental state: a kind of intellectual bafflement, i.e. an experience of verbally accessible paradox (e.g. how can there be spiked irons or how can a toilet bowl be an art object, how come 2 + 2 is 4 and not 7, etc.). Traditional arts take no interest in this kind of experience at all.
Indeed, one could say that traditional arts have almost nothing in common with modern art.
Matmee — Thai Silk Ikats, part 6: current state of affairs
Matmee weaving has been on an accelerating decline: there are ever fewer weavers as old weavers retire but no young people enter the profession. I know several Khon Kaen girls whose mothers’ weave, and who are proud of their mothers’ work, but who themselves have not woven a thread and would not weave one if their life depended on it: to their minds, weaving stinks of old, passe countryside life which they are eager to leave behind. Almost any other menial city job seems better.
More importantly, mothers choose not to teach their daughters: they prefer for their girls to complete schooling and move to the city. The city seems to them to promise an easier life — even if the girls should end up, as they usually do, in the ranks of city proletariat. And even though teaching their daughters to weave in their spare time, after school or on weekends, would not subtract from the child’s education, but on the contrary, enhance her repertoire of skills, somehow, they do not: weaving does not stand alone in their minds as a valuable skill; but forms an inalienable a part of the village-woman’s life. To their minds, one begins to leave the village by first abandoning the weaving.
Economic incentives play their part, too: it takes between 4 and 12 weeks to weave a full-patterned matmee. This effort is well rewarded for master weavers who turn out the best work, priced in the hundreds-of-dollars-and-up range (remember that the weaving is done in the breaks between other kinds of work!) but in the case of ordinary pieces commanding prices in the under-hundred-dollars range, the financial rewards are not high: a Khon Kaen girl working in a bar in Bangkok makes $30 – $50 a night.
The demand-side economics isn’t good, either: buyers who were reportedly numerous before the Asian Monetary Crisis of 1997, have largely disappeared. Perhaps that crisis had the same effect on Thai middle class that the current global crisis is having on our own middle class today: the middle class itself is coming to an end as we know it. All traditional artists and dealers whom I meet today – world over – tell the same story: the American and European middle class have dropped out form the market completely, leaving only two market segments: cheap junk at the bottom and super-rich at the top. It seems that many of the traditional arts which I am studying will probably not survive the forthcoming two decades of economic stagnation.
The owner of the Chonnabot Thai Silk Factory says his firm used to employ about 100 weavers in late 1980s; on a recent Monday, there were two.
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From speaking to and watching the weavers at work one can see that their work is a source of happiness to them: 1) it allows them to experience the satisfaction of flow (concentration upon successful execution of a challenging task); 2) it affords them the aesthetic pleasures of a) looking at beautiful colors and surfaces and b) of bringing things into an order (think of the pleasure of reassembling a picture puzzle); and
3) it is perhaps their only activity in which they can earn cash and admiration for something they do: within the silk world, good weavers are famous; outside of it, in the eyes of the world, they’re just ordinary rice farmers.
It does not occur to these women that by failing to teach their daughters, they deprive them of an important source of happiness.
Matmee — Thail Silk Ikat, part 5
First prize winner
Winners of the Khon Kaen Silk Weaving Competition
And now we come to the meat of this series of posts, and the reason why it came into existence in the first place: the Khon Kaen Silk Festival, mainly the usual fair-ground-cum-walking-market, full of people in flip-flops eating food on a stick — the sort of ado which seems to arise at the drop of a hat in Thailand — but with a serious hard core: two rooms of silk dealers from the whole country, each with the wares from his province (other silk weaving traditions exist in other provinces of Thailand) — and, at its center — the silk weaving awards. It is pretty much the only place in the world today where a mere mortal can hope to catch even a glimpse of really, really good matmee.
Winners on display
This post proudly features several of the winners of the competition. Second prize is perhaps my favorite:
Second prize winner
But how do you choose between all these beauties? The winners aren’t just good technically — indeed, the patterns seen at the competition are rarely seen elsewhere precisely because they are technically so challenging —
Third prize winner
but they are also made with the traditional natural dies — extracted from plants, minerals and animals — which is one of the conditions for entering the competition. They therefore represent the heart of the tradition and of the Khon Kaen silk aesthetic: somber, serious, and, for all its gorgeousness, refinedly understated.
Also ran
Also ran, too
Eat your pretty hearts out.
Matmee — Thai Silk Ikat, part 4
I bought these during a previous trip to Khon Kaen, in 2003. All were bought on the loom. Three out of four have been sewn into clothing, for which — my profuse apologies to humanity. Had I known then just how endangered the art was, or how hard to find these pieces would become, and how soon, I would have never put them to the scissors.
Matmee — Thai Silk Ikat, Part 2
Broadly, there are three kinds of Thai matmee: Khon Kaen (also known as Chonnabot) are flat weaves, often three-ply (obverse and reverse are different color), often in raw-silk (silk that feels almost like sand-paper to the touch) and use very thin thread resulting in small, very tight patterns; Chayaphum which are flat-weaves with thicker thread and coarser patterns usually on raw two-ply silk (as rough to the touch, but less stiff); and Surin where the most famous silks are very fine, soft two-ply silks with an additional (three-dimensional) twill pattern – resulting in subtle interplay between the the three dimensional pattern of the twill and the flat color pattern of the cloth.
Most matmee weavers are housewife-farmers and work at home, usually on a rented loom stored below the house (traditional Thai houses stand on stilts and the loom stands underneath it). They tend to work in spurts, when other work is slack, less during crop planting and gathering, more during December – May, with largest number of pieces available on the market from about March through June. Although there does exist a network of stores, both locally and nationally, which buy up inventory during March-June and offer it for resale year-round, their product offer tends to be relatively low quality, with prices in the range of $40-80 per 4-meter length. This is not to say that these pieces are bad: even ordinary matmee can be very beautiful:
Notes on The Cultured Life 
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