Allen jones is a British pop artist best known for his Figurative paintings and sculptures. His work is a based around feminism, which looks at male and female power dynamics, which celebrates and satirizes fetishes and BDSM practices.
- Born 1937 – Present
He is an accomplished artist who has been awarded the Prix des Jeunes Artistes at the 1963 Paris Biennale. As well as being a senior academician at the royal academy award of arts, he also received the Honorary Doctor of Arts award from Southampton Solent University.
A collection of work that I am interested in, is the Hatstand, Table and Chair, involving fibreglass “fetish” mannequins, debuted to protests in 1970. I think these are particularly special due to the context of how/why they were made. Being a man to make work openly saying you are a “feminist” in the 1970″S was a big deal, especially when women were still not fully recognised in the art industry.
Figure: 775 (h) x 571 × 991 mm
Rug: 100 (h) x 800 × 1000 mm
There are many aspects that I like about this work, one of the main ones being their composition and size. Chair for example, had similar dimensions to that of a female body, so you could say it was intentional that the artist wanted us to feel like this could be a person in front of us. I think his use of representing the female body in this way is risqué, but very clever. Initially you might think that this is how he sees women but, in my opinion it looks like he is brining light to the misogynistic ways of men, valuing women simply as objects. Something that this reminds me of is the old James Bond 007 movies, the way that women were only there to be objects of desire, seeing how this would’ve been made around then, it could’ve been an influence.
I especially like how they have been constructed, the finish that he has got on them is really smooth and gentle. I have attempted to obtain this finish in fibre glass, but haven’t had much luck, however this has encouraged me to want to try different finishes on fibre glass and experiment with that.
I think what I particularly like about “table” is its use of mirrors to represent beauty standards and body image, especially when they have used bondage to represent fetishisation. My work also looks at body image, specifically how women see themselves after going through a pregnancy, and what that does to them.
CONTROVERSY
Understandably though, his work was thought to be misogynistic and he, have a castration complex ( the whole combination of the child’s unconscious feelings and fantasies associated with being deprived of the phallus), that he was only create work of his own fantasies and nothing more. It casued outrage with feminists and at the ICA in 1978 protesters let off stink bombs at a Jones exhibition, and on International Women’s Day in 1986 a demonstrator poured paint stripper over Chair in the Tate in an attempt to deface it.