Allen Jones (1937 - )
Related: BDSM - pop art - human furniture
Films he contributed to: A Clockwork Orange (1971) - Maitresse (1976)
Profile
Allen Jones (born 1937) is a British pop artist famous for his exhibition of erotic sculptures, like the set Chair, Table and Hat Stand (1969), each of which turns a woman into an item of furniture. Much of his work draws on the imagery of rubber fetishism and BDSM.
Jones was born in Southampton and from 1955 to 1961 studied at the Hornsey College of Art (London); from 1961 to 1963 he taught at Croydon College of Art.
Jones designed the film Maîtresse (dir. Barbet Schroeder, 1976).
The sculptures in the Korova Milkbar from the film A Clockwork Orange were based on works by Jones. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Jones [Apr 2006]
Chair, Table and Hat Stand (1969)
In 1969 three female figures by Allen Jones each slightly larger than life size, ‘Hatstand’, ‘Table’ and ‘Chair’, were cast in fibreglass in editions of 6 by Gems Wax Models Ltd of Notting Hill, London, a firm of commercial sculptors who made (and make) shop window mannequins and sculptures for waxworks. Stylistically the figures are similar to those in Jones's paintings of c.1967-8. For the figures Jones made working drawings from memory, not in front of a model. From these drawings a professional sculptor, Dick Beech of Gems Wax Models, produced clay figures under Jones's direction; these clay figures were modified in accordance with his intentions. He wanted to make sculpture ‘without fine art marks, devoid of fine art clothing’. When the first, ‘Hatstand’, a standing figure, was finished he realized that it might be construed as a bizarre window mannequin and so he decided to process the figure so that it would not appear to be just a decorative object. This he did by giving the other two sculptures a more obvious function, that of being a table and a chair, so that the viewer's expectation of what could be fine art would be questioned and allow the viewer to perceive the figure anew as a subject in art. --http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=7232&searchid=8172&tabview=text [Feb 2005]
'You Don't Know What's Happening, Do You Mr. Jones?' (1973) - Laura Mulvey
[...] 'You Don't Know What's Happening, Do You Mr. Jones?'" first appeared in 1973 in the British feminist magazine Spare Rib. In it, Mulvey critiqued the work of British pop artist Allen Jones who had produced a series of sculptures in 1970 called Women as Furniture in which "life-size effigies of women, slave-like and sexually provocative, double as hat-stands, tables and chairs." Some of these may be familiar as they were featured in a scene in Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. Mulvey pointed out that Jones was simply repeating a cultural trope or set of conventions which could be seen in many forms of popular culture and mass media: fashion magazines such as Vogue, Harper's and Bazaar, news magazines such as Life, advertisements of all sorts, TV shows, and films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Barbarella. Mulvey's point was that Jones, like many male auteurs in the visual arts was speaking in the language of fetishism. --source unidentifiedSee also: Laura Mulvey
your Amazon recommendations