It has been a vintage season for mannequins. At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, an exhibition called Silent Partners looks at the relationship between artist and mannequin, from function to fetish. In London, the Royal Academy is hosting a retrospective of the work of British artist and Academician Allen Jones. Jones, who is now 77, became obsessed with mass-produced imagery of eroticised women. As the show makes clear, he never really got over it.
During the 1960s, Jones emerged as a leading pop artist. His contemporaries at the Royal College of Art included Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney, but he was expelled after a year. His big break came in 1969 with his trio of fibreglass sculptures that portrayed women as pieces of furniture. Unsurprisingly, ‘Hat Stand’, ‘Table’ and ‘Chair’ (all of which are on show) didn’t exactly chime with contemporary feminist discourse. In 1986, ‘Chair’ had acid thrown on it when it was exhibited at Tate Britain.
But what to make of them today? As objects, these hyper-realistic sculptures are still intriguing to look at, but political discourse has moved on. Feminism’s third wave reclaimed symbols previously seen as disempowering, such as stilettos and fetishwear. So perhaps Jones’s women are blissfully happy as sex objects? Only a few weeks ago, Kim Kardashian elected to be photographed for Paper magazine with a glass of champagne balanced on her bottom — part drinks trolley, part Hottentot Venus. Sexual politics certainly haven’t become any less murky, that’s for sure. Jones’s sculptures speak of a time when sexual boundaries were more defined, and depicting a woman as a piece of furniture wasn’t seen as a triumph for feminism.
The exhibition follows Jones’s development from the 1960s to the present day, although the show abandons chronology in favour of thematic groupings.
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