The man who turned half-naked women into chairs — and called it art
WEARING a pristine white shirt and jeans, her hair swept up primly, the girlfriend of billionaire soccer club owner Roman Abramovich was clearly aiming to project the image of a sophisticated art expert when she gave an interview to an upmarket fashion blog.
But if that was her intention, it was fatally undermined by the fact that she was pictured sitting on a chair made from a lifelike mannequin of a scantily clad black woman lying on her back with her legs in the air.
Worse, the pictures appeared online on Martin Luther King Day, on which millions of Americans commemorate the achievements of the man who did so much to promote black rights.
After being accused of racism, socialite Dasha Zhukova has now been forced to apologise. The darling of the celebrity circuit – who owns her own art gallery in Moscow – insisted the artwork was, in fact, a protest against prejudice.
The chair, designed by a Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard, was ‘an artwork intended specifically as a commentary on gender and racial politics’, she claimed. Her somewhat self-serving explanation is not unlike that offered by the man on whose erotic furniture Melgaard based his chair.
It was in 1969 that British artist Allen Jones, a friend and contemporary of David Hockney at London’s Royal College of Art, designed a set of sculptures – a hat-stand, table and chair – all incorporating fibreglass models of submissive women (although they were white, not black) in skimpy leather outfits.
The sculptures were cast in fibreglass by a company that produced mannequins for shop windows at a cost of £1,500 each. Their leather clothing was made by the same firm that supplied the skin-tight cat-suits worn by Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in the TV series The Avengers.
They caused a storm of protest when they were first exhibited in 1970. Feminists, not surprisingly, took great exception to the way they objectified women, turning them into nothing more than a piece of furniture, something on which men could hang their hats or put their pint glass.
FANTASISING about women as furniture is known to psychologists as forniphilia. The radical feminist magazine Spare Rib suggested Jones must be terrified of women and have a ‘castration complex’. When the sculptures were later exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, stink bombs and smoke bombs were thrown at them.
‘ There was an i ncredible furore,’ Jones later recalled.
The Guardian newspaper suggested he should be banned from exhibiting.
‘It was tough stuff and I wasn’t expecting it.’
Some years l ater, when ‘Woman As An Armchair’ was shown at the Tate, it was attacked with paint-stripper that shrivelled the skin on the mannequin’s face. It has since been restored. The attackers were never caught but as i t took place on International Women’s Day, i t was assumed feminists were behind it.
Like Dasha Zhukova, Jones claimed the art never set out to be offensive – and was protesting against sexism, not revelling in it. His principal aim, he says, was to be i conoclastic. With sculpture as an art form having gone out of fashion by the Sixties, Jones wanted to revive it, but by using industrial materials. ‘My idea was to offend canons of art at the time,’ he explains.
Yet he has admitted being motivated by other, some what less lofty impulses than artistic radicalism. Part of the inspiration came from the sight of scantily clad women walking round London in miniskirts and hot-pants.
Jones says: ‘I was liv- ing in Chelsea and I had an interest in the female figure and the sexual charge that comes from it. Every Saturday on the King’s Road you saw that skirts were shorter, the body was being displayed in some new way. The following week, someone would up the ante.’
Those visions were to fuel his artistic imagination, producing not only his women as furniture, but striking images of seemingly endless legs wearing stilettoes.
Born in Southampton and brought up in London, Jones moved to New York after being expelled from art college for ‘excessive independence’.
During the Sixties, his work became more and more sexually explicit, until his friend David Hockney observed that one of his paintings looked like an illustration to a fetishist magazine.
Jones, rather than feeling chastened, began collecting such magazines and his art became ever more focused on sex: women with whips, women in bondage wear, women with painted male genitalia superimposed across their torsos. But he became frustrated that th t th the curves of f hi his f fantasy t women could not be adequately expressed on a flat canvas.
So he decided to turn to sculpture, using modern, industrial materials rather than traditional clay or metal.
His wife Janet posed happily for a magazine alongside the table and hat- stand, kneeling topless on a chair, wearing stockings and a corset, looking disturbingly like one of her husband’s sculptures.
Although never as famous as his contemporaries Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol, Jones was at the forefront of the British Pop Art movement.
His furniture and the furore it provoked acted as a career boost, raising his public profile.
It certainly brought him financial success. An entire set of the furniture – six editions of each set of three were produced – was snapped up by Gunter Sachs, the German playboy who was married to actress Brigitte Bardot.
In 2012, Sachs’s art collection was auctioned at Sotheby’s, where the furniture set sold for £2.6 million, although Allen Jones received only £10,000 in royalties.
FILM-MAKER Stanley Kubrick was one of those very taken with the sculptures. Years earlier, he’d asked Jones to design some similar erotic ‘furniture’ for his film A Clockwork Orange, whose disturbing themes included violence against women.
At first, Jones liked the idea but when it became clear Kubrick was expecting him to make the sculpture for free, he turned him down.
Undeterred, Kubrick got a set designer to produce tables for the film, using models of completely naked women. One critic described the movie as ‘ an intellectual’s pornographic film’.
David Lee, art critic and editor of art magazine Jackdaw, doesn’t believe Jones’s claim that the sculptures were some kind of ironic profeminist commentary on women’s position in society.
Instead, he suggests that the cynical Jones deliberately set out to create a storm, particularly among feminists, in order to get noticed.
Nor does Lee believe the chair and its accompanying hat- stand and table can be seen as great art. Jones’s entire oeuvre is, he says, ‘fairly superficial, about t**s, legs and bondage.
‘[It’s] based on half-naked Bondgirl types. It makes me feel uneasy and squeamish. It’s sleazy.’
Since his controversial heyday, Jones has become something of a grand old man of British art, organising exhibitions with David Hockney and bemoaning the failure to teach drawing properly.
What does he make of the chair at the centre of the current controversy. Is he flattered by Melgaard’s ‘homage’ to his original?
Far from it. He told a BBC interviewer he found it ‘rather tacky and distasteful. I can only imagine that he [Melgaard] was going to get a lot of publicity, which unfortunately it has, for the wrong reasons.’
Perhaps Melgaard was simply working on the principle that sex sells, and there’s no such thing as bad publicity. As Jones himself discovered, 45 years ago.