Five Thoughts on Allen Jones at the RA Which Are Not About ‘That Chair’

What to say about Allen Jones?  Well, if you’re pretty much any critic who reviewed this exhibition, most of the discussion should be about his representation of women.  You’ve likely all seen his sculptures of women as furniture, produced in the 1960s for the most part.  Most famously there is ‘Chair’, in which a woman is bent double, a seat cushion on her thighs, and her calves as the back of the chair.   There’s also ‘Table’, and ‘Hatstand’, which you can probably picture.  Objectifying?  Commenting on society’s objectifying?  Who can say?

So in the spirit of everyone already having said everything about those particular works, I will try to say something different about the Royal Academy’s show.

1. Seeing his process is interesting.
Early on in the exhibition, there is a room with materials from his studio, including sketches and maquettes and experiments.  One thing which I found very interesting was to see pieces of paper cut into 3D sculptures of couples dancing, and then see the life-size sculptures themselves a few rooms later.  I think that more exhibitions would benefit from lifting the curtain from time to time, rather than just showing the finished products.

2. This is a very colourful show.
Large scale paintings are displayed for the first time a couple of rooms into the exhibition, with works drawn from all the decades of his career and brought together to encourage comparison.  To use a hackneyed phrase, it is a riot of colour.  Unlike the later works of Hockney, for example, which the RA had on display a couple of years ago, Jones has continued to stick to his Pop Art roots, and while the fashions his figures wear change with the times, the use of dazzling colours and forms is a constant.

3. I much prefer the paintings to the sculptures.
Even setting aside any controversy about the three sculptures I mentioned,  Jones has returned to full-size female figures in various states of undress or bondage gear so many times that I found a room of them to be too much.  I did find it interesting to see the finished products of the sculptures I had seen in paper, but at the same time they seemed to me like something you would find in a nondescript public square.  The paintings, on the other hand, had a bit more life for me, and more variety as well.

4.  Kate Moss.  Is she everyone’s muse?
What would anybody artistic ever do without Kate Moss?  She crops up a couple of times in the exhibition, once as one of the life size sculptures, as a sort of armless mermaid, and also in the image used for the posters, wearing a sculpture which is kind of like a body suit.  Not that I really have anything against her, but she does seem to be everywhere.

5.  I think the RA has too many shows on at once.
Between Kiefer, Moroni, Jones, and I think something else as well about architecture, they certainly had their hands full.  I hadn’t been into this exhibition space before at the other side of the building from their normal entrance, but I found the exhibition was not clearly laid out, to the point where I got confused about where to exit and had to backtrack.  Definite points off, if I can’t work it out and I’m in an exhibition once a week.

So there we go, now you know a few things about the Allen Jones exhibition, and can go and make your own mind up about whether he is a cutting edge artist or misogynist so and so.  Just don’t sit on ‘Chair’, she’s just for looking at.