In the early sixties, London-based critic and ICA curator Lawrence Alloway pointed out the importance of the role of the viewer and his direct participation in the work of art, a concern apparent in the works of both abstract and figurative artists of the time. Allen Jones’ preference was for spectacle and style, and his subject-matter centered on the stereotype of the female figure as presented in advertisements, glossy magazines, and cartoon strips. In Dance with the Head and the Legs…, the spectator is confronted with a unique representation of subdued eroticism in which he is actively drawn in. It is a highly charged composition, in which a blurred male figure, painted upside – down and executed in a flat plane manner together with a female figure painted in spherical contours, are shrouded in a vibrant colourful aura.

 

These are forms, or rather hybrid figures, in motion, invested with enormous erotic charge, but they are also the bearers of a host of social signifiers: their act of coition is a reference to the relationship between the male and the female in contemporary society. The frenetic use of colour and of hyper-real surfaces heightens the strangeness of the situation. The painted planes are deconstructed in order to become reassembled in the viewer’s mind according to his own fantasy and imagination. Jones is a pioneer who presents quite candidly his interest in the world of the senses and the balance between the male and female genders, an interest most probably rooted in his study of the theories of Nietzsche, Jung and Freud.

 

Dance with the Head and the Legs… clearly manifests that the female body has throughout history been the object of intense scrutiny and of the application of social convention. Jones comments on its relationship to the male body, alluding to the reality of female emancipation and a general climate of liberation from the norms of the past that prevailed in the progressive social environment of the Swinging London of the sixties. Jones further developed his erotic iconography during his stay in New York in the period between 1964 and 1965. He was immediately acquainted with the sexually charged, fetishistic imagery massively produced by the city’s advertising and leisure industries. He expressed his pop sensibility through the creation of illusionistic paintings-symbols of extreme eroticism, of a precise linear style, which provide evidence as to his romanticized and ironic view of new, consumerist societies.

 

Toward the end of the sixties he created important offset and colour lithographs dealing with the same sensual subject and by 1969 he had begun creating glass sculptures portraying sexual encounters between men and women. Jones’ unique talent in graphic design is attested to in his prints and lithographs. His multidisciplinary career also extended to designing for the stage, for film and television.

 

 

Margarita Kataga

May 2010