Young Woman Contemplating Sculpture

For centuries the depiction of provocative nudity has been a successful and often used strategy in pop-cultural advertising. It has also always been part of Pop Art’s program to assume this imagery and weave it into art. British artist Allen Jones goes beyond simple adoption of these aesthetics in his art. He does not take over the motif, but the logic behind it; the plain, sexually charged style of sales and marketing. Gendered clichés are employed boldly and unquestioned; phallic symbols are suggestively interweaved in image production; woman become objects, reduced to nothing but the most attractive body parts. Allen Jones adopts this rhetoric, exaggerates it and presents it in his art. He never wanted to be the seen as a critic of cynic popular and commercial culture – and he does not have to be, his works position him accurately enough.