Chair, Table and Hat Stand  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Chair, Table and Hat Stand is a 1969 set of erotic sculptures designed by Allen Jones. It features a Chair, Table and Hat Stand [1], each of which turns a woman into an item of furniture.

In 1969 three female figures by Allen Jones each slightly larger than life size, ‘Hatstand’, ‘Table’ and ‘Chair’, were cast in fibreglass in editions of 6 by Gems Wax Models Ltd of Notting Hill, London, a firm of commercial sculptors who made (and make) shop window mannequins and sculptures for waxworks. Stylistically the figures are similar to those in Jones's paintings of c.1967-8. For the figures Jones made working drawings from memory, not in front of a model. From these drawings a professional sculptor, Dick Beech of Gems Wax Models, produced clay figures under Jones's direction; these clay figures were modified in accordance with his intentions. He wanted to make sculpture ‘without fine art marks, devoid of fine art clothing’. When the first, ‘Hatstand’, a standing figure, was finished he realized that it might be construed as a bizarre window mannequin and so he decided to process the figure so that it would not appear to be just a decorative object. This he did by giving the other two sculptures a more obvious function, that of being a table and a chair, so that the viewer's expectation of what could be fine art would be questioned and allow the viewer to perceive the figure anew as a subject in art. --tate.org

See also

You Don't Know What's Happening, Do You Mr. Jones by Laura Mulvey