Linder Sterling and Allen Jones

Linders' montages reflect more closely to the sort of composition i would like to create in my own collage. Although i haven't been able to find a book in the library, I have really enjoyed looking at her different works on the internet and seeing how she often combined image from pornographic mags with images from fashion and domestic magazines. She is making a very clear point about societies expectations of women as a stereotype and how the female body is objectified.

Linder
Untitled

1976

Printed papers on board

370 by 300mm

Linder Sterling was a radical feminist born in Liverpool who was part of the punk culture. To the right is one of her collages in a series of untitled pieces created in 1977-8, it was used as the basis for the cover of the single 'Orgasm Addict', a song by punk band Buzzcocks. Although a very simple composition, it is very effective and this is something my work needs to give it the aggressive edge i want to portray.
It shows a naked woman in a seductive pose with smiles for nipples and an iron for a head. My interpretation of the whole piece is that it gives a picture of strength instead of seduction, through the oily body which i know i see as common in body builders. This is probably due to my demographics and the society i have grown up in. I really like the montage and can see why Linder is a feminist icon.

I came across this on the Tate website and found it really interesting.

"The late ‘70s were pre-style press, so the images of food, washing machines or record players came from mail order catalogues and mainstream women’s magazines such as Woman’s Own. In the British pornography I used – Fiesta, Men Only – the bodies weren’t toned or airbrushed and pubic hair wasn’t shaved, so there’s a real physicality to them. Now we’re fairly at ease with that kind of imagery, but back then women wouldn’t have been expected to know about porn, let alone look at it or make work with it."

Here is another image of a piece from the untitled collection of montages by Linder.

Linder
Untitled
1976
printed papers on paper
279 x 196 mm

The image shows a couple locked in a romantic embrace, i think i was struck by the womans eyes in this particular work because they link closely to the recent googly eyes i have been using.
I see a woman in a stereotypical lovers role who actually wants to gouge her eyes out. It says not every woman wants a stereotypical 'loving embrace' as society says.


I am now planning on working towards some more finalised pieces, i am going to try working using flat canvas. Hopefully using influence from Linder and 'Lads Mags' to create work with more of a strong message.

Allen Jones

I found some information on the Tate website about Allen Jones, who is best known for sexually provocative sculptures like Chair (1969) which present the female figure as a piece of furniture. He was visited by ‘tateshots’ at his London studio to find out how he progressed from painting and drawing the human body to producing life-size mannequin sculptures that, as he puts it, ‘were very much made to offend the accepted canons of what fine art might be’.

He also says, ‘what I am trying to do is create something that has an iconic presence’.

According to the man himself, by around the mid-sixties, Allen Jones’ artwork honed in on the female figure. His work at this stage was graphically flat, and bending paper and taking the figure out of the canvas added a new dimension to his work. This is what kicked off the following 20 years of sculpture exploring the female form. His natural talent lied in drawing and taking it to a third dimension added an entirely new creative flow. He took mannequin away from the surrealist idea, progressing to take it away from a fine art prospect and turning the female form into furniture.

Allen Jones (born 1937)
Chair
1969
Acrylic paint on glass fibre and resin with Perspex and leather
775 x 571 x 991 mm

In Jones's view ‘because these 3 sculptures of women are recognisably representational it is less obvious that the sculpture is not about being naturalistic. They are not so much about representing woman but the experience of woman, not an illusion’.

'The erotic impulse transcends cerebral barriers and demands a direct emotional response. Confronted with an abstract statement people readily defer to an expert; but confronted with an erotic statement everyone is an expert. It seems to me a democratic idea that art should be accessible to everyone on some level, and eroticism in one such level’.

Those two quotes are two I found interesting from Allen Jones. In a similar way to his use of his work as a challenge against the perceived idea of what fine art may be, I intend to use the female form through my work as an object. Objectification of women through the media is the main idea behind this entire project, therefore this work closely relates to mine (even if not in the same form of media). I want to take his idea of eroticism and work it in with how Linder, as another example, uses it as a shock factor. My work is made to act as an ironic realisation, so pornographic or general male orientated magazines should provide me with the reaction and opinion I want to provoke in a viewer.

After further research I have discovered these other pieces by Jones which provide female forms in collaged screen prints. Although untitled and I can’t find out much about them, the images chosen in the works provoked a reaction in me that I am hoping to portray through my own pieces.

This untitled screenprint collage was created throughout 1976-7 onto paper. Although the dimensions are unconfirmed, according to tate it is 502 x 702 mm.

I am finding this piece incredibly difficult to discover information on; however, I really like how Jones has taken erotic or sexually appealing images of women from the media and placed them together to create an ironic composition which provokes the reaction I am trying to get in my own work. From this, i am going to try and use domestic settings in my collages and combine them with erotic imagery of women.

In the middle of the image is an article taken from a newspaper which begins with a series of rhetorical questions aimed at a female audience, for example ‘do your girlfriends feel sorry for you because you have such a poor figure?’ and goes on using the power of advertising to make the reader question their self-confidence and develop a need for their product.

It is completely patronising and if I read this extract in a newspaper of today I can only imagine the amount of complaints about it. In a ‘lads mag’ I have got recently there are lots of quotes from the women saying things such as ‘I love wearing my best black lingerie around the house’ and more similar. These are aimed at men admittedly, but because of how society and the media has moved on since the time of the piece, these are more the sorts of things that are being used by magazines which are demeaning and put stereotypes of women in place.