Chair, Table, and Hatstand: controversial or iconic?
What does it mean for an image to offend — and why do some images, once condemned, later become icons? Chair, Table, and Hatstand (1969), Allen Jones’s fibreglass women-as-furniture, have long occupied that uneasy space between fascination and repulsion. When first shown, they were accused of turning women into objects of male desire; yet their boldness also challenged the conventions of sculpture and the polite distance of art.
Through the lens of feminist theory and psychoanalysis — from Mulvey’s notion of the fetishistic gaze to Freud’s idea of desire displaced — this essay traces how Jones’s work exposes the contradictions of looking. It asks how cultural context shapes our reading of the body, and how time can turn outrage into acceptance. Like Manet’s Olympia before it, Chair, Table, and Hatstand remind us that art often reveals more about those who look than about what is seen.
