One Way Traffic 1974

Allen Jones made this print, One Way Traffic, by collaging together screen-printed images of women. I can just imagine Jones, in his studio, surrounded by images cut from magazines, arranging and re-arranging them, letting intuition guide his choices, allowing the composition to emerge organically. The images themselves, some are photographic, others cartoonish drawings, are fragments, bits and pieces, that when assembled, offer a vision of femininity mediated through the male gaze. I mean, you can feel the tension between objectification and desire, can't you? There’s a lot of visual energy in the work, and it’s like Jones is wrestling with how to represent the female form. It’s all there: the colours, the composition, the way the images repeat and echo one another, but what does it mean? These artists of the 1960s, like Jones and Warhol, they weren't just making art, they were having a conversation about representation, about pop culture, and about the power of the image.