One Way Traffic 1974

Allen Jones made this print, One Way Traffic, by screen printing, and it’s like he’s riffing on the Pop Art of his day but with a seedier, stranger vibe. I think of screen printing as a process that flattens images, almost removing the hand of the artist, but here Jones lets the layers misregister and the ink splatter a little, reminding you someone made this. The images are all kinds of pin-ups, models, and suggestive drawings, arranged in a grid and printed in a tight palette of pinks, greens, and browns, which creates a strange tension. It's pretty cold, but also kind of juicy in a funny way. Look at the splatters of green ink, especially over the rows of text. They undermine the slickness, pushing the piece away from straightforward Pop art. There’s something uneasy about it, which keeps it alive. I think of Sigmar Polke's playful subversion of Pop Art, or maybe even some of the odder corners of Jess’s collages. It’s a conversation, right?