In 1969, a coat rack, a table and a chair shook the foundations of pop art. The controversial sculptural work ‘Hatstand, Table and Chair’ made Allen Jones a star in the art world and the target of criticism from a part of the feminism of the time that did not understand the provocative metaphor about patriarchal oppression implied by vision of those women converted into furniture (another thing is the particular erotic reading that was made from the BDSM field, where forniphilia is a very common fetishism).
One of these furniture-women, the work ‘Green Table’, is explicitly honored in one of the vignettes that make up the video clip ‘Perfect Stranger’.
After ‘Eusexua’, FKA Twigs appears transformed into a woman-table, endorsing the feminist discourse that was nested in Jones’s original work. A scene in which she is accompanied by the designer Stefano Pilati in a gentlemanly manner.
These types of scenes, with cameos of celebrities and representations of images of domination, articulate a large part of the narrative of the clip (directed by the American photographer and director Jordan Hemingway, the singer’s current partner): actor Tom Goodman-Hill as hubby one of those who only enters the kitchen to get dirty, Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a dominatrix, the model Mona Tougaard, the artist Yves Tumor…
The rest of the video is constructed through dance scenes starring the British singer, which form a mosaic of cubes through which Hemingway’s camera passes, with a succession of horizontal and vertical tracking shots that are reminiscent of Hemingway’s film writing. Wes Anderson.
‘Perfect Stranger’ is also our Song of the Day for this Saturday.
