THE FEMALE BODY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

A friend begged me not to write about Bianca Censori. And I get why she wanted me to ignore the first lady of Yeezy’s formal entrance into performance art. The work is about attention optimized for more attention. Giving it oxygen, it’s hard not to feel like a mark. The female form is trapped inside a system of desire. The viewer is trapped inside a system of spectacle. The critic is trapped inside a system of circulation. Postmodernity ensures each system feeds into the next, a loop with no exit. Do any of us have any chance of escape?

The living room in BIO POP, Censori’s presentation in Seoul in December 2025, featured latex-clad female figures contorted into the shapes of tables, chairs, and a chandelier. For the duration of the performance, living, breathing models held these postures, each one braced by a scaffold of painted stainless steel, plexiglass, shearling fur, and 3D-printed resin — human furniture as retro-futurist luxury with health-goth accents. As design objects that choreograph a performer into hypersexualized positions, the work recalls Anna Uddenberg’s installations, while the images from the performance that circulated online directly invoke Allen Jones’s furniture-sculptures made from fiberglass mannequins. Know-it-alls in the comments section were quick to point out Censori’s debt to both artists. As if that weren’t obvious. And possibly even the point.

Jones first exhibited the earliest works in his Women as Furniture series in 1970. In Chair (1969), the figure lies curled on her back, her thighs forming the seat and her lower legs the backrest. In Table (1969), a figure on all fours supports a sheet of glass splayed across her back. In Hatstand (1969), the figure stands six feet tall, her upturned hands doubling as hooks. Each mannequin is dripped out in latex lingerie, long gloves, and tall boots made by John Sutcliffe, a key figure in Britain’s S/M scene, who began designing fetishwear in 1957 and was the publisher of AtomAge magazine. Nuclear anxieties defined the psychological conditions of postwar bondage culture. With masculinity destabilized and new possibilities of violence exceeding comprehension, synthetic materials offered control while domestic space circumscribed a site of stability. Sutcliffe’s collaboration with Jones landed his latex pieces in galleries and museums, lending credibility to designations of his practice as art and potentially shielding it against obscenity laws and their enforcement.

Not everyone welcomed the sexual fantasy Women as Furniture presented, not least because of the works’ strikingly literal objectification of women. On International Women’s Day in 1986, Chair was defaced at the Tate Gallery of London by a protestor who threw a can of corrosive solvent at the figure. Conservator Lyndsey Morgan recalls: “The paint stripper landed — whether by coincidence or design — on the face and on the top part of the body, and it melted the paint. All that was there became wrinkled and badly discolored, and the resin underneath was very badly pitted... The paint stripper splashed onto the gloves and the boots, and so all of the clothing had to be taken off.”

Before Jones ever presented his furniture-mannequins, feminist sculptors had been exploring provocative new ways to represent the female form. In the 1960s, Nicola L. transformed the female figure (and its parts) into furniture, but her upholstered foam pieces created soft, shared environments that encouraged multiple users to lounge together, fostering social interaction rather than spectacle. Meanwhile, Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nanas (began 1964) radiated a joyous exuberance that directly countered Jones’s sleek control. Whether produced as sculptures, inflatable beach toys, or monumental works of architecture, the Nanas operate as a mythic female archetype, explosively alive and expansive in their self-determination. By the 1990s, irony was increasingly at play in feminist art. Sarah Lucas offered up the female form as anti-aspirational, her deadpan humor mocking objectification while awkwardly refusing the viewer’s pleasure. Later that decade, artists like Sylvie Fleury and Vanessa Beecroft staged a return to the hyperglossy objectification we see with Jones, reproducing the seductive image-systems of advertising and implicating the viewer in their dynamics of desire, but with a detachment that unsettles any feminist interpretation.

The tone of these later developments set the stage for Bjarne Melgaard’s Allen Jones redux in 2014, which saw the Norwegian provocateur remaking Women as Furniture with one essential modification. While Jones’s mannequins were white-skinned, Melgaard recreated the works with Black women. Racial hierarchy enters the chat, along with its enduring legacy of subjugation and brutality, disrupting the implicit neutrality of the white figures in the original fantasy.

Arguably, Melgaard’s work is about white desire confronting its own violence. But others view it less generously, asserting that, whatever Melgaard’s intention, any criticality is made null in the circulation of images that restage racial subjugation. This felt true when art collector and heiress Dasha Zhukova was photographed for a magazine profile in one of Melgaard’s chair-sculptures, a white woman in business casual seated atop a partially nude, latex-clad Black woman.

Even if an image is fixed, its meaning is still vulnerable to the psychic economy in which it circulates. Both Melgaard and Censori recycle the symbolic content of Jones’s sculptures, but decades later, the viewer is no longer able to uncritically metabolize latex as modern, submission as sexy, or that these mechanisms of control might offer any reliable sense of stability. These recontextualizations raise the question of whether Jones’s original fantasy was ever really about mastery and not the anxieties that push us toward its illusions. In Censori’s restaging, nostalgia and referentiality short-circuit to embody something larger about the angst that’s dominated the 21st century so far. We fear the unknown at least as much as we fear becoming trapped.