There are doubtless many reasons to love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family which, until recently, stood close to Speaker's Corner, challenging and subverting the arrogance and pomposity of John Nash's hateful Marble Arch. Indeed, it was the fact that these colourful resin figures showed such playful indifference to the history of the area in which they stood and seemed to mock said Arch with their post-Pop aesthetic that primarily appealed to me.
It's difficult to convey just how much I loathe Marble Arch. For one thing, it's intimately connected to the British Royal Family and is an open celebration of the violent power of the State. Secondly, it's made of a material which I don't much care for. The fact that marble retains its high-ranking status within a hierarchy of substances and continues to be a privileged medium amongst sculptors and architects keen to produce works within a Classical tradition, means nothing to me: I prefer plastic.
For plastic has none of the cultural pretension of marble and is, in its essence, not only the very stuff of alchemy, as Roland Barthes long-ago pointed out, but it also abolishes the above-mentioned hierarchy of substances, opening the way to a more democratic era. Plastic, if you like, makes free as well as joyful. For plastic affords us the euphoric experience of being able to reshape the world and endlessly create new forms and objects, limited only by our own ingenuity and imagination. It doesn't necessarily allow us to live more beautifully or more truthfully, but that's ok. We are so tired of these things posited as supreme values and of being bullied by our grand idealists who mistakenly equate them with the Good. Today, I prefer the cheap and cheerful over the eternal; the Top Shop mannequin over the Venus de Milo; and the Jelly Baby Family over the House of Windsor.
