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.
"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."
ReplyDeleteDo we want a “more democratic” (and/or less hierarchical) era? It seems strange for the Nietzscho-Lawrentian blogmaster to approve such a sentiment - odious though Marble Arch may indeed be. Personally, I love the in/human grandeur of classical sculpture, and the 'pretension' (actually, as far as the Greeks are concerned, acute realism) of its artefacts.
I'm also not sure where Barthes is coming from in apparently connecting plastic (which wasn't fully synthesised until 1907) to the practice of alchemy, unless he construes alchemy in a very vulgarised and unhistorical sense. As Jung's exhaustive investigations illustrate, the classical alchemists were primarily concerned with the fantasy of turning base metals into gold (which Jung reinterpreted as a psychological projection, rather than an ontological verity). Holding a plastic cruet set, say, in my hand at dinner, doesn't make me feel particularly cheerful either. With one or two ecological exceptions, plastic doesn't biodegrade (bacteria don't like eating it), perpetuates the unsustainable and economically divisive petro-chemical industry, and seems mostly designed to break and diminish the aesthetic pleasure of life. Touching it, one feels guilty, manipulated and ungrounded.
I'm also put in mind of Hilary Mantel's blasphemous description of Kate Middleton as a 'plastic princess designed to breed' and 'shop-window mannequin'. Presumably, had Mantel alluded to Middleton's marble face and silken skin, the furore of the monarchistic right might have been somewhat more muted. But we all know what she meant. Plastic is style without substance, malleability without personality, and meretricious rather than luscious.
All that said, the Jelly Baby Family are, I suppose, stupidly amusing, if not actually affecting - a bit like the Teletubbies, whom they strangely resemble. (Though I prefer the sweets themselves, I have to say.)