- Venue
- Toynbee Studios
- Location
- London
Bobby Baker's work achieves an amazing resonance among women because the forms she uses and the situations she references are commonly shared yet largely undiscussed amongst us. But unlike other intentionally feminist works like Judy Chicago's infamous Dinner Party which represents a very special and extraordinary kind of eating ritual, Baker's work involves the actual consumption of very ordinary food and communicates through an appropriation of commonplace items.
Where Judy Chicago's much earlier work is deliberately grandiose and imposing, Baker's materials are deliberately humble and ordinary. You would never eat from Judy Chicago's incredibly vulva-like, rarefied and commemorative plates. Contrastingly, as part of Bumper Package yesterday, we were invited to eat customised cakes decorated with an edible print of a bread breast-plate that Bobby had baked for one of her previous performances. This provision for the audience is a fairly constant element in Baker's work. In Kitchen Show she bandages her hand into the position required for stirring tea with a teaspoon after explaining that she cannot bear for anyone visiting in her kitchen to be without a cup of tea. The image of servitude and care that this evokes is familiar to many of us, and Bobby's almost pantomiming action results in a certain amount of self-examination since the work is referencing common experiences and feelings.
In the performance she did this year on International Women's Day she wore a costume that was covered in ladles, oddly reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois' many-breasted images. The ladles hampered Baker's mobility, made it awkward for her to move and bore an air of absolute ridiculousness. But as these ladles were filled and emptied of liquid, and as Bobby explained the significance of each of the dances performed to accompanying 'Showtoons,' the costume began to communicate effectively. Water, milk, wine, tea and other liquids were tossed into the ladles and spattered all over the stage in a kind of grotesque and compelling parody of all the human exchanges that take place along the course of our lives. The ladles are able both to catch or receive what is poured and to dish it up again, effectively evoking the messy exchanges of human relationships and life. The performance ended with Bobby Baker covered in red food colouring looking for all the world as though she had been shot, standing underneath an eye-wateringly bright image made from all the spilled liquids and apparently 'heading off into the sunset' with her troupe of young dancers. As an articulation of where Bobby Baker finds herself at this point in her life, this final image is poignant. Bobby takes to new extremes the idiosyncratic British tendency towards keeping 'a stiff upper lip' by exposing on an irrefutable scale the violence of that very mentality. Presented with the image of a wounded, broken Bobby Baker grinning from ear to ear under the violently colourful 'sky' created during the performance, we the audience are forced to ask ourselves how many times we, being similarly destroyed, have presented an image of being 'fine' to the world.
There is something very important about the work she is doing in this territory of mental health and attitudes towards emotions and survival. In 2000, Pull Yourself Together involved Bobby Baker being strapped onto a bus with a loud-hailer from whence she exhorted the public to 'pull themselves together' and to follow other familiar instructions associated with ignoring one's own feelings (and especially one's distress.) Establishing such a militant position from which to shout 'pull yourself together' exposes the real violence inherent in the sentiment. It is brave, timely and necessary for someone to address British attitudes towards emotional life in the way that Bobby Baker does. I am excited to see what work she ends up developing in this vein as she spoke yesterday about war, trauma and the history of mental illness in her family and specifically about how she is currently developing work from these areas of experience.
Baker articulates very publicly, ideas that are normally retained privately. Other artists have used much loftier means of referencing the passages of life than milk, water and wine; they have elevated our daily lives by representing them in gold-leaf, pure pigments or carefully edited film, providing escape through the fiction they make of reality. In so doing, such artwork safeguards itself from criticism, because such work is easy to like in its flattering portrait of life. It is easy to like a pretty watercolour that describes life in delightful colours; less attractive to contemplate, for instance, the private rage that Baker talks about when she flings a pear 'with great force' against the wall in Kitchen Show. In using the familiar and inexpensive objects with which we eat and drink to articulate emotional truths about relationships, growth and mortality, Bobby Baker does not provide escape or abstraction for us. Rather she draws our attention constantly to the inescapable significance of our most ordinary moments.
Her symbolic language is one derived from the frozen peas, the ready-meals, the sandwiches, the chores, the tasks and the components with which our lives are imperceptibly filled. Her performances come wrapped in the guise of amateur dramatics (the nervous laughter, the cue cards) and cookery demonstrations. In this way the conventional borders between the 'expert' artist and the 'ignorant' audience are collapsed; we are very close to the artist performing before us. We know her tools for we have used them ourselves in our own kitchens.
Thank goodness, then, that with all this difficult content, Bobby Baker manages to make us laugh and to feed us with delicious cakes and to always offer hope at the end of her performances. Far from being niceties that detract from the serious things her work explores, I think these details are the very thing that grants safe passage in and out of her work.
I cannot recommend highly enough that you endeavour to see Bobby Baker perform; the images she creates stay with you for a long time afterwards.