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BLENDING IN

THE IMMATERIAL ART OF BOBBY BAKER'S CULINARY EVENTS
Lucy Baldwyn

"It was essential that the painting was made out of food, because food is like my own language." (1)

Through her performance events, Bobby Baker presents us with a genealogy of everyday tactics and surrogate practices that reveal creative techniques for daily living. Whether a recipe for relieving anger (throwing a ripe pear against a cupboard door) or instructions on the art of 'roaming' (a complex dance of several activities performed while talking, such as sorting out 'some notices,' throwing bits of paper towards the bin under the sink, Baker cultivates their immaterial significance.

With skilled deliberation she uncovers the invisible, unacknowledged chores of motherhood and domestic life, which, unfinanced and disrespected, daily threaten to erode identity. By choosing to investigate these often solitary pursuits within the parameters of a performance, her scrutiny celebrates and valorizes the skills involved. Historically, these practices (or wisdoms), like the saws of so-called 'old wives tales,' have been disregarded, considered inadequate for official discourses. Baker, while celebrating the creative potential of these practices, also capitalizes upon the blind spots of cultural ideologies. Apparently acquiescing to the repressive stereotypes proliferated within a misogynistic culture by identifying herself as a mother/housewife and discussing shopping and cooking - she simultaneously undermines them by contravening their limits. Employing a peculiarly British gamut of emotions - reticence, irony, and embarrassment - she concocts theatrical images that resonate with unspoken desires and frustrations. In keeping with its character, her performances have appeared in unexpected places - including other peoples' kitchens and her own home.

The form, the structure, of Baker's creations are powerfully disrupted by the subtle, provocative excesses of her performance. Her taboos collect around the visceral qualities of food: its proximity to the body and to emotions, and its ability to represent what we would rather forget.

At the beginning of Kitchen Show (June 1991), Baker plays the perfect 'hostess', offering each audience member refreshments. Having made sure that everyone is provided for, Baker marks this action by bandaging the thumb and forefingers of the hand she has just used to stir milk or sugar into each drink - an ambiguous gesture which sets the tone of her work. For while the pink elastoplast cocoons her hand, shielding it from harm and holding it in place, it also evokes a more disturbing set of associations. The binding of Baker's hand shifts the ground of her action from the hospitable ministrations Western cultures consider feminine, to an uncomfortable 'injury'. The bondage of her hand resembles all too nearly the bound feet that were required of femininity by Imperial China.

It came together with the idea I had very early on of wanting to make work that related to those moments in time where just for a split second you experience an extraordinary complex set of realities, associations. I know the first time it happened was at St. Martin's [art school] where I was standing in the middle of a studio. I tried painting that moment but it didn't work. It's like when you're a child and write your address with the universe at the end and try and go further." (2)

Having trained as a painter, Baker, by her own admission, became preoccupied with cake:

I loved the kind of gentility of the cake, the fact you've got this little, very strange, pathetic object that you offer someone".

This fascination began to develop into various ("rather oppressive") tea parties at which she produced cake sculptures. Eventually the experience of her tea parties resulted in An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, which consisted of an entire family made out of cake. The family was housed in Baker's own house in Stepney, East London. Each figure had his/her own room, the walls of which were covered with newspaper pages appropriate to that particular person. Baker then covered the entire interior - all the furniture and fittings - with icing. Each member of the family was sculpted from different ingredients: the son was made out of garibaldi biscuits and chocolate cake, the baby out of coconut cake, and the teenage daughter was a meringue confection suspended above her parents' bed, which was surrounded by erotic sugar drawings. The installation was open for a week, during which time viewers were invited to consume the sculpture while Baker watched its disappearance. Baker defined the disappearance of her artwork as a crucial part of its transformation:


"It was a devastating image at the end. This family, they were completely destroyed, and it, you know, it actually smelt and the walls were ... it was quite horrifying".

Baker's presence throughout the event acted as a continual unspoken reminder that the consumption of her human confectionery effected not just a diminution of her art, but by extension a concealment/ erasure of herself as an artist. The possibility of literal consumption for the spectator allowed a particularly intimate inclusion into Baker's process.

Angel Cake, Devil's Food Cake, Death by Chocolate - the secret of the favored cake seems to combine a cunning combination of otherworldly aspiration and metaphysical excess. We are often covert in our cake eating activities and most often guilty. (A male friend complains: Why is it the first thing women do in a restaurant is look at the sweet menu, spend ages deliberating in rapturous appreciation, and then with a sigh lay it aside, claiming, Oh no, I really shouldn't.) We confess to adoring our favorites at particularly intimate moments with friends and lovers. A good mother never forgets the peculiar confectionery foibles of her children (however old). And as an adult one is never allowed to renounce the 'favorite' cakes and puddings of one's past. There is a sweet, sticky bond in which cakes are domestic offerings to family life.

Later this month, [Ms. Baker], the 42 year old performer, who looks, well, remarkably normal, returns to London... (3) In Drawing on a Mother's Experience (1988), Baker enters the white performance space with two brimful carrier bags and silently tiptoes her way around the performing area. This hushed walk is facilitated by a pair of soft-soled, low-heeled wedged shoes. The walk, which appears uncomfortable, is both ridiculously exaggerated and strangely unsettling. Baker attempts to take up as little room as possible, to absent herself from the space. It seems as if she has strayed somewhere forbidden and needs to mark out her space before being caught. Baker's entrance (tiptoeing: the word itself suggests childhood, childish transgressions) immediately calls into question Baker's right to inhabit the space, to be center stage.


A memory, an experience I had when I started performing, was that something came into focus; suddenly I perceived what it was I wanted to do. It was a moment when I began to feel sorry for the people watching this endless performance. Performance intensifies the relationships between people; intuition and consciousness are all heightened during a performance. I became so concerned about the audience, sitting surrounded by a lot of my paintings and an enormous amount of cooking equipment and a life-size body made out of cake on a mattress. Suddenly I got out a tomato and said, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to squash this bloody tomato. It was an electrifying moment. And I just knew - it was a moment of absolute connection with the people there - we were absolutely united."

As Peggy Phelan has remarked in Reciting the Citation of Others, critical writing about performance "comes after the event and traces the impression left by its disappearing absence" (4). Writing can feel like an intensely nostalgic (non)event because it must always fail in its essai to return to the past, to remember its desired object. The lived experience of a particular moment is diffused in my memory; however much I try to conjure a word, a look, the particular feel of a moment, I'm left floundering, caught between what I can see in my mind's eye and the slight prickle on the back of my neck - the fantasy of what I think I saw. Phelan likens critical writing to the psychoanalytic interpretation of the lost (repressed) events of early 'erotic relations'. The script of our nascent identity is one that can only ever be improvised from the fragmented remnants of memory. The desire for that story haunts the act of tracing the theatrical event which, similarly, can never again be represented.

Critical writing can also feel like a (Freudian) 'condensation' and 'displacement'; whereas the original event may have been witnessed with all the senses (a 'carnal stereophony', as Roland Barthes might say), its recollection is contemplated only through the insight of words.

As Phelan suggests, the ontologies of writing and performance are antagonistically opposed. Writing seeks to hang on to, to preserve and record - to invest in the future; meanwhile, performance defies the economics of reproduction, and, resisting documentation, lives only for the moment: "This brave insistence on the power and fullness of the present as such is, for me finally the beautiful folly of performance - and it is this folly that critical writing must learn to celebrate, not incarcerate" (4)

As many writers have remarked, the relationship between performance and 'real life' has become increasingly complex (see for example Read 1993 and Blau 1992). To great effect, the 'performative acts' of theatre have been borrowed to describe the social 'stylization' of the body in which "bodily gestures, movements and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding, gendered self" (5) These minutiae of material existence, of everyday acts, are, as Judith Butler suggests above, not the result of an already gendered self, but instead, the codes by which an individual is perceived as a gendered body. The 'performative acts of gender constitution' are concretized by their repetition over time. Significantly, the body is a "continual and incessant materializing of possibilities". However, these possibilities, like the parameters of a performance, are always constrained and conscripted by the specifics of historical conventions.

Like Edna Everage, Bobby Baker is fast establishing herself as a housewife superstar.(6) It is well documented that Baker 'disappeared' from the art scene in 1980 after the birth of the first of her two children. When she next performed in 1988, her role as an artist was complicated by the fact of her motherhood. Baker has commented that, having become a mother, she invoked a complex set of subconscious taboos about herself as an artist:

What happened was that I could not allow myself to be an artist because there was absolutely no precedent within my family that I could carry on acting as an individual, from that moment on I should devote myself to my family, my children and my husband. Once I could actually perceive how I come from a history, a long line of really thwarted women, none of whom could do what they wanted, then it was quite easy to change." (7)

Baker's work reveals a particularly subtle and complex interweaving of mimicry and what might be called self-presentation. Through exaggeration and parody she presents us with the construction of her 'self' - Bobby Baker, the artist/ mother/ housewife - yet this is set against a continual reminder of the unerasable presence of her physical body, through which the performance is enacted. The laboring of her body is an aspect of her materiality to which Baker continually draws attention. At one moment she may confide: I'm quite hot and bothered now; and at another, My hands are shaking a bit. Never hiding the effort it takes, to perform, Baker allows herself to expend.

And at the end of each action I make a pose, just for a moment, for a fraction so that people can observe the mark. It's an essential part of the performance because it gives people that moment to reflect on what's happening."

Baker's parodic self-presentation is apparently simplified by her customary performance costume which consists of a white lab coat, tights, and light shoes (which vary in style for different shows). The costume combines images of 'service uniform' with that of the medical/ science profession (suggesting a formal, desexualized objectivity). In How To Shop (1993), this outfit, surprisingly, was accessorized with a gold ankle chain, which glittered somewhat irreverently as it caught the light during Baker's performance. Adorning the otherwise immaculate apparel, the anklet was a seductive reminder of sexuality. Details such as this indicate Baker's subtlety: contravening a stereotype yet simultan- eously employing it. The witty combination of apparel related to sex and to domestic labor ostentatiously displays characteristics that have traditionally been used to objectify and define representations of women. However, Baker simultaneously denies these representations in the very acting out/ performance of her subjectivity and her artistic authority.

An important part of creating a performance is to decide how best to encompass a complex range of ideas within an appropriate form. I found it irritating to clutter ideas with clothes. That carried too many associations. The white overall offered an inexhaustible range of associations to play with as well as a certain blankness."

Having marked out her space, (in Drawing on a Mother's Experience) Baker sets down her bags and lays out a polyethylene sheet, announcing that, as a 'very experienced mother' she has learned to 'avoid unnecessary mess wherever possible.' Over the polyethylene she lays a 'white cotton double sheet, (90 x 108 inches)' (8), and begins to recount her experiences, mapping the events of her history of mothering from the gestation of her first child to the birth of her second. Each anecdote is drawn out on the sheet:the first tentative mark is made with two pieces of cold roast beef, which, with cunning economy, she will reuse for another drawing, or simply give to the cat... The art of 'making do' humorously undermines any notion of an original or unique piece of art. The second mark - possets and dribbles of milk-reminds her of excess maternal fluids. With the third mark - four bottles of 'health giving' stout - it is not so much the sight of the liquid but the sound of the bottles as they clink together on the sheet that conjures up Baker's memory of postnatal tiredness. And when she remembers her long bedridden illness, it is the feel of the dry Boudoir Biscuit crumbs that rub against her reminiscences beneath the visual image.

These unearthed memories, whose significance is plucked out (and made tangible) by the objects around her, caused me to consider again the fragile ways in which we remember and pass on that which binds our sense of identity. Since we increasingly store our memories outside of the body in a proliferation of documentation - the camcorder, the computer memory chip - the fragility of these raw marks seemed willfully vulnerable. For me, the most powerful moments in her performance glimmered in the unexposed details of her (re)marks or the unexplained inspiration in her actions. Caught in my imagination, I wondered at the surreal sight of Baker dancing the chutney into her drawing and of the silent refusal of her final mark:

There's one element I never seem able to introduce into my painting. I find it very hard to talk about. So I won't. I shall just introduce it visually" (9)

This said Baker sieves two bags of white flour over her drawing, obliterating her image, skillfully erasing all that she's created, the air thick with a fine smoke screen of flour...

"A mother is not so much a person as a place, a supportive texture for other people's lives and personalities like wallpaper or a comfortable armchair" (10)

Since 1991, Baker has worked on a succession of pieces that have comprised part of a series entitled Daily Life. Both Kitchen Show and How To Shop, while revealing the construction of the performer's persona, also ironically suggest an intimate quest: a 'voyage of self- discovery'. However, as Baker theatrically constructs her identities, she simultaneously demonstrates their social erasure the way in which the mother, the housewife is passed over, hidden in the private quarters of the domestic realm. In Kitchen Show Baker presents us with 13 actions - a baker's dozen - provoked by her experiences as a housewife and performed in other peoplesÕ kitchens throughout Britain and abroad.

In How To Shop Baker enacts a spiritual investigation, a catechism of supermarket shopping. This performance, presented in the style of a lecture, combines audiovisual aids (video footage of Baker demonstrating shopping cart techniques in a local supermarket) with the onstage recreation of her own search for the sublime in the mundane. This is a Pilgrim's Progress, a Spiritual Guide to Consumption. Her instructions include searching out and purchasing seven virtues, among which are a tin of anchovies for Obedience, a toffee apple for Joy, parsley for Humility, and bread for Love. Typically, Baker transforms these elements by the manner in which she chooses to mark their significance for the audience. Thus she celebrates joy by using the toffee apple to sing along to a Dusty Springfield song, stuffs the tin of anchovies into her mouth as an unwilling act of Obedience, and with great tenderness makes garlic croutons out of the bread before distributing them among the audience. This last gesture, at the culmination of the piece, carries obvious ritualistic significance as Baker twists the giving of communion - the sharing of bread - into the sharing of her performance with the audience. Again we are invited to consume her artistic offering and to recognize her sacrifice.

After I've finished the Daily Life Series in 1999, I want to explore different processes of communication - perhaps taking a more objective position in terms of my relationship with the audience. For the past 20 years I've been so passionately concerned with finding ways of communicating sets of ideas, beliefs, that I've experimented with different ways of using my persona and body to achieve this. Perhaps it's just appealing to think of placing myself in a safer position... to place an object between myself and the audience. IÕm going to be 50 in 1999 - an age which is considered ÕdifficultÕ for women. IÔm looking forward to that.'

In his chapter entitled Orientation: Space and Place, Alan Read distinguishes between space Ð "which is made up of mobile elements" - and place - which is the "order in accord with which elements are distributed in relations of coexistence." 'Knowing one's place' speaks of stability and order, while space is an undetermined capacity/volume for "velocities and variables." (11)

Place, like the physical materiality of the body, is an organized construction with determined and defined limits and parameters. What Baker executes so incisively is the suturing of place and space - or rather she balances on the skin between. In Kitchen Show she twists the domestic vernacular, performing our expectations of kitchen duties (as she cooks soup and makes cups of tea) and simultaneously shifts their contours as she skips and hops with spinach leaves ("dancing when inspired by operatic music"). Baker then casts out all sense of these duties when she puts on a plastic bin liner and exits her 'stage' to run onto the grass outside (pretending to be a cat bounding across the garden).

Although the last two gestures sound merely absurd in description, in performance they become the - very humorous - materializing of possibilities in the space offered by the kitchen as a place. Baker lays herself bare. In revealing her vulnerable fantasies, Baker materializes that strange space of daydreams where anything is possible. This dislocation is reinforced by the break in the rhythm of her performance and by the fact that suddenly we were watching her in 'long shot' through the frame of the window. Momentarily the audience was left alone, not in a theatre, but in someone else's kitchen - a room which was silently full of another set of unseen memories hidden in the objects left there. Having drawn aside the culinary surface of the kitchen, Baker provoked a rich clutter of unspoken desires and resentments lying beneath.

Perhaps Action No. 3 clarifies this. The action involves taking a ripe pear and throwing it against a cupboard door. The laughter that ensued from this particular sequence suggested that I was not alone in having witnessed a secret yearning (performed with such compelling velocity!) made concrete. The destruction of the hapless pear was such a fine expression of pent-up tension. The soft explosion of the pear is a comic fantasy moment during which an unspoken anger is acceptably vented. As the laughter dies away, the artist is already removing the evidence with a skillful sleight of hand. The pear, however, leaves behind a provocation - how may a woman show anger in public? Since then I have secretly admired pears, weighing their explosive potential should the need arise...

This seemingly sensible, respectable woman with her cut-glass voiceÉ is driven to extreme flights of fancy by the mundane tasks that make up a woman's life. (12)

The overstepping of place is potentially most unsettling when it occurs around the body. For instance when, in How To Shop, Baker inserts the anchovy tin (sideways) into her mouth, it provokes laughter as an improbable act and a comical image, but the action invokes apprehension: what must it feel like having that in her mouth? The skin looks perilously stretched - what if it cuts through?

Similarly, in Drawing on a Mother's Experience, there was a moment when, her sheet painting half-complete, Baker lay down on it to enact an anecdote. When she got up, the back of her white overall was covered with the food- stuffs already splayed across the sheet. The stains included a patch of dark red (blackcurrant juice) just at the top of her legs. This vividly reminded me of a moment when my mother, suffering from what Baker's persona euphemistically calls 'women's troubles', stood up from a long car journey to find a dark patch of menstrual blood staining (soiling) her skirt. The horror I felt as a little girl was repeated in my momentary embarrassment for Baker as I was overwhelmed by the disconcerting memory of my mother's helplessness. The image was a silent illustration, a palpable, unspoken marking of Baker's own lengthy illness due to the birth of her second child.

ActionNo. 7 Picking up small pieces of food between my thumb and forefinger and popping them into my mouth.

Mark No. 7 Putting bright red lipstick on my puckered lips. I chose this action because o something that happened when I was little. We went to visit a friend of my mother's who had just had a baby. My mother went upstairs to see her friend and the baby in the bedroom. I went up too but they were embarrassed and annoyed at my interruption because she was breastfeeding. I saw the woman's nipple. It looked bright red like a cherry. I thought she'd put lipstick on it. (13)

What happens to the body when it oversteps its place? In the work of Julia Kristeva the ideological assumptions of space and place can be seen in relation to the cartography of the body.In Powers of Horror, Kristeva examines the ways in which the inside and the outside of the body, the space between the self and other, are based on and maintained by the exclusion or expulsion of disruptive, 'unclean' bodily matters. Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory has drawn and redrawn the ways in which the subject is created through the symbolic separation between what is inside the body, and thus part of its subjectivity, and what is outside the body.

However, this psychical mapping of the body can never fully (protectively) seal in a seamless subjectivity since areas of the body are never fully enclosed. All bodily orifices (that is, mouth, eyes, ears, anus, and genitals) can be seen as being structured in the form of a (Lacanian) 'rim'. The rim is the space between the corporeal surfaces, an interface between the inside (part of the subject) of the body and what is outside of the body. These crevices in the body have been ascribed a particularly contrived and regulated significance because of the peculiar uncertainty of their materiality.

Baker's shows are,in fact, littered with things being where they should not, or becoming what they are not. For instance, having reveled in the pleasure of opening a new tub of margarine -

The best bit is the little pointed nipple in the centre. ItÕs such a wonderful shape, so exquisite. I gaze at it lovingly for a moment and try to fix that moment of beauty in my memory." (14)

Baker applies it to her ... cheeks. Similarly, having prepared a platter full of shaving foam (first with an old fashioned brush and shaving block, comment- ting that the smell reminds her of her father's neck, and then, cheating with a can of spray foam), she spreads the foam on her stomach to make a pregnant belly. Suddenly, her father (evoked from her memory through smell) has become incorporated into a phantasm of her own body in an uncomfortable union of past(s) and present, father and daughter/mother.

Kristeva argues that abjection is the "underside of the symbolic" (15), whereby, in a complex reaction of recognition and denial, the socialized subject both realizes the impossibility of, and the necessity for, control of its corporeality. The subject is relentlessly reminded of the materiality of the body by the continual bodily cycles of incorporation and expulsion. Although these cycles are fundamental to the continuation of the subject, they are also taboo in that they cannot be socially recognized or represented.

Those areas of the body that are structured in the form of a rim are particularly worrisome to the neat maintenance of subjectivity and form the sites of the abject. Those objects that traverse or transgress the boundaries of the bodily rim are those that generate abjection: food, feces, urine, vomit, tears, spit. Because they cross between the inside and the outside of the body, they can never be defined absolutely as part of the subject's body, or conversely, as separate from the subject's body. The abject continually demonstrates the impossibility of the (necessary) frame of identity:

We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity. Because while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it - on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. (16)

Embarrassment is so clearly to do with what one is educated to feel about what is taboo. It's built into my being. I've used that [in performance] as a way of getting through to people. In day-to-day life, it's a habit that is irritating, but to use it in performance - to be embarrassed and to talk about it - is very empowering."

The abject is to be found in three material areas: food, waste, and signs of sexual difference. As might be expected (considering the significance of the abject for identity formation), the subjectÕs reaction to these abjects is intense and intensely visceral. In an almost 'hysteric' reaction, the body manifests symptoms of what is unacceptable to 'rational consciousness' through its very corporeality. Hence, feelings of disgust are very often accompanied (embodied) by nausea and even vomiting (an abject reaction to the object of abjection).

Particularly emotive is the cultural horror attached to menstruation. Significantly, this is not just because it is an unmistakable sign of sexual difference, rather it irrevocably attaches women to their reproductive role as potential mothers, simultaneously excluding men and marking the ideological power with which the maternal body is imbued. Kristeva suggests that the marks of menstruation act as a (taboo) social testimony to the unspoken debt of culture to the maternal body. (Patriarchal law may well be that of the father, but it relies on mothers for perpetual renewal.)

There is one element I never seem to be able to introduce into my painting. I find it very hard to talk about. So I won't." (17)

Bobby Baker's use of embarrassment - that sudden disconcerting lurch of self-consciousness - underlines the art of the performer to project a coherent identity, and forces us to fluctuate between a sense of Bobby Baker the mother/artist and Bobby Baker the performer. Perhaps it is a uniquely British characteristic to have an intimate relationship with embarrassment. If so, Baker subtly elevates this relationship into a revealing characteristic. Hovering at the edge of her revelations, her embarrassment suffuses the moment of public declaration. Embarrassment has been described as a "failure to conform, whether intentionally or accidentally". (18) For me, Bobby Baker's use of this mundane marking of difference invokes both a visceral personal reaction (of wanting to conceal the moment, of wanting to acknowledge what is being said and also to not acknowledge it) and an ironic recognition that this audience is present precisely because of the nature of her 'difference'.

Butler suggests that the psychical mapping or projection that instigates the formation of a coherent material body marks the 'contours' of the body as "sites that vacillate between the psychic and the material". (19) Furthermore, she suggests that bodily contours and morphology are not just a constituent of the "irreducible tension between the psychic and the material", but are in fact that tension. What is then excluded (outside of the frame) in order for the body's boundaries to form? "And how does that exclusion haunt that boundary as an internal ghost of sorts, the incorporation of loss as melancholia?" (20)

At the close of Drawing on a Mother's Experience, Baker lies down on her sheet drawing, which is covered with flour, and rolls herself up in it ("like a human Swiss roll"). The flour acts as a skin, protecting against the chaos of ingredients marking the sheet. However, as the artist struggles to here feet, the foodstuffs begin to bleed through the second skin of the sheet. Gradually, this seepage takes on the appearance of internal organs - a mapping of capillaries and veins, a tacit revelation of interior matters. This action, Baker remarks somewhat self-consciously, symbolizes "how one takes oneÕs past into the future." Sure enough, the invisible stains of past events are momentarily materialized on the bodyÕs selvage, an invisible ink of remembering.

Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species' nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to itÉ memory derives its inter- ventionary force from its very capacity to be altered - unmoored, mobile, lacking any fixed position. (21)

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau characterizes memory as an " activity of alteration". This is because memory is constituted by external occurrences (which, like the exposed silver particles in a photo- graphic reaction, are chemically transformed) and because memory's "invisible inscriptions" appear or are recalled under new circumstances. The way in which memories are recalled (their mode of transmission) imperceptibly corresponds to the particular action of their inscribing. This undermines the Western conceptualization of memory, which is still overshadowed by classical descriptions of memory as a sort of storage receptacle from which images are retrieved.

Instead, as a permanent, unseen marking, the materiality of memory is uncertain; memory leaves its mark "like a kind of overlay on a body that has always already been altered without knowing it." (22) Memory, in the mind's eye, is a constant reminder of the slippage between body and thought - the material and the immaterial. It continually defies the process whereby we know what has been and requires us to challenge what it is we think we see.

My second memory is: I remember sitting in a pram with a packet of cornflakes ... but I don't remember whether that's a photograph... Anyway, I remember dropping them over the side, which my brother found very amusing. I remember feeling immensely powerful and entertaining."

Traditionally,the value of fine art lies in the documentation it leaves for posterity-the signature on a priceless original. By using the impermanent materials of domesticity-the food and drink, which, once consumed, are soon forgotten - Bobby Baker's 'signature' uses a theatrical context to worry at the conceptions of what sort of art we traditionally give value to. Not only does she use materials that betray the artist by deteriorating and decomposing (no formaldehyde for these creations), but - ever the 'experienced mother' she also clears up, washes out, and destroys her work as she goes. Her 'food paintings' - likened to the abstract beauty of Jackson Pollock's work - are entrusted to the transient, time-based nature of live performance. Baker's work is part of a body of theatre that reminds us of the powerful "prerogative of theatre to exist in a place for a unique unrepeatable moment and then to perpetuate in the memory but no more..." (23)

Her performance uses the unpredictable translations of memory that cause us simultaneously to interpret the past through the guise of the present and to invent the present as a response to the past. Baker prod- uces a language for emotions, which is as much made up of the olfactory and the gustatory as the visual and the written; a language that urges us to remember the power of those elements which can't be seen and heard - the "smell of the greasepaint," to coin an old theatrical adage. Conjuring with the everyday, she translates it into an experience that is at the heart of both cooking and theatre, a metaphysical, alchemical act of producing, sometimes a meal, sometimes an event, which is always, inexplicably, more resonant, more toothsome than the sum of its various parts.

There's one element I never seem to be able to introduce into my painting..."


Lucy Baldwyn
TDR Winter 1996

Notes
The construction of an individual identity - the acquiring of subjectivity - is articulated in terms of spaces and boundaries which aim to fix the limits of corporeality. In discussing the structure of the child's ego, Freud suggested that it was integrally related to a psychical projection at the surface of the body: The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensation, chiefly those springing from the surface of the body.

It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides... representing the superficies of the mental apparatus. (24)

Frances Yates comments in her book The Art of Memory that Aristotle likens the mental pictures from sense impressions to a kind of painted portrait, the lasting state of which we describe as memory (25). This idea of memory as a passive database modern correlate in the family snapshot and the camcorder record. However, this passive memory does not account for the ways in which experience constantly shapes recollection, and for the manner in which memory itself might be an active process. It may be productive to consider the perform- ative qualities of memory - its constitution through enactment. Instead of providing visual data for transmission, memory might be seen as a process, shaped itself as much by the material it shapes.

Cultural representations of memory are used to underscore a coherent identity. In an era of bodily transformation (surgical or otherwise), the regulation of memory becomes an important arena for the maintenance of ideological deceptions. To have memory is to have a history. The near-future dystopias of several science fiction films, such as Bladerunner and the Terminator films, worry at the changing ontologies of being 'human'. If the physical body is no longer a guarantor of truth or selfhood, then perhaps memory holds the key. The regulatory facade of memory is, however, very thin. Scratch the surface and you reveal the complexity of inconsistencies which surrounds its construction. The outrage over 'false memory syndrome', aside from the more visible issues of sexual accusations and expensive lawsuits, masks the problematic immateriality of memory.

1. Tushingham, David 1994 'Food Is My Own Language.' In Live 1: Food for the Soul, ed. David Tushingham. London: Methuen Drama.
2. ibid 3. Ferguson, Jane 1993 'Performance.' Evening Standard Magazine, 17 June:
4. Phelan, Peggy 1993 'Reciting the Citation of Others.' In Acting Out: Feminist Performances, ed. Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan. Arm Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
5. Butler, Judith 1988 "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Theatre Journal 40
6. Spencer, Charles 1993 'Celebrating The Ordinary.' The Times (London), 3 July
7. Tushingham, David 1994 'Food Is My Own Language.' In Live 1: Food for the Soul, ed. David Tushingham. London: Methuen Drama.
8. Baker, Bobby 1988 Drawing on a Mother's Experience. Publicity postcard. London: Arts Admin.
9. Baker, Bobby 1988 Drawing on a Mother's Experience. Text from the video. London: Arts Admin.
10. Pollock, Griselda 1990 'Drawing on a Mother's Experience.' Performance Magazine, 62 (November).
11. Read, Alan 1993 Theatre and Everyday Life. London: Routledge.
12. Stacey, Caroline 1993 'How To Shop: The Lecture' Time Out, 6 July.
13. 1991 Kitchen Show. London: Arts Administration.
14. ibid 15. Gross, Elizabeth 1990 'The Body of Signification.' In Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. J. Fletcher. London: Routledge.
16. Kristeva, Julia 1982 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.
17. 1988 Drawing on a Mother's Experience. Text from the video. London: Arts Admin.
18. Sutherland, Stuart 1994 Irrationality-The Enemy Within. London: Penguin Books.
19. Butler, Judith 1993 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' London: Routledge.
20. ibid
21. de Certeau, Michel 1988 The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
22. ibid 23. Read, Alan 1993 Theatre and Everyday Life. London: Routledge
24. Freud, Signumd 1953-74 "The Ego and the Id." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. XIX, translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth.
25. Yates, Frances 1992 [1966] The Art of Memory. London: Pimlico.

References
Blau, Herbert 1992 To All Appearances Ideology and Performance. London: Routledge.
Pollock, Griselda 1990 Drawing on a Mother's Experience. Performance Magazine, 62 (November)

Blending In: The Immaterial Art of Bobby Baker's Culinary Events by Lucy Baldwyn was published in The Drama Review T152 Winter 1996. This is a copyright note, and may not be reprinted or reproduced in any way without priornegotiations with the author.



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