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