Box
Story takes up some of the familiar themes of Bobby Baker's work
in a conclusion that contains more openly tragic material than the earlier
shows in the Daily Life series. All the shows are funny, of course, but this
one offers us an optimistic, indeed redemptive, look beyond the death
that is at the centre of this performance.
Box Story is the last in Bobby
Baker's Daily Life quintet. The series has
involved a decade-long commission by the London International Festival
of Theatre in which Baker, working with her longtime collaborator Polona
Baloh Brown, has explored both comic and painful aspects of daily life in
local settings.
Opening the series in 1991 in
her own North London kitchen, with
Kitchen Show, Baker then performed a lecture on supermarket shopping
in How To Shop 1993; next came a tour of a health centre turned into
an uneasy funfair in Take A Peek! (1995). In 1999 Baker returned to
class in a local primary school, with Grown Up School. To end the series
she takes her audience to church.
Box Story has an obvious personal
and autobiographical slant. It is
Baker's own life in short stories, beginning with one about her behaving
badly in the pram with her older brother, and ending with an anecdote
from the teenage years of her own children. Baker's technique of creating
(from food and drink) an artwork in the course of the performance, to be
destroyed at the end, has worked consistently well since her successful
Drawing on a Mother's Experience. The emotional shock at the centre of
Box Story is her father's death in a drowning accident on a family holiday.
Although this is dealt with 'tightly' in the show, the effects are clear to
see. Drowning becomes one of the disasters invoked towards the end
of the performance, along with plague, chaos, war, and incest, and it is
represented in Baker's 'drawing' here as a solitary island. This shocking
death, and its destructive long-term cons sequences, cannot be accommodated within the main framework of the depiction of a life.
Box Story links this experience
to an awareness of the slow develop-
ment and recognition of profound suffering. Baker's characteristic
embarrassment of her audience, the trademark experience of the mess
that she inflicts on herself, are seen in this show to follow from her
father's death - she subsequently gets drunk and breaks things, gets
into art and damages herself. There is an exploration of an abject lack
of self-esteem in her years as a young adult, very different in tone from
the cheeky child invoked at the beginning of this story. The culmination
of the disasters is global in scale and, not surprisingly from an artist who
thinks in terms of the meaning of food, represented by Black Magic
chocolates. As ever in Baker's work, the domestic activities of clearing
up and cleaning up have a restorative and therapeutic character - the
ills and pestilences are physically swept up and swept away, opening
the path to a statement of optimism and faith. This secular form of
redemption figures in many of Baker's performances, often expressed
through upbeat music.
Box Story, however, is being
staged far its opening in 2001 in a church,
Baker's 'own' church of St Luke's Holloway in London. St Luke's hosted
an event in the 'Art in Sacred Spaces' festival in 2000 which was a
service at which the 'sermon' was delivered by Bobby Baker. Baker's
performance on that occasion was reassuringly similar to her secular
outings, complete with a wriggling on-stage changing of clothes and an
ABBA dance routine for the exit. The first show in the Daily Life series,
Kitchen Show, will be remembered by the Bobby Baker faithful as
including "Action No 8: saying the Lord's Prayer. The accompanying
notes said "I always feel a bit embarrassed about it but it's such an
important action that 1 have to include it." Increasingly BB has been
'coming out' in the religious regard; the abandonment of her trademark
white overall is significant in Box Story. Do not let the cycling shorts and
the spangly high heels distract your attention from the royal blue being
worn for this show: it is the exact blue traditionally used to represent
the Christian Madonna.
Box Story is not only about death,
guilt and regeneration, it is about the
more specifically Christian themes of sin and redemption. 'It's all my fault'
is the ending to the catalogue of accidents that makes up the last story
in the sequence. This plays with a gorily old-fashioned notion of sin,
which sees it as a stain that needs to be washed away in sacrificial
blood; redemption here, as in the hymn by Cowper chosen for the Art
in Sacred Spaces service, is a 'blood-bought' reward from God for the
unworthy. This notion of sin links with Baker's domestic agenda in quite
complex ways: the biological washing powder of the obsessionally clean
woman may be sanctified here, but we are reminded that it also
damages her skin.
The box itself has the function
and shape of an altar, on which Baker
deliberately lines up the other containers as she finishes with them.
In a church setting, these cartons patently associate, visually, with altar
furniture. At the opening of the show, in St Luke's Holloway, the map
that Baker creates in the performance was associated visually with an
image at the bottom of the stained glass window facing the audience.
The setting is here particularly loaded with meaning, more so perhaps
than some of the other shows in the Daily Life series. Kitchen Show (staged in her own kitchen at home) and Grown Up School (which took
the audience into a functioning primary school) shared this enormous
'freighting' of their setting.
The audience is free to take
some distance from the specifically Christian
aspect of the performance: it is merely an accentuated version of the
more general way in which Baker sees mundane and daily life as the
source of truth and vision. Linking the mundane to the mystical and
sacramental, and in particular regarding the everyday as the route to
special or privileged insight, has a significant history, even if the artists
who have espoused this connection (Stanley Spencer would be a good
example) have often exposed themselves to criticism.
Although the setting of Box Story
favours a specifically Christian reading
of the performance, there are far broader cultural resonances at work.
What is the box? A fridge-freezer carton, it speaks for the mundanely
domestic in any language; in a church it clearly works as an altar. It is
also a coffin: Egyptian funerary culture is alluded to, and the formal
placing of the shoes is very apt. Most of all, the box replays the myth of
Pandora. In the popular version of the myth, Pandora brings a box to
earth and, curious, opens it and releases its contents: these are evils
and misfortunes such as war and plague and thus Pandora is responsible
for the ills of humankind. This common version of the myth allies Pandora
with the biblical Eve and represents women as the source of all trouble.
In practice, the box on its own will do - a "Pandora's box" simply means
an alarming container you would be wise not to go near.
The myth of Pandora and her
box, from classical Greek culture, has a
very complex history.(1) It seems that it was not a box but a huge storage
jar, and not necessarily even Pandora's; she might have opened it, but
possibly her husband Epimetheus did that. Pandora was herself created
by the Gods, animated by the fire that Prometheus stole from Zeus in
order to help humans, endowed with a variety of gifts (some good, some
bad) from all the Gods, and sent to earth. The ambiguities in the many
versions of the Pandora myth are fully exploited in the way Bobby Baker
uses the box in her story. What is often forgotten, though not by Baker,
is the one spirit that remained in the container: hope. Touchingly
referred to as 'blind', Hope stays with Pandora 'in an unbreakable home
under the rim of the great jar'. Hope, another word for optimism in the
face of disaster and discouragement, is the most plausible secular
alternative to a religious belief in 'redemption'. It is hope, blind hope,
that inspires Baker's own breakout from the box.
Box Story, as is fitting for
the finale of the Daily Life series, reprises
familiar elements of this sequence of shows, with a heightened drama
to which the commissioned music by Jocelyn Pook makes an important
contribution. The performance also acts as the artist's own mini retro-
spective, including critical comment on her earlier work. Typically, Baker's
history is self-mocking rather than grandiose: the legendary Edible
Family in a Mobile Home was bad for her teeth, the success of Drawing
on a Mother's Experience went to her head, and we are treated to a
priceless critique of one performance that other, vainer, artists might
decide to forget.
Box Story touches on another
question that remains a puzzle in Baker's
work: how does she put her finger so accurately on recondite academic
arguments - in this instance about the currently fashionable vocabulary
of 'cartography', the iconography of island and sea, the 'mapping' of
culture? Earlier shows have in turn been obliquely informed by positively
abstruse debates in psychoanalytic theory, semiotics, consumption and
identity. Baker tends to position herself enigmatically in relation to the
growing body of academic comment on the intellectual content of her
work. Perhaps Box Story, in speaking of the coincidence between
teenage academic success and tragedy, points to an understanding of
that biographical issue.
Michele Barrett
Queen Mary, University of London
Notes:
1. Dora and Erwin Panofsky Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a
Mythical Symbol (Princeton, 1991)
This article appears in the
booklet Box Story: Bobby Baker published by Artsadmin 2001
This is a copyright note,
and may not be reprinted or reproduced in any way without prior
negotiations with the author.