Bobby Baker is a gracious woman as she welcomes us, not without a
touching moment of awkwardness, into her North London kitchen.
Homely, but superbly designed, the space is comfortable and we can feel confident
that we will be well cared for by so experienced and skilled a woman.
Bobby Baker is taking a risk as an artist allowing the public into her
studio and work space. Intimate rituals and private processes which
define the unique qualities of an artist's work cannot be displayed or
demonstrated to a public on these open days without a hint of the
anxiety of self revelation on one side and the apprehension about
how to react on the other. There is no object to mediate the encounter
between artist and public. There is, however, the persona
of the performer, a body acting in space.
Bobby Baker emerged as an artist in the later 1970's, a period of
decisive
significance in the recent histories of British art. Trained at one
of the leading ail schools, St Martin's, she belonged to a generation
who resisted immersion in the still influential confines of High Modernism
to expand the possibilities of art making and render its range and
effects
considerably more complex. New materials, site - specific
locations, the reference to the life processes of both an individual person
and the environment or culture around us, all this made for an art to
challenge every preconception. Yet a lot of the art made by her
contemporaries still
looks like traditional art. The objects which result
from the many new processes still get exhibited in traditional art spaces
like galleries and bought by companies and collectors. Bobby Baker
crossed critical boundariesin her
work when she began not only baking
but talking about her cakes.
In
the installation, Edible Family in a Mobile Home,
which created a family
group out of cake moulded over life-size wire figures, which were prog-
ressively consumed by visitors over a week, the white coated persona
of the
artist was a critical presence. The experience was at once humor-
ousand macabre,
edging the over familiar towards the surreal as a
means
of signifying the emotionally complex in the commonplace
situations of domestic relations.
Bobby Baker's work has been shaped by the existence of the Women's
Movement which operated in the 1970-80's - as both a vital and a yet
more radicalising force on what culture could do. The whole arena of
women's particular experiences and perspectives was opened out to
resource art practices that began to break down boundaries between
art forms while questioning the existing definitions of what art was and
who it was for. Performance especially has been a richly invested medium
for making art about space and gesture, action and ritual, subjectivity
and language, the necessary means of addressing what has been
unspoken and disregarded in a divided and divisive culture.
Performance has been used as a means to transgress the boundaries within which woman is held separate from, the antithesis of, culture, society, meaning.
Here the problems begin. How is a woman an artist? Can it ever be by
virtue of being a woman? Bobby Baker confronts this head on by staging
her latest art work in a space which is at once a studio and a kitchen.
Lots of women make art on the kitchen table because they don't have
a studio. But this is different. Kitchen is both the site and the subject,
the resource and the topic of a piece of art. Bobby Baker has performed
her work in many places, galleries, as part of festivals, in studios. But
this work is as much about the audience's entry into her space as it is
about what she will do to our experience of that space and its meanings
through watching her working in her kitchen. Housework and the
housewife are terms which are location specific - the house or home is
at once both the core of a social organisation and yet without social
status or value. What could give them significance or meaning, other
than their being made the site of art, the material of art? To make the
housewife and the artist converge in this specific space is to set our
culture's teeth on edge.
Art is the transformation of material - social, psychic, physical - into a
form which so alters what we are familiar with, that we come to know
it differently. Art uses affect cognitively. Women's work, however, is not
often the material of art because it doesn't affect us and it seems to
defybeing known
at all. It fails below the threshold of recognition and
it is not really accounted as work. It is what mothers do because they
are mothers. They cook and clean, prepare food and wash clothes,
shop and run households as a natural extension of the ability to gestate
and deliver babies. Decide to have a child and the whole package of
domesticity lands on an unsuspecting adult's head to take over and
redefine what you are. Who is there when all this happens - who is the
subject (psychoanalytically speaking) of women's domestic labour?
A person, a woman, a worker? The worker, there's a word loaded with
historical and political force, empowered all the more by the debilitating
nature of the work workers are forced to perform in factories, mines
and offices. But the mother, that has no political charge, no identity even.
'Mother' is a not a person so much as a place, a supportive texture for
other people's lives and personalities like wallpaper or a comfortable
armchair, a thereness which is the opposite of our idea of the individual,
neither agent nor sensibility. And woman, well, there's an enigma.
What do they keep going on about?
Bobby Baker's work is about the subjectivity of the woman who works as a mother. Bobby Baker's work is about an artist who works with the materials of an experience which is lived as and seen to be the antithesis of being an artist. There is no doubt Bobby Baker is very good at her job as an artist. There's no doubt Bobby Baker is good at her job of being a mother. There's no doubt that it cost Bobby Baker a lot to disappear into a job at which she was so good it made her all the more invisible.
To make art at all is to change the terms of being a worker who is a mother making art about working in a kitchen.
How
can this topic of all topics be made to touch us for it is blighted by
a culturally endorsed tedium. The Mothers know it already, all too well,
though it is both shocking and comforting by turns to recognise a familiar
pattern of rage, anxiety, ecstasy and pain experienced in an emblematic
form of Kitchen Show. The Daughters don't want
to know, because they
must believe it will be different for them. The point of being a Daughter
is exactly not to become like the Mother. The Son doesn't want to know
because it might make him feel confused. He is already looking for a
Mother substitute. The Father doesn't understand because when he
became a Father his Humanity, his place as a social subject didn't
evaporate in a cloud of talcum powder and napisan. Anyway when he
cooks he clocks up the brownie points. This work is not narrowly
addressed to those who know - or can bear to know. We are not all
Mothers, but we are all the children of Mothers. It happens to Mothers
and we live off it. It is one of the central experiences and social instit-
utions of our cultures - in all the complex facets - of our society and it
should enter representation, so that it can be confronted imaginatively.
Kitchen
Show is a highly formalised piece of work. There are to be a
dozen actions, variations of stirring, throwing, peeling, eating, praying,
dancing, tidying, resting, roaming. What is an action? Like pieces on a
chessboard which have prescribed movements through which it realizes
its function, these actions are ritualised movements through which are
realized, made actual and made into experience, the functions a woman
fulfills in the kitchen, that core domain of the domestic economy, the
familial community, that private space of reverie and emotional bricolage.
(Bricolage is a term from anthropology which defines a making process
which involves the combination of many found elements, the accumulation
of hybrid materials and items to create a cultural form.)
In the kitchen people's needs are supplied. There are actions like offering a cup of tea or coffee which are both simple tasks and dense social rituals. Lest the little moves which encapsulate the attentive concern that all needs should be anticipated and met be overlooked, Bobby Baker focuses attention on the gesture of stirring by fixing her hand into that pose with lengths of adhesive bandage. Suddenly the hand that stirs the coffee in this sunny and plant-filled kitchen becomes a kind of bondage, an injury on a body marked and incapacitated like the bound foot of old China in its submission to the invisible bonds of hospitable service patriarchal cultures call femininity. The placing of a spoon on a saucepan lid is a reminder of a friendship, a network of mutual obsessions and shared tips and hints in the perpetual improvement and elaboration of cooking rituals that begin to have charm as tokens that pass between women, invested with memory and association. It is proper that this should be celebrated - the spoon becomes an adornment for the hair. But there it transgresses two spheres - women's service and the rituals of cooking and women's service and the rituals of beauty. Hair in food or food in hair are taboo, dangers, signs of things being out of place. This gesture of spoon in hair reminds us that there is a person who bridges these places and an artist who by marking her own body with this emblem grounds the shock and the transgression in the actual and the visible, not allowing the metaphor to derealize the social bond, the communication between women that the 'mark' commemorates.
What is an action? Actors acting use the body in space to dramatise words and to make meaning acquire a vivid image through our identification with a sentient, expressive being. The Kitchen is a theatre for many emotions. But Kitchen Show makes us see the actions without an overdressing of drama. They are performed, not acted. The action of bowling a pear at a kitchen cupboard as an emblem of anger is shocking in its calculated nakedness as an action. Angry women are a cultural anathema. Mothers are never meant to be angry. It is always one of the shocks of becoming a mother and a housewife how anger is unleashed in hitherto peaceable and self-controlled people. The anger has deep roots in the violence brewed both in any ordinary family and in the mother's own childhood. The pear is a fruit of soft and sweet flesh. Women are often pear shaped. As it crashes against the hard wooden surface (vinyl silk so that it will wash off easily) it is bruised and explodes - producing a shocking image of violence coupled to vulnerability. The careful housewife takes precautions that her guests are not splattered with her anger. A table cloth protects them from the fallout. The artist places another fruit in her breast pocket, for another time, a disruption of that metaphor of women's fruitfulness with a potential missile.
Managing emotions is part of good acting, and the next three actions alter the mood dramatically. The Kitchen is a space for surprising moments of sensual pleasure and ecstasy because it allows for the unexpected delights of playing with colours and textures. Note the joys of revealing that intensely saturated orange hue of a carrot beneath its drab and often hairy skin. Note the delights of running water 'shot through with joy' as the interior and the work place connect via that humdrum instrument of modern technology, the faucet /tap. Remember James Joyce's lengthy chapter on the modernity of water works in Ulysses as Bloom fills the kettle for a cup of tea. Pause for a moment to note the almost forgotten sensualities of food as the artist opens a tub of margarine with its pristine, glossy surface and rippled swell into that tiny sign-off nipple. These joys are undoubtedly sensual but the careful control which art exercises by asking us only to look at colour and texture but not touch is breached as the artist swamps herself with water and moisturises her face with margarine.
Food is a complex field for women who must both spend their lives feeding others and yet exercise perpetual control over their own consumption. Haunted by the cultural taboos on body size, the mother experiences childbirth and feeding as a potential disaster. How many women never regain their girlish form after that amazing hormonal transformation which allows one body to sustain two and then produce that life giving liquid? Eating has been identified as a feminist issue - where pleasure and pain perpetually interfere with each other across that formative threshold of the inside and the outside, the mouth. Action no 7 produces a mark - lipstick applied to make the mouth a cherry. The narrative which leads to this overlays that adult act of female sexual adornment with a childhood memory, the startled child's inadvertent discovery of a breast-feeding mother and her exposed nipple, red like a cherry on top. Lips, especially reddened lips, are usually taken as a sexual sign - an advertisement of other lips, a fetish against that female wound. But that is in an economy of masculine sexuality. Oral imagery is here wound through memory and image into a more specifically feminine pattern. It is also suggestive of the permeability and mobility of the female subject, at once a mother feeding a child, yet projectively able to experience the lost ecstasies of the child's utter abandon to the pleasures of its lips around the cherry of life. Freud wrote of a little girl's shock at seeing her mother's body and knowing it was lacking. Bobby Baker invents another startled girl-child encountering what is much more interesting and strange about the adult female - the breast, a fullness, a redness, a capacity to sustain life out of the body itself that precisely poses the singularity of woman not as closer to nature, but as a more complex site of human subjectivity as it lives its psychic and symbolic realities in and through a body.
Performance is a singular and effective art form for this kind of complex discourse precisely because we, the audience, are required to engage with these multiple registers of human identity - the physical, the psychic, the symbolic, the affective by being in the presence of the performer who is at once the guiding artistic intelligence and the body which is being artistically marked. The body is not a thing, a natural given, not inert matter or irreducible physicality, but figure, sign, space. Performance uses the body as the principal vehicle of both its semantics and its poetics. But there is always the problem of how we read a woman's body in art. It is often the mute icon, the projective landscape for masculine fantasy. Performance disrupts the fantasy through the actual presence of a body, this person's body, her body. Kitchen Show is about marking a body as the place of an accumulated history, as the place not only of work but the sexually specific subjectivity of the woman whose history of work and whose creative meanings for that work are 'acted out'.
Actions can be movements; they also move us. Two actions are very intimate and personal. They represent extremes of human ambition and self consciousness. One, the awkward attempt to imitate the natural grace of a cat's langorous prowl across a tiny garden lawn, shows the limits of the human body in its odd relation to other animals' confident physical prowess.
The other, the quiet moment's recitation of the Lord's Prayer, kneeling against the window forming a vaporous and momentary stain upon the window pane, shows a spiritual dimension, an ambition to imagine humanity as more than its animal condition. Religion represents a self- imposed but collectively experienced submission to a rule, a mark of difference, a personal faith. Women have been a major force in the history of religions, yet religious institutions are hardly egalitarian. Kitchen and, in this case, church are also antithetical spaces which this action determines to affect. Marked by the knee pads of a keen gardener, praying, an inner - 'rather she kept it to herself sort of matter' is made inescapably public - making the viewer meet the particular person of this artist, who speaks as herself and not everywoman.
Domestic work is a continual struggle to create order amidst the chaos which is daily life. Women are known to become obsessive about this impossible battle against dirt and disorder. Freud called it 'housewife's psychosis' but wasn't very interested. Tidying is an important action, but a complex one. A house is a large space and there have to be contingent plans for getting out of place things back to their homes. Bobby Baker calls them targets, and her tossing them at the targets is both an efficient and a cathartic way of registering the distress at the perpetual mobility of inanimate things and the human will to resist being overwhelmed. Tidying a drawer is symptomatic of the promised pleasures of one day winning, doing a thorough job, which always has to be put off for another time. A jangling selection of wandering items of kitchen equipment forms a noisy and incongruous necklace as a way of marking this perpetual human campaign against the object world which are as often the residues of the other people who share the household space.
There is a continuity and a dissonance in the discovery of the kitchen's other secret pleasures - dancing and roaming. Bobby Baker withdraws into her space as she listens to Pavarotti, using the humble spinach leaf as her prop as she dances in self-contained reverie around the kitchen. How incongruous to imagine that fantasies of such grace, movement and intensity can flourish in the kitchen amongst the daily routines of cleaning the bugs off the greens?
At odds with the will to order and fix is the remarkable capacity of very skilled houseworkers to orchestrate the totality of many little jobs, done on the wing, fitted in between, blending them into a seamless whole. Roaming is like juggling, says the artist, a combination of immense physical skill and an organising intelligence which effortlessly manages a sequence of jobs and duties, managing the many different processes of housework, food preparation, keeping up with friends, odd business phone calls, weaving them into the seamless whole whose skillfulness and pleasures are almost invisible precisely because of that effortless flow through the day. Jeye cloths trail a cloud of blue glory from the heels of sensible indoor shoes as a touching mark of the euphoria experienced in that to and fro which brings together all the kitchen actions. Perhaps there will be a Baker's dozen. One final action which will make us contemplate the totality of what we have witnessed, drawing it all together, and also taking it into the person whose experience has been acted out in time and space, in body and words.
If
such a range of human emotion can be lived in the Kitchen, just what
is it that denies this space both social status and poetry? Women's
domestic lives are not empty any more than workers who are otherwise
required daily to perform repetitive tasks which service other economies.
Kitchen Show presents us with a person, a range of memories, reveries,
meanings and resistances to the domestic as something which threatens
women's hold on a singular identity and yet is also the site of its elabor-
ation. Each subjectivity is a product of constructions of class, race, gender,
sexuality and each speaks necessarily from its own, localised experience.
But each attempt to expose the tension within which a particular class,
race and gender subjectivity is pinned to a culturally prescribed identity
and its performance, has something to say beyond the conditions of its
own existence - if it does not claim its experience as exemplary or
normative. Each attempt to speak of and represent that combination of
subjection and resistance makes a difference because it brings hitherto
disregarded areas of social experience into view. Bobby Baker's art form,
performance, makes us the audience, the necessary witness to the
cultural marking of an individual body. The persona in the piece functions
as the visible crossover point between the action of culture upon this
woman and the cultural action of this artist.
The effect of marking is to make us remark upon the process of living
inside a culture which makes the artist and the woman antithetical terms.
Where else could this become so remarkable than in Bobby Baker's
workshop - a kitchen?
Griselda
Pollock
Leeds, May 1991
This article appears in the booklet Kitchen Show: Bobby Baker published by Artsadmin 1991
This is a copyright note, and may not be reprinted or reproduced in any way without
prior negotiations with the author.