In a mock heroic bow to the traditional housewife's ability to
wash
whiter than white, Bobby Baker opens her video Spitting
Mad with a
shot of herself pegging out dazzling laundry on the line. She then
snuffs up the smell of it: unlike most advertisements for soap
powder,
her visuals put in play all the other, baser senses besides sight.
Inside, smoothing out the dry cloths, now immaculately ironed into
folded squares, she prepares to make paintings: the foods she will
use as medium, all taken from the blazing end of the orange-red
spectrum, stand on the table; she strokes bottles of wine and ketchup
and checks the sell-by dates, bringing the viewer into touch and
taste;
then she stabs an orange incongruously straight through the core
with
a stiff index finger, and makes a little 'oops' sound.
The undertow of disturbance beneath the control and paragon of housewifely veneer,
the sense of some impending wild loosening and dishevelment has already begun: but
nothing will erupt and break surface to shatter the order Bobby Baker's performance
establishes:it just feels as it might, any minute, and the tension is painful,
gripping, and eloquent.
In Spitting Mad, Bobby Baker applies
- parodies? - craft techniques: tie-die with orange pulp chewed and
spat out again; she echoes artistic movements of the past, using red
wine for an abstract expressionist splatter image; but she also works with her own body directly,
without covert references, when she milks the ketchup bottle into her mouth,
her head thrown back, and then spews it savagely on to the cloth -
with that little nervous smile of women when they know they are not acting
quite as expected of them.
The apologetic diminutive 'oops' at the beginning of the video
is followed by similar noises - little 'oohs' and 'aahs' punctuate the marking
of the cloths; while on the background tape, an arrangement by Steve Beresford
of Besami Mucho, the Brazilian bossa nova, plays languidly. The music
adds 'Latin' sensuality, the captive's fantasy in the midst of kitchenware
banality. But on closer hearing, itconnects to Bobby Baker's exploration
of the glories and the horror of oral gratification: on the soundtrack, a paean
to kissing, on the table, biting, murmuring, chewing, upchucking, and spitting
from the highly charged range of oral practices. Her scarlet and yellow
effluvia of choice transform the shining laundry into receptacles of body pollution - with reminiscences of sanitary towels, nappies, hospital linen.
The film only lasts nine minutes, but it is richly woven, and climaxes with a stunning mock heroic coda to the tune of the ride of the
Valkyries, in which Bobby Baker has turned her artworks intosemaphore flags
and is seen sailing down the Thames, past the Houses of Parliament,
Big Ben and the tower of Bankside. On the prow, like a living figurehead,
still wearing her trademark stiffwhite overall, she signals grandly
with emphatic eagerness; the image, mocking the portentous and the official, combining the comic and the poignant, the small things and the
big issues, packs a strong political punch. The performance sets the artist's
skewed and poignant homage to womanly skills, to domestic processes and cyclical necessities of sustenance, against the rigid towers and
structures of masculine energy and authority. For her flags signal - to them
at Westminster? to us? to herself? - 'PROVIDE BETTER FEEDING'.
The video was Bobby Baker's first film, commissioned by BBC2 and the Arts Council and created with Margaret Williams. She made
it between two live performance pieces in the sequence of five that
she has been working on since. Take a Peek!,
the third in the series, was premiered at the LIFT festival in 1995; Jelly
Game, the fourth and most recent, explores the urgent fears around children, definitions of innocence and the presence of violence. Bobby Baker will perform it in primary schools, and, in the same way as Take
a Peek! is constructed as a funfair with sideshows and booths, so Jelly
Game follows a precon-ceived form of popular entertainment: in this case, the TV game
show, in which the children in the audience will take part. In the aftermath
of the Bulger murder and the Dunblane massacre, Bobby Baker began increasingly to notice the level of violent attacks reported daily on the radio, in the press. A typical news item would say, she notes on a drawing, 'A man has run amok with knives in a supermarket in Broadway Green'.
She's not (of course) a law-and-order tub-thumper; the harrowing preliminary drawings she has made to the performance piece reveal,
as if through dreamwork, how terrified she is of murderous feelings
she experiences. She shows herself spilling out of her own forearm
while her open hand is bloodied and armed with a knife. 'It's
important, she says, 'to be aware that you are a murderer, a fascist,
that everything is within yourself.' Her view of endemic, individual aggression coincides
with the argument of Gillian Rose, the philosopher, in her posthumous collection of essays, Mourning Becomes the Law, that fascism
must be struggled with: to argue for silence ... the witness of 'ineffability', that
is, non-representability, is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too
continuous with what we are - human, all too human.(1) Fascism,
writes Rose - but socially disseminated violence could be included here - retains
its hold when it is not faced and challenged through representation.
Working with schoolchildren in her area of London, Bobby Baker
found
The artist spares no one from uneasiness: Jelly Game will show Bobby
Baker, wearing pink jackboots, as the game show's host, and will
implicate her, and ourselves, in both banality and evil.
Take a Peek!, Bobby Baker's preceding
performance piece, began with a sequence of intense, personal, coloured pencil drawings, elf-portraits showing the artist in the form of one of those stiff Neolithic fertility figurines, arms by her sides, legs close together. But in her case her body was opening up, showing its bounty - and its poisons. In one drawing, her figure is divided into internal
compartments, like a chemist's wall cabinet, and from under the
flaps come unpredictable fluxes and oozings ('bodily emissions'). In
another, the effigy has become a doll's house, with storeys of furniture
and books which the artist has annotated: 'The desire for order - body and household possessions - neat and tidy - PROPERLY LOOKED AFTER'. Other drawings show her head exploding with a burst of silver lucky charms, a breast fountaining with blood, and her body segmented
into flowerbeds, 'growing useful herbs'. This woman is seeking to be
of service: in one image it looks like one of those Egyptian corn
effigies, which were planted with seed and placed in the grave to sprout.
These private sketches strip away the comic playacting which Bobby Baker uses to present herself in performance, and they reveal the work's roots in profound and painful self-exposure.
Two years before, in How to Shop (1993),
Bobby Baker combined the
idea of a management training lecture with a housewife's weekly
supermarket experience; in Take a Peek!,
she has taken up the
question of women's bodies more directly than ever before, and
spliced a woman's nameless ordeals in hospital and clinic with
the
shows and shies of a traditional fairground. Members of the public
are hustled and bustled through in a series of nine moving tableaux
and invited at each stage to participate in some way. The highly
structured sequence was her most ambitious performance to date.
Take a Peek!, first staged on the
back terrace of the Royal Festival
Hall, then toured the UK and abroad in a series of purpose-built
spaces and booths designed by the architects Fraser, Brown, McKenna.
Co-directed by the artist's longtime collaborator Polona Baloh Brown,
it involved two other actors performing and dancing with her -
at the
LIFT festival Tamzin Griffin and Sian Stevenson manipulated the
artist/patient in their care with false bright smiles and muscly
dispatch throughout. In the first booth Bobby Baker was displayed,
bundled up in nine of the starched cotton overalls that have become
her signature costume: she's the Fat Lady', a freak on show; this
corresponds to the 'Waiting Room' stage in the hospital narrative
that pulses disturbingly under the whole piece. Explosions of
entertainment and circus spectacular interrupt the exploration
of
the nameless female complaint, as the spectators - taking a peek
-
follow the artist through the 'Nut Shy' during which she's pelted
with hazelnuts, then on through to the 'Show Girls' where she
performs an acrobatic dance with the others to a hurdy-gurdy.
She is making a spectacle of herself, as Charcot's patients were
made
to do during his lectures on hysteria in the Salpetriere hospital
in
Paris in the 1880s (Freud owned a lithograph of one of these sessions,
showing a young woman displayed in a contorted trance, and it is
still
hanging, above the famous couch, in the Freud Museum.) When Bobby
Baker saw the images of herself grimacing, taken by Andrew Whittuck
(her husband) she realised they caught the feeling of the photographs
that Charcot had taken of his patients - most of whom were women
-
to illustrate the passions that surfaced in the hysterical condition.(2)
The most distressing tableaux involved the 'nurses' pirouetting
as knife-throwers, with all the terrifying associations of reckless
surgery;and the acrobatics scene which cunningly and horribly combined
expert bed-making with a post-op anaesthetised body and strenuous circus tumbling.
Each phase of her journey through Take a
Peek! is marked by a fresh, enigmatic, painfully absurd and peculiar sign of the body, as consuming and consumed - oversize melons in a string bag, kumquats swimming in a plastic bag, looking like fairground goldfish, bubblepack
ice-cubesfilled with Guinness, grass and dirt in a round jug. Each of these
signs are again reproduced in photographs Andrew Whittuck has made to accompany the piece, which approach their odd subjects with the
cold formal precision of the most highly skilled commercial food photography. The audience of How to Shop also came
away with ironically glossy souvenirs: handsome postcards of items in that show's series of
ordeals,like a bowl of croutons, labelled 'LOVE'.
When Bobby Baker was a student at St Martin's, the contemporary
artists she most liked were Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, and her interest in objects and food was partly shaped by Pop Art's approach. But her time at St Martin's was also the period when Gilbert &
George were first appearing as Living Sculptures and beginning to send round
their mail art pieces - traces of their breakfast that day, clippings from
their hair. But while they have turned to two-dimensional imagery for the wall,
Bobby Baker is continuing to use herself as subject and object at once, and to explore pathos and the absurd in daily life.
In 1972, when she first baked a cake - in the shape of a baseball boot - and carved it and iced it, Bobby Baker
Later, Bobby Baker performed a tea-party, offering cakes and meringues to invited friends, and there came a second vision, more painful, and more crucial to the subsequent course of her work:
In that discomfort, when she was laughed at, in that clash between the
audience's response and the earnest effusions of the caring teaparty
giver, Bobby Baker's performance art is rooted. Through it she provides
for others, both in reality and in mimicry in such performance pieces as Drawing
on a Mother's Experience (1988) and Kitchen
Show (1991). She could be called a hunger artist, working with her own cravings and the common needs of people for sustenance, for comfort, for nourishment, of
which food is the chief sign and the chief embodiment in the real world.
The hungers Bobby Baker represents build on her own self-portrait,
andthe revelations she makes are so open they provoke embarrassment. Embarrassment, the emotion close to the intimacies of shame, also depends on arbitrary social codes: it is not one of the grand passions,
the cardinal virtues or the seven deadly sins, but that does not make
it less important, less acutely felt. In this, her use of embarrassment
corresponds to her interest in working with the most mundane and overlooked
daily tasks (cooking, shopping) and using everyday materials (packaging)
andtrinkets (a gold ankle chain). But the theatre of embarrassment
in herhands turns out the lining of all these ordinary processes and
stuffs andmakes them raw and deep; she works with what is concealed in the domestic and the homely and the banal and exposes its complexity
andits conflicts, with humour and imagination and reefs of pain.
In the sequence of performance works, Bobby Baker avoids lulling
the audience into a false sense of security through her comic self-parody: her art is planned to be raw, unsettling - even violent in its
relationsbetween subject and audience. She has defined the effective artistic works as those which
Attending Take a Peek! as part of
the audience should communicate this same feeling of rush and bewilderment, as the audience too
are bundled about and asked to do this, to do that, without explanation; in Jelly Game, collaboration with
the violent instructions, as in one of those blind tests of human aggressive responses, will inspire insights into one's own collusion and responsibility.
Though the illness or the disorder is never defined - never found?
in Take a Peek!, the piece communicates
the female patient's predicament, as she is passed from one investigation or examination
to another, each stage appallingly transmogrified into fairground
entertainments. Each time she is handed on, she sheds one more overall, as if approaching the anatomy theatre for the final operation.
However, by a blissful reprieve, in the climax of the piece, she's undressed
to take a blessed, easeful bath instead - in chocolate custard. She
emerges from this smeared and speckled all over with hundreds and thousands. So Take a Peek! ends in celebration:
in the spirit of 'look we have come through'. The catharsis of its ending corresponds to the bittersweet triumphs which have brought others of Bobby Baker's performances
to a reverberating conclusion. In How to Shop,
for instance, she ascended into heaven on a hoist, a virtuous housewife who has done her job more than properly; in Kitchen Show,
she tucked J-cloths into her shoes to give herself wings to fly, and then perched herself on a revolving cake stand, with the J-cloths still standing out stiff y from her
heels, and memorably began to turn, like a clumsy, poignant, female Eros
of the sink and the stove and the cooking spoon.
These narratives of feeding and being fed are highly ambiguous
in their picture of home victories. For her first major piece, performed
in 1976, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home,
Bobby Baker made life-size figures out of cake worked on to chicken wire as if the dough were
papier mache, and set them out like figures in a doll's house,
in rooms lined with newspapers and magazines: beauty pinups in the girl's
bedroom where she was lying on the bed, reading, and comics in the
boy's room. The mother had a teapot for her head, from which
Bobby Baker used to pour a cup for her visitors, as she was inviting
them in to eat the family.
At the end of the installation of An Edible
Family, when all that was
left of the figures was a stain on the floor and a mass of twisted
chicken
wire, Bobby Baker realised, as she had not done before, how
fundamentally transgressive she had been, how she had in effect
made
a model of her own brother and sister, mother and father and herself.
The experience was distressing, but the work crystallised her approach:
in the most normal scenes of everyday life, she would find disturbances.
Her art's game of 'let's pretend' reveals how much is truly pretence.
An Edible Family in a Mobile Home defined a powerful and recurrent
theme in Bobby Baker's original art of performance: the piece was
a profane communion, a family tea-party in which the family was eaten,
so that the most polite, indeed genteel, national ritual of friendship
became an ogre's banquet. But the artist who nearly twenty years
ago made effigies of her own family out of cake can now present herself,
at the close of Take a Peek!, emerging
out of confusion and physical suffering into the blissful state of gratification, a childhood
fantasy of pleasure and sweetness, fit for licking all over, good enough to
eat.
This kind of ending is again intertwined with the theme of communion
in her work: it reflects the structure of a ritual like the Mass,
which in
its Protestant form does end with the ceremony of the Eucharist,
the eating of the body and blood of Christ by the congregation.
The Mass mirrors his passion, death and resurrection, in a ritual
pattern
which demands that sacrifice take place before rebirth and renewal
can
happen. Bobby Baker's father was a Methodist, and she went to a
Methodist school; her grandfather was so strict that when she made
an
aeroplane out of putty on a Sunday, and gave it to him, he pulped
it with
a scowl. On her mother's side, there are 'strings of vicars'. She
is still a
Christian, and owns up to it, an unusual act for a contemporary
artist.
But its principles and discipline are intrinsic to her pieces.
The abjection
she records is bound up with the idea of suffering and humiliation
as a
resource; she inflicts mortifications on her own body, as in the
horrific
moment in How to Shop when she put
a tin of anchovies in her mouth,
under her cheeks, stretching her face from ear to ear in a ghastly
mockery
of a virtuous smile. She has said that she 'wants to share feelings
of no
worth, of being humiliated', and does not feel that by enacting
them,
she compounds them, but rather gives herself back power in the
act of
willful imitation.
Among the violent preliminary drawings for Jelly Game is a bleeding wound, with a small flattened figure brandishing a knife emerging
from it. She has captioned it 'Oh soft, self-wounding
pelican' in a reference to the hymn which invokes the sacrificed Jesus as the mother bird
who, according to the classical and mediaeval bestiaries, pierces her
own breast with her beak in order to nourish her brood on her blood.
For this reason, in mediaeval images of the crucifixion, a 'pelican
in herpiety', sitting on her nest, often appears at the apex of the cross. For Bobby Baker, the symbol moves closer at hand: to the simple maternal feeding and sustaining of family.
Cannibalism fascinated the Surrealists, as part of the outrageoustrangressiveness they cultivated, and Bobby Baker's work also connects with the movement's aesthetics, in her attention to quotidian details,
to discovering in everything and anything the quality of the marvelous - what Andre Bretoncalled le merveilleux banal. The macabre feel
of An Edible Family, and its burlesquing
of gentility, is close, too, to Surrealist staging of street scenes and enigmatic incidents. They used dummies in combination with fabricated objects in order to
mount a political attack against the hypocrisy of the guardians of culture
and morality then in power. The word 'banal', with its etymological
connection to the Greek word for 'work' and its sixteenth-century meaning
of
common or communal, has been degraded to mean trite or trivial,
just as the ordinary work everyone must do has also fallen into disregard,
if not contempt. This is especially marked recently with respect to the
domestic routines of women and the daily business of mothering - the very
territory Bobby Baker makes her own as an arena of art.
Another Surrealist artist, Meret Oppenheim, in several mordantly
ironical mixed media objects, likewise explored the connections of the female
bodyand food, of love and nourishment: for example, a pair of bridal
shoes trussed and upturned on a dish, with butcher's paper frills around
the heels (Ma Gouvemante - My Nurse - Mein Kindermadchen, 1936),
and the bread roll in the shape of a woman showing her vulva, laid on a
chess board as place mat, with knife and fork alongside (Bon Appetit,
Marcel! 1966). But Bobby Baker did not merely invite eating in an eternal
moment of suspended time; the family was eaten by her guests. This was
uncanny, and comic, too, and it brilliantly realised theories of family
conflict and the place of food, as simultaneously the symbol of care and love and
the instrument of control and authority: 'I'll be Mother' means taking
charge of the teapot.
Similarly, in one of the powerfully bizarre episodes of How
to Shop, she made a baby out of shaving foam, in an appeal to male help
and protection - and then destroyed it. The clash within the very core
of the maternal role figures vividly in Bobby Baker's earlier performance
piece, Drawing on a Mother's Experience (
1988), where she is no longer the daughter but the mother, and is herself feeding and being consumed, physically and mentally. It is a most upsetting piece to watch,
and a powerful one; it begins with Bobby Baker, bright and cheery, giving
a pretty straight account of the birth of her two children and the
first eight years of her life as a mother: there's nothing very dramatic recounted - except for the sudden successful delivery of her son, on the
floor, at home - 'on the only rug I hadn't washed'. At each stage in the
story, Bobby Baker remembers some item of food - the Guinness she drank
to build up her strength, the fish pie her mother brought her - and
produces them on stage from a shopping bag, and then uses them to draw (as
the double entendre of the title promises) on a sheet she has spread
on the floor. The result is a kind of mock Jackson Pollock, an action painting made of beer and blackberries and splattered fish pie.
Then, at the very end, she rolls herself into the sticky, wet, dribbling mess and stands up and hops, stiffly, in a kind of celebration
dance that she has survived.
Drawing on a Mother's Experience was
performed in a church in Bobby Baker's part of North London the night I saw it. From preference, she would always perform in public spaces in ordinary daily use,
like schools and churches and halls (she initially wanted How
to Shop to take place in a supermarket), and says that her ideal would
be to'take a stool out into the street and stand up on it and do it'
rather in the manner of a lay preacher. She finds her material to hand
never in specialist shops or fancy, brand-name boutiques; she is developing a vernacular at all levels - dramatic, visual, topographical -
and it is intentionally not hip like street jargon, or nostalgic like dirty
realist drama dialect, but the particular urban language of the informal unofficial networks, of the usually disregarded working local community. Kitchen Show was patterned on a coffee
morning among neighbours; she deliberately broke down the distinction between strangers in
the street and family in the house, and it was shocking, in a pleasurable way, to be invited into Bobby Baker's own private kitchen to see
her perform. She is interested in the ordinary stories people tell
one another; in the exchanges that take place between strangers on
a bus.
The audience in the church for Drawing on
a Mother's Experience responded vividly, with cries and sighs, hoots and giggles, but
as Bobby Baker worked towards the end, there was a hush and tears. The tragicomic atmosphere was under her complete command: she assumes a tone of stoical jollity in the way she tells her story,
while her characteristic physical bashfulness adds to the excruciating vulnerability she communicates. We learn of what that body has been through,
and though her body is on show in some way on the stage, it remains
hidden at the same time, under her recurring uniform, the anonymous white overall, and through the conventional gestures she adopts. She
says, 'In any place I wear an overall I became faceless and voiceless
and I find the possibilities of that really interesting'.
The laughter she causes is not mirth; it is sadder and deeper.
It expresses recognition in both male and female spectators of the ordinary human mysteries of life and survival and all their accomp-anying difficulties she is representing; but it is very far from
the kind of collusive laughter that protests provoke. Bobby Baker does not
come on as a victim, asking for solidarity in her sufferings. Her re-enactment
of her experience as a mother is matter-of-fact - no grievances are being
aired, no self-pity. But she draws us into her anger at helplessness,
and the corresponding terrors of inadequacy, into understanding her confusion
at all the demands and the tasks, and the incommunicability of trying
to sustain life.
The Surrealist writer and artist Leonora Carrington said in an
interview that for her painting was 'like making strawberry jam, really carefully, really well'; she cultivates 'dailiness' and its pleasures. Similarly,
the undercurrent of unease in Bobby Baker's pieces rises up to a surface that must be rich in sensuous delights for her. Recalling An
Edible Family, she talks of the figures' perfect prettiness at
first, before theybegan to rot and to disintegrate (and be eaten); she remembers 'the irresistible sparkle of the sugar against the newsprint'.
Her workis consistently concerned with pleasure, with the lively, connected responses of palate and eye, and inspires her to introduce sensuous surprises in every piece, which are frequently funny because they displace sexual engulfment and bliss. Even in the midst of recording
the humiliations of the body, she will take a pause to admire - the
dazzling purple of plums, the peachiness of some pale pink stuff. It brings
to mind something the writer Colm Toibin composed about Egon Schiele, another self-portraitist with a taste for performance:
Partly, Bobby Baker guys herself as a woman, with all the paradoxes that
that entails. When she was little, she wanted to be a boy, like
so many girls brought up in the 1950s with the tomboys Jo in Little
Women and George in The Famous Five as role models. Her name was Lindsey
(itself ambidextrous), but she chose Bobby, and stayed with it.
Names are obviously important: in the game of Happy Families,
there was Miss Bun, the baker's daughter, and Bobby hated her being so round -
and red-cheeked, such 'a diminished creature'. While taking up baking
with a vengeance, Bobby Baker was turning on that fat and happy alter
ego who was so supine in her lot. The figures of women in her work often
seem to belong in a game, too, a game of 'let's pretend' that she is playing.
She conveys the strangeness of all the duties women are expected to fulfill,
and her own ambiguous relationship to shopping and cooking and
mothering and so forth put in question the naturalness of such
activities for women at all. She pinpoints the springs of feelings of worth,
and destabilises them, as when, in How to Shop,
she comments on how accomplished she feels when her trolley is filled with more bargains
and healthier items than the next person in the queue. The uniform
helps here too, as if she needs the costume to perform correctly
in the task of being-a-wife-and-mother, but its anonymity and its ungainliness
only bring out the imprisonment of gender expectations more vividly.
She also seems to affect feminine mannerisms: she has a penchant
for baby pink - slippers, slingbacks, even the overalls were to be
pale, pale pink. She gives quick nervous little giggles after a phrase in
order not to seem too assertive, and to cover up, without really succeeding,
feelings of panic and tension. She purposefully adds flurry and
fluster in her eagerness to communicate, dipping and nodding in a pantomime
of social expectations from carers, mothers, homemakers. This is
often excruciatingly funny, too.
Rituals, sacred and domestic, are sometimes structured to include humour; the festivals of Greece and Rome accorded a hugely important role to comedy, in the raucous satyr plays, for example, which concluded the performance of tragedies, and in the Saturnalia, which survive in some form in carnival topsy-turvy. The Christian
liturgy used to include the risus paschalis, or Easter laughter which greeted the resurrection of Christ. Anthropologists have shown the link
between the way rituals define identity and belonging, and the way jokes,
for example, set borders between 'Us' and 'Them', or challenge adversity with laughter and confirm a sense of social solidarity. The court
jester was allowed, in the guise of jokes, to tell the truth, as the Fool
does in King Lear. Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, points ou
She goes on to discuss the joker as a ritual purifier among the Kaguru,the Gogo and the Dogon and other African tribes, where a joker enjoys privileges of open speech others are forbidden, and can therefore cleanse the community; his modus operandi is different from the straightforward flouting of taboos, however:
Douglas could have been writing about Bobby Baker; her use of the comic mode is interestingly related, given her taste for ritual structures. The women in her childhood - her grandmother and her mother - were given to laughing:
Derision was these older women's way of tackling the world. Freud wrote in a short essay on humour that laughing was a powerful means of self-assertion:
The ego refuses to be distressed
by the provocations of reality,
to let itself be compelled
to suffer. It insists that it cannot be
affected by the traumas of
the external world; it shows in fact
that such traumas are are no
more than occasions for it to gain
pleasure ... Humour is not
resigned, it is rebellious. It signifies
not only the triumph of the
ego but also of the pleasure principle,
which is able here to assert
itself against the unkindness of
real circumstances(6)
The various comic modes upon which Bobby Baker draws - standup, self-mockery and burlesque, clowning and pantomime - consist of different ways of acknowledging the state of abjection and making
a virtue of it, which is a form of refusal, but not complete denial.
Her crucial change is that her humour does not taunt or jeer at others, or like a comic, make the audience laugh at others' distress (the banana skin principle). She is the target of the laughter she provokes, but remains in control, however weak and vulnerable she presents herself to be. She said once that going into a local church gave
her:
Bobby Baker has turned her perception of her own vulnerabilities
and folly and anger both at herself and as a woman into a brave show,
a new way of fooling: like the jester, she tells the truth but seems
to be making mock while she does it, so that we can bear what she makes
us see.
Notes:
1. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation.
Cambridge 1996 p43
2. See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and
English Culture. 1830 - 1980.
London, 1987, pp 147 - 55
3. Colm Toibin The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe.
London 1994, p 121
4. Mary Douglas, Jokes in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology.
London 1975, p 106
5. ibid., p 107
6. Sigmund Freud, Humour. 1928 Complete Works, Vol XXI (1927
- 31), London, 1953, pp 161 - 6.
Bobby Baker: The Rebel at the
Heart of the Joker by Marina Warner was published in
A Split Second of Paradise: Live Art, Installation and Performance, edited by
Nicky Childs and Jeni Walwin. 1998 published by River Oram Press, 144 Hemingford Road, London N1 1DE
This
is a copyright note, and may not be reprinted or reproduced in
any way without prior negotiations with the author.