ABSTRACT
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-dye 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, it connects 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 bodily 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 into semaphore 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 stiff white 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 (later retitled Grown-Up School), 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 preconceived 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’. Fascism, writes Rose, but socially disseminated violence could be included here, retains its hold when it is not faced and challenged through representation (Rose, 1996: 43). Working with schoolchildren in her local area of London, Bobby Baker has found ‘they instantly picked up what Jelly Game is about. I went in with a bowl of fruit, and said, “Let’s invent a game.” One boy immediately grabbed an orange, and cried, “Boom, boom, it’s a bomb, it’s a hand grenade” – I felt I’d come home at last, they understood so well.’ 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, self-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 play-acting 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 Sîan 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 Salpêtrière 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 (Showalter, 1985: 147-50). The most distressing tableau 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.
