ABSTRACT
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 defy being known at all. It falls 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 wall-paper or a comfortable arm chair, 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 the Mothers and we live off it. It is one of the central experiences and social institutions 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 realises its function, these actions are ritualised movements through which are realised, made actual and made into experience, the functions a woman fulfils in the kitchen, that core domain of the domestic economy, the familial community, that private space of reverie and emotional bricolage.* 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 derealise 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 fall-out. 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 workplace 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 marge. 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 breastfeeding 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. 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 elaboration. 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?
