ABSTRACT
If BoBBy’s work ‘communicates’ to a wider public than usual for ‘experimental’ performance this is because her focus on the objects and rituals of everyday life, the play of humour, and above all her famously ‘endearingly eccentric’ stage persona, render her work ‘inclusive’ and provide numerous points of identification. Yet, Bobby’s shows are multifaceted and densely layered and her relationship with the audience is far more complex than might first appear. Even while she uses self-deprecation and self-parody to encourage laughter at her claims to knowledge and expertise on the basis of her years of experience of being a mother and a housewife (or a patient), she transforms everyday domestic items into highly evocative and aesthetically pleasing ‘art objects’, through the power of her extraordinary skill as an artist and a mother and a housewife (and a patient). Her ‘endearing’ persona then is deployed ironically to persuade the audience to question social and political assumptions about social roles and identity categories, but the ‘discursive’ is explored through the local, the specific and the material. In many shows she engages in actions which foreground the ways in which discourse acts on the body in a manner which can verge on the violent and masochistic, for instance forcing a tin of anchovies into her mouth in How to Shop or pouring a whole bottle of tomato sauce into her mouth in Spitting Mad. At these points it is not unusual for spectators to gag in sympathy, but such acts can also create a sense of unease or embarrassment at such excessive behaviour. Similarly, her shows
frequently touch on serious, even distressing autobiographical material in ways that can give a discomforting sense of complicity in witnessing the public exposure of profoundly personal and painful experiences. In short, as the feminist critical response to her practice suggests, Bobby’s work often manages to produce the affect she sought as an art student, that is the ‘experience [of ] an extra-ordinarily complex set of realities, associations’ (Baldwyn, 1996: 38), not least in relation to the profoundly ambivalent, intellectual, emotional and physical experience of being gendered in our culture. The production of this affect, however, is a matter of aesthetics as well as politics, of ‘art’ as well as ‘life’. Hard work comes into this equation and it can take her years to develop a show. For instance, she says she started to think about the concept of the pea in How to Live between 10 and 15 years ago. This may be partly because as she indicated in an interview in the 1990s, Bobby is engaged in a ‘constant searching for shape and pattern, an almost mathematical fascination with form, that you may be able to put ideas together in arrangements which you imagine, in a rather fantastical way might become perfect’ (Heathfield, 1999: pp. 88-9 above). Integrity in all its meanings is a pre-eminent principle within Bobby’s own process and practice and can be understood to include an understanding that a passionate desire to communicate important ideas involves a commitment to searching for the appropriate (if not perfect) form through which to express them. This sense of integrity and a concern for form counterbalances the deeply felt autobiographical and sometimes ‘taboo breaking’ or disturbing nature of her work, allowing her to engage with the audience in a way that moves between distance and identification, so as to take them on a journey that ‘is somehow safe, based on trust and not abusive’ (Heathfield, 1999: p. 87 above).
