ABSTRACT
Baker mimics the idea of a ‘living museum of suffering’ by representing past experiences, traumas from the patient’s – rather than the doctor’s – point of view; performatively archiving the memories of the hysteric that medical men (like Charcot) could not ‘see’. Narrating her own stories (some of which, she tells us, are too embarrassing to tell), Baker also connects with the collective social and cultural memory of the damaged ‘feminine’; enters the cyclical, backward-looking (rather than linear, forwardmoving) time of the hysteric; remains in the time (body) of a forgotten, repressed Other that is and is not her ‘own’. Clément explains the body of the hysteric as one ‘transformed into a theatre for forgotten scenes’ one that ‘relives the past’ (1986: 5). Baker plays out ‘forgotten scenes’ of daily life, going back to school (childhood) in Grown-Up School, the kitchen or the supermarket (How to Shop). In Take a Peek!, which represents a women’s clinic as kind of grotesque, fairground peepshow, Baker deliberately sets out to make an ‘exhibition’ of herself as female patient, hysteric. She puts herself on show, as an object of humiliation in the gaze of her audience, in order to alienate the ‘naturalised’ clinical and medical violence against the female body. The flesh functions as an archival sight/site, a repository of that violence.* There is a risk, however, that Baker’s hysteric as archivist will merely be read and dismissed as the hysterically funny (‘mad’) woman, not to be taken seriously. Commentaries on Baker’s work frequently tend to elide the serious, angry side to her work, by focusing only on her comedy. Yet, to do so ignores the figuring of the hysteric as angry rebel – as Warner (1995) so insightfully describes her: ‘the rebel at the heart of the joker’. As a counter cultural rebel, Baker mobilises (performs) hysteria in the interests of bringing down the Father’s house. If Baker is playing out ‘forgotten scenes’, bringing them out of silence, then how is she to make memorable in the future what has been forgotten? How is she to make these scenes endure, remain, beyond the moment of their staging? In addition to the tradition of orality (shared storytelling), as previously discussed, it is also important, in this respect, to note Baker’s technique of ‘marking’ actions. Baker marks an action, a memory, abstracting it from continuous performance time for viewing so that it remains differently, is made more present both in the performance and in the after-performance memory. It is important to see these marks not just in isolation, but as they relate to each other. By the end of Kitchen Show, for example, Baker’s body is marked by 12 actions/ memories from the first mark of hospitality (the contorted hand of the hysteric bandaged into the action of stirring tea) through to the mark of roaming (blue J-cloths tucked into the back of her slippers), and shown all together in one final image (to make a ‘Baker’s dozen’). As Baker explains in the performance, it is important to see the image that these make when they are all
shown together. Marks are also central to Baker’s composition. Marking actions is how Baker structures memory and gives an episodic shape to her work. Each mark, memory, has a story that is told, recollected, shared. That these marks are episodically arranged, narrated, is important – these are episodes from a life story, from lived experience, though never the whole story. As Baker marks her personal memories through objects, mostly food, which she frequently, in some way, takes on to her body, she makes a collage – but a collage with gaps and spaces. The white overalls that she usually wears for her performances, for example, get marked by
her memories (often splattered in food), but you can still see the white – a reminder that the stories we tell of who we are to give ourselves a past, an identity, are ruptured fictions. If the medical archivist thought he could catalogue the story of a whole traumatic past, he was very much mistaken.
