ABSTRACT
THE ‘PATIENCE’ SEQUENCE of How to Shop remarks the sort of ‘incoherence’ that, according to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, is produced by the foregrounding of the ‘abject’, a concept and a work of particular relevance to How to Shop because of the show’s religious content. According to Kristeva, ‘Abjection accompanies all religious structurings and reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse’ (Kristeva, 1980: 17). In this essay, Kristeva throws into relief the ways in which the modernist, ‘scientific’ discourse of psychoanalytical theory draws upon and remains imbricated within the historical discourses of institutionalised religion, particularly the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Kristeva traces out the evolution of Old Testament purity laws as a process of creating rules and boundaries for an ideal ‘clean and proper subject’, fit to speak to his god. She argues that these laws, which were related both to hygiene and to the sacred, developed into a classification system of differences and oppositions separating out subject from object, masculine from feminine, heterosexual from homosexual, the spiritual from the corporeal, the clean from the unclean, inside from outside. According to Kristeva, this system then served to define the limits and borders of orderly, proper subjects, defined in obedience to cultural taboos, which must be maintained to achieve socialisation and provide a sense of the self as a discrete and unified whole. The abject marks these limits and borders which, when transgressed or even simply remarked, can provoke the recognition that this wholeness is only a construct, producing a sense of instability and incoherence or of being ‘out of control’. Above all, the abject relates to a fear of the fragility, permeability and ‘uncontrollability’ of the
body, and so the subject’s ‘wholeness’ is threatened by the sight of blood, the appearance of other bodily fluids and the ingestion and expulsion of food, all of which serve as reminders of, and prefigure, the ultimate loss of self – death. Paradoxically, these same objects simultaneously serve as a reminder of birth and of the primary, physical and psychical process of separation from the maternal body, necessary to the achievement of this discrete subjectivity in the first place. As a result, within this process of classification, the feminine comes to be associated with the corporeal abject, and the abject with the feminine, so that for Kristeva food induces abjection when it recalls the ‘archaic relationship between the human body and the other, its mother’ (Kristeva, 1980: 75-6). However, as Kristeva puts it, abjection ‘is caused by what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (1980: 4). It would therefore be wrong to associate the abject only with the maternal feminine. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva then turns to the New Testament, where she explores the sublimation and recuperation of the threat of the corporeal/abject/maternal/ feminine through its incorporation into the figure of Christ, a god made flesh, whose body is subsequently purified through physical suffering and death and then resurrected so that he is assumed ‘whole’ into heaven. By this means the abject/corporeal/feminine is inoculated and transcended through this figure, who thereafter represents an impossible, ideal model for achieving ‘true’, rather than ‘symbolic’, wholeness (Kristeva, 1980: 120). Clearly, ‘Patience’, like much of the rest of the show, can be read as playing on social and sexual taboos in a fashion that borders on the abject in various ways – hence the contradictory, excessive, if not incoherent, nature of Baker’s identifications. The tendency towards ‘abjection’ throughout the piece was often concentrated around the use of food products which were also quite specifically connected to religious iconography. Yet the attitude Baker demonstrated towards this iconography in the show was in itself ambivalent, ambiguous and contradictory. At times, this imagery seemed transgressive, foregrounding the historical, discursive abjection of the feminine within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. At others, Baker appeared to accept her position as the feminine abject and at others again to identify with Christ as an ideal of unity and wholeness, unifying the split between masculine and feminine, the pure spirit and the sinful flesh. This may indicate a reworking of this religious structure at the time of its collapse, and, interestingly, it was the sections where Baker appeared to express genuine religious belief, rather than those that were more obviously transgressive, which seemed to evoke uncertainty, if not instability, within the audience. For example, just before launching into her exemplary shopping trip, Baker repeated the little prayer ‘Lord send me’, which she told us she always said before
engaging in such activities. In contrast to the comic tone previously established, this prayer was delivered quietly and seriously, a switch of mood that caused a hiatus, after which Baker shrugged self-deprecatingly, muttered something inaudible and once again changed registers. Yet ‘Obedience’, for which, following the prompting of her ‘inner voice’, the voice of the Lord, Baker placed an unopened tin of anchovies sideways in her mouth, was received with much hilarity despite its masochistic and Christian framing. This action was shown first taking place in a supermarket on film and then on stage where, still with the tin in her mouth, Baker performed a clumsy dance to the music of ‘When the Boat Comes In’, therefore obediently and/or ironically dancing for her ‘daddy’. The implicit, biblical reference to ‘fish’ was consolidated through linking this act to a story about friends swimming with a shoal of fish in Greece, but Baker also said she may actually have got this image from the film Shirley Valentine. This act was most definitely a mortification of the flesh, and yet Baker’s personal anecdote dwelt on the pleasures of the senses. Moreover, Shirley Valentine is a story of a ‘disobedient’ woman who leaves her husband and rejects domesticity to ‘find’ herself through worldly physical experience, in a sort of reversal and repetition of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Finally, enacting this gesture in the supermarket in itself was socially a transgressive and disorderly act that failed to respect not only the boundaries of inside and outside the body but also the ‘rules’ of the appropriate public behaviour. Similarly, for ‘Joy’, Baker mimicked Eve’s original sin of eating the apple which brought death into the world, thereby quoting the Old Testament construction of the feminine as standing for, and enslaved by, the corrupt and corrupting temptations of the flesh. Yet her citation of this religious archetype was performed as a playful celebration of the body, if not a positive reclaiming of disorderly female desire. Yet again, this whole section was framed by reference to the experience of drowsing in an apple orchard on a late summer afternoon surrounded by the scent of windfalls, a highly sensuous image but one which in turn is not so far removed from notions of death and decay. These, then, like all the sequences in the show, were sort of double or triple exposures in which contradictory or opposite images, narratives and identifications were layered on top of each other, in a manner that was contiguous and overlapping, rather than dialectical. This produced clashes, convergences and dissonances that were somehow both obedient and disorderly, celebratory and troubling, simultaneously affirmations of life and memento mori. This contradictory, dissonant layering was much in evidence with reference to the last two items on Baker’s shopping list. Red wine, for Baker, stands for ‘Compassion’, and she said she needed a great deal of this to get through the day. She held up
a corkscrew to the audience, flapping its arms and saying, ‘My friends say this is me.’ Under the influence of the show’s religious framing, this corkscrew seemed not only to signify ‘out of control’ femininity but also a crucifix. A film sequence used trick photography to show Baker being transformed into this corkscrew to open a bottle of wine in which she then swam apparently nude. This again, then, is a series of double images bringing together the masculine and feminine, the martyrdom of Christ with the ‘hysterical’ woman, the partaking of the cleansing blood in the ritual of the Eucharist with more mundane, literal consolations. This reference to the Eucharist was consolidated in the final action for ‘Love’. Using ‘Mother’s Pride’ bread and taking pains to let the audience enjoy the smell of frying garlic, Baker made garlic croutons which were placed in baskets, passed out and shared with the spectators. Of the ritual of the Eucharist, Kristeva says that, ‘By surreptitiously mingling the theme of “devouring” with that of “satiating”, that narrative is a way of taming cannibalism. It invites a removal of guilt from the archaic relation to the first pre-object (abject) of need: the mother’ (Kristeva, 1980: 118). This sequence was described by several reviewers as ‘touching’, but it is also potentially a reminder of the way in which Mothers are often ‘devoured’, both literally and metaphorically, and therefore, although presented as an act of love and willing self-sacrifice, it did not necessarily allow for the removal of guilt. In fact, How to Shop was shot through with moments when Baker foregrounded the self-effacement demanded by her role as mother and housewife as a sort of martyrdom. This is a mortification of both the flesh and the spirit, which is not entirely willing and happy – hence her need for courage and compassion and her ambiguous relationship to obedience. She was shown breathlessly rushing around the supermarket in order to fit in all her daily tasks, she said she never got to watch a film all the way through because she would always either fall asleep or be popping in and out of the room, and before picking up her halo at the end of the show she muttered darkly that, of course, ‘You’ve got to pay.’ In both the ‘Love’ sequence and in the final act of assumption, the image of the nurturing, everyday housewife and mother, weighed down and ‘devoured’ by mundane, domestic duty, overlaps simultaneously with Christian from The Pilgrim’s Progress, transcending his body to reach the celestial city, the body of the abject, ‘archaic (M)other’, the image of Christ as an ideal of both loving self-sacrifice and ‘wholeness’, and also perhaps with that of the Virgin Mary who, like Christ, was bodily assumed into heaven (as is Bobby in the final image of the show). This final figure, venerated as a mother but only in so far as she achieved maternity without any recourse to sexual intercourse, again represents both an incorporation and erasure of the feminine at the same time. This layering and juxtaposition of contradictory imagery opens up a space of defamiliarisation to
underline the ambivalent, if not incoherent, fashion in which the maternal feminine has been historically, discursively constructed and is concretely experienced by Baker in the practice of her everyday life. However, since How to Shop is, above all, a performance, it would be a mistake to take some of Baker’s ‘masks’ in this show as transparently reflecting the truth about her ‘real-life’ subjectivity, while assuming others only to be part of the act, not least because the subjectivity performed is unstable and unreliable. To do so is to assume the meaning of the show in advance on the basis of Baker’s apparent sex, gender and sexuality and paradoxically to close down the space of agency out of which, in Linda Kintz’s (1992) terms, Baker is successfully manipulating these images. Since it is the proliferation of ‘masks’, identities and identifications Baker performs that produces this defamiliarisation, it is important to take all her ‘roles’ in this piece equally seriously or equally as jokes. This includes her identity as artist and her role as lecturer. Paying more careful attention to the staging of the show within the lecture theatre as a social space and to Baker’s role as lecturer allows for another reading of the piece to emerge which confirms much of my analysis so far but also places more emphasis on Baker’s ‘agency’ as a socially and historically located subject. As the lecturer, Baker stated that she was offering a ‘deconstruction of the shopping experience’ and that one particular source of ‘inspiration’ had been the book Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption (Shields, 1992), from which she read a quotation from Lauren Langman’s essay ‘Neon Cages: Shopping for Subjectivity’ (1992). Examining this quote, its original context suggests that Baker has indeed studied this work which offers a deconstruction of the shopping experience, and that to a large extent How to Shop is a repetition, a reversal and a resignification of this work – in short, a deconstruction of this deconstruction. This reading is of course entirely based on information collected after seeing the show, but Baker did strongly urge the audience to take notes and gave enough information for us to follow up her citation of Langman’s essay. She also stressed that she chose the lecture format because she felt that in previous pieces, like Kitchen Show, the audience became too relaxed and failed to pay attention to the ‘very important points’ she was trying to make. In short, she invited us to accept the validity of her knowledge and her right to speak as an equal authority in a field where, as she remarked, the strength of academic interest indicates that ‘an understanding of the shopping experience is central to any analysis of our modern society’. At the time the audience laughed, and it was left open for them to finally decide whether or not this authority was only a joke and whether or not to become active agents in the construction of meaning after, as well as during or before, the event.
