ABSTRACT
Kitchen Show (1991): a space in which the preparation is the show-and this is a situation that, in itself, foregrounds the importance of food in 'the moment(s) before'. Bobby Baker's 'actions' focus upon acts of preparing food rather than consuming it. Indeed, eating is furtive, is guilty, and as such is described coyly in terms of 'grazing' and is manufactured to be as fragmentary and incidental as possible, so that it almost disappears. For example, the finger dipped in the peanut butter jar and the habit which she confides in us (and to which we can all relate) of eating only broken biscuits-and, if there are only whole ones, of breaking a bit off. Reclamation and recontextualization seem central to Baker's intention. In food performance she has found a space that expresses the fundamentals of (her) life: 'Food is like my own language' (Baker in Tushingham 1994:30). It is her text, with which she is able to communicate on an intuitive level. We look at Baker looking at food. Baker plays for the acknowledgement of its significance. In order to achieve this and, concurrently, to cement the relationship she is seeking to establish with the audience, she draws frequently upon stock-images
the audience will share; in Kitchen Show she discusses the merits of pre-prepared soup and enthuses over the beauty of the margarine 'nipple' that crowns a newly open tub of spread, she takes them to the supermarket in How to Shop (1993) and defamiliarizes tinned fish by forcing the whole thing into her mouth, a preoccupation with food packaging that was reiterated in a recent piece, which involved smashing a jar of jam, then transferring some of the jam and glass mixture into her mouth in order to make a mark on paper (in Heath-field et al. 1998). In these cases, it is almost as if she cannot wait to consume it, but, paradoxically, the packaging also sustains the 'moment before' consumption and the dubious safety of hygienic wrapping, a manifestation of an over-anxious society. Baker reclaims the misnamed kitchen sink drama and kneads it into refrigerator, chopping board, electric hob theatrical spectacular. Working even more from the 'inside', in terms of his (sub) version of domestic realism, Sam Shepard, in True West (1988[1980]) and, most particularly, Curse of the Starving Class (1988[1978]) turns out the cupboards, switches on the gas in the box-set kitchen, and moves the lamb-pen plus occupant/potential meal in from the yard.
