ABSTRACT
The genre of female solo performance has seemed to turn around key American figures, such as Karen Finley, Holly Hughes and Annie Sprinkle, for whom a concern with issues of sex and sexuality has brought a ready assimilation into the tumult of argument on the nation’s cultural politics and sexual morality. In comparison, British live artists have rarely suffered from the heat and indignities of full-scale censorious media, religious or party-political attention. Yet in Britain over the last twenty years Bobby Baker has developed a body of popular solo performance works that have come to occupy a complex, critical and resilient position within the cultural landscape. These works have explored, imaged and given voice to feminine experience against a culture in which it has been systematically blanked. As with Finley, Hughes and Sprinkle, her work has often been placed by writers within the formal conventions and political co-ordinates of feminist autobiographical performance. Here the artist is both the subject and object of the artwork, claiming a previously denied autonomy and agency, pressing disclosures of private experience into the public arena in order to speak of an identity overshadowed by patriarchal culture. For Baker this has led to critical attention around her use of the figure of the mother-asartist, and its implicit valorisation of women’s ‘domestic’ work.
