How to Live

A BAKER BY both name and nature, artist Bobby Baker rose to prominence in the 1970s for her edible art works. Food – shopping for it, cooking it, serving it, consuming it – is a consistent feature in Baker’s work, which focuses on the seemingly mundane, everyday details of life. This time it’s the humble pea. Small, round and, as foodstuffs go, distinctly lacking in glamour, Baker’s chosen the pea as a symbol for the human psyche, in a show that’s about mental health and the commercialisation of therapy. ‘I think it’s a fantastic image for our frailty and insignificance in the world’, she explains, ‘a symbol for the extraordinary minuteness of things’. Inspired by her own experience of being treated with Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) – a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy developed to treat people with mental health issues ranging from phobias to more critical personality disorders – Baker will take to the stage as a self-styled self-help guru to indoctrinate the masses with her own 11-step programme for a happy life, How to Live. ‘My patients are peas’, she explains with only the slightest hint of irony, ‘and the basis of the show is that I’m giving an open session – with a patient who’s agreed to be treated in front of the public – in which I’m teaching this set of skills that this patient needs in order to function as a normal person in society.’ It’s typical of Baker’s work that an issue of such profound social and personal significance should be approached so

irreverently. Yet the pea metaphor is designed to educate as well as entertain, and although Baker’s stance is characteristically sceptical, her research for the show is backed up by hard science. With the help of a research grant from The Wellcome Trust, for the past two years Baker’s been collaborating with psychologist and social anthropologist Dr Richard Hallam. How to Live, the fruit of that collaboration, is inspired by Baker and Hallam’s shared fascination with the way in which psychology is packaged and dispensed to the public and by the fact that the language of therapy is now so bound up with the way society operates – in management strategy, reality TV, education and the media. The process has taught both of them that, in the field of psychology at least, the worlds of science and the arts share much common ground, as Dr Hallam points out: ‘Psychology does straddle art and science. I see it as a creative activity. There are some very hard nosed scientists that don’t believe in dealing with questions that can’t be answered or existential questions, but fortunately most aren’t like that.’ Baker continues ‘We discovered we had a great deal in common in terms of our view; we are both, to a degree, sceptics, who like to explore things from the outside. There must be a lot of practitioners who, unlike Richard, find it uncomfortable to stand outside the practice and question it to this degree.’ Baker admits that her initial brush with DBT was not positive – ‘I felt as though I was being indoctrinated, that I was being put in a mind control prison and that I was supposed to alter my way of thinking’, she says – and her first response was to create a show that critiqued it. ‘But as the years went by’, she continues, ‘I realised that it has an extraordinarily sophisticated way of operating and is founded on a scientific approach. I’m a rather belligerent, resistant patient, questioning everything exhaustively, and yet it’s proven to have worked. It’s also empowering, exciting and engaging. What I love is how it’s heightened my ability to observe my own behaviour and thoughts and emotions. It’s also intensified my gaze on society, which has really played into the way I make my work.’ For an artist whose work has always been confessional in nature, Baker’s taking the bravest step of her career by going public with her own experience of the mental health system. ‘It’s been a concern to talk more openly about my own mental health problems’, she admits ‘but given that one in four people will experience mental health problems at some point in their lives, it feels very relevant to be open about it.’ She’s also eager to challenge the stereotypical notion that the individual who doesn’t show his emotions is strong, whilst the person who responds with greater sensitivity to life’s ups and downs, is weak. ‘My experience is that the majority of people with mental health problems are phenomenally strong to cope with them’, she asserts. ‘There’s an

assumption that if you’re severely mentally ill you just become a non-functioning member of society, and yet the evidence shows that there’s an enormous number of people who actually function extremely effectively. People are encouraged to hide it away and be ashamed. And yet it’s a part of life.’ If all this sounds a little earnest, don’t worry: as in all Baker’s shows, the serious theme of How to Live is likely to be subverted by the artist’s left-field, often hilarious, sense of the absurd. Reviews of Baker’s shows are littered with adjectives like ‘dotty’, ‘batty’, ‘dippy’ and ‘quirky’, and perhaps the secret of her success is to do with the fact that although, like many other performance artists, her work explores major existential themes, it’s always served up with huge dollops of irony and wit. It’s this interplay between light and dark, mundanity and profundity, laughter and tears, that’s made Baker a favourite of audiences in the UK and also increasingly in demand overseas, where she’s seen as a quintessentially British middle-aged, middle-class housewife. As a mother of two grown-up children who celebrates her 25th wedding anniversary this year, it’s a stereotype she simultaneously conforms to, reacts against, and self-consciously exploits: ‘I am that but I’m also not that, because, I’ve got the very rebellious streak of an artist, which keeps me on the outside. I’m not the person I was brought up to be in a sense. I’m married with children and do the housework and those sorts of things, but I continuously question that. It’s that questioning that I think people enjoy. I make fun of myself, which enables the audience to laugh. International audiences seem to genuinely want to laugh affectionately at the British and love the fact that we laugh at ourselves.’ Underpinning the project, as always with Baker’s work, is her Zen Buddhist-like belief that little by little – like ripples caused by the drop of a tiny pebble into an ocean – the actions of one individual might change the world. ‘When I perform,’ Baker modestly asserts, ‘I’m motivated in part by a somewhat simple desire to make people change their thinking, change their behaviour. I want people to leave the shows thinking differently or seeing things from a different perspective, even if only momentarily or only in fragments throughout their life. I’m hoping that they will leave the show in a state of hilarity and ecstasy with wonderful tools to change their lives.’