Bobby Baker Research Articles

When Bobby Baker works, she plays: a study of Drawing on a Mother’s Experience and Table Occasion No19

ABSTRACT Bobby Baker has been making innovative performance work for more than forty years. This essay takes a fresh look at two works – Drawing on a Mother’s Experience and Table Occasion No 19 – through the prism of play theory. Play is sometimes disruptive, messy and dangerous, and it is sometimes silly, funny and welcoming. Through play worlds are created where things can be true and not true at the same time; play is taken seriously, but it is not serious. In play, it is possible to say one thing and to mean another. Exploring Baker’s work as play reveals how she is able to present contradictory attitudes simultaneously. These performances engage with – and interrogate – a wide range of topics including the complexity of art, gender, domesticity, professionalism and mental health. Baker’s play challenges the status of different forms of work and questions the labours of leisure and care. Each performance concludes with an attempt to reveal a discovery, but always holds back from polemic. This article shows that it is Baker’s use of play that makes it possible for the artist to present an astute and nuanced argument in these works.

From the Political to the Personal: Work and Class in 1970s British Feminist Art.

How did British feminist art of the 1970s represent work and class, and what light does this shed on the women's movement more generally? This article discusses the work of artists, including Bobby Baker, the Feministo and Fenix collectives, the Hackney Flashers, and Mary Kelly. These artists were eager to connect feminist activism to other struggles on the Left and were thus initially drawn to document working-class women's paid work. Their political commitment to represent 'ordinary' working lives often led to lengthy periods of research, as well as attempts to make both the creative process and the finished product accessible to new participants and audiences. However, across this period, two changes took place. First, artists began to focus on women's unpaid work, drawing attention to the tension between domestic work and paid employment, and the lack of easy solutions to this problem. Secondly, most lost faith in art's power to represent the experience of work beyond the individual and the personal. Early political idealism gave way to sustained soul-searching about the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic difficulties of representing the experience of others, particularly those of a different class background. This article, then, shows that the early British women's movement was keen to engage with working-class experience and that it did so in a way that was self-reflective. In the end, it was this self-reflection, and the questions that it generated about the morality, politics, and aesthetics of representing others, that led to the personal and psychological turn of the later 1970s.

Performance and Community: Commentary and Case Studies ed. by Caoimhe McAvinchey (review)

Reviewed by: Performance and Community: Commentary and Case Studies ed. by Caoimhe McAvinchey Jane Barnette Performance and Community: Commentary and Case Studies. Edited by Caoimhe McAvinchey. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014; pp. 272. In this edited collection, Caoimhe McAvinchey joins the conversation about the role of theatre in society, providing compelling counter-narratives to the “useful” approach of community-based performance through case studies and interviews. Designed to be a “resource for students of applied, social, community and contemporary theatre practices,” Performance and Community offers a snapshot of current approaches to making theatre with, about, and by diverse communities, most of which are rooted in the United Kingdom. In direct contrast to the approach of tackling social exclusion taken by the UK’s Labour Party over the last decades, this collection highlights the aesthetic and political ambitions of community practitioners, providing evidence for interpreting applied performance as vital to society for its affect, as well as its effect. The problem with the Labour’s narrow focus on a social return for its investment in the arts, according to McAvinchey, is that “such singularity of approach negates the glorious complexity of human beings and how fluid, accommodating, or even contradictory our identities and notions of community can be” (6). To demonstrate this variety, McAvinchey has woven a tapestry of examples through carefully curated interviews with and case studies about leading practitioners in community performance. The result is a provocative invitation to redefine both key words in the title of the anthology: what is performance, and how can it help reimagine and critique our understanding of community? The ordering of the case studies and interviews helps to flesh out these questions, in (roughly) three sections— each proposing a different definition of community (and, by extension, an aesthetic of performance). In the first, combining interviews with Lois Weaver and Mojisola Adebayo with a case study of Magic Me, McAvinchey explores the generative potential of “negotiated togetherness,” or a temporary community (11). For Weaver (now based in London), whom American audiences will recognize as a pioneer in lesbian and feminist performance, her current projects center on “inventing ways to get people to talk to each other,” such as The Long Table, an approach that uses the dinner table as the centerpiece to encourage what Weaver calls a “seeded conversation” (26). Adebayo is passionate about recognizing minorities within minority communities, and the workshops she facilitates create spaces for LGBTQ individuals of mixed ethnic and racial heritages to find temporary communities within their other communities, whether bound by geography, race, or economic strife. Magic Me, an East London–based arts organization that forges connections between youth and the elderly, uses performance to articulate connections between generations of people who are otherwise isolated from each other. Next, with case studies of the Lawnmowers Independent Theatre Company and Grassmarket Project, as well as an interview with performance artist Bobby Baker, the focus shifts to community performances that are by and about marginalized populations. Lawnmowers, for example, intervenes in the public understanding and acceptance of adults with learning disabilities, while Grassmarket takes a théâtre verité approach to staging, typically casting nonactors to portray themselves in performances that offer a voyeuristic glimpse into the gritty reality of, say, drug addiction and poverty. Baker, meanwhile, seeks out “places where people meet rather than . . . places where theatre audiences go” for projects like Mad Gyms and The Daily Life Project, which offer survival tips and rebuttals to the prejudices often associated with mental illness. The latter half of the collection identifies six examples of collaborative creation, ranging from choreographer Rosemary Lee’s Common Dance, to the partnership between Mark Storor and Anna Ledgard, to “the only building-based theatre” group in this collection, the Young Vic Theatre, as revealed through an interview with Sue Emmas, director of their community performance program Taking Part (15). In an interview culled from a larger academic study, including a symposium and an interactive DVD, Lee discusses the creative process behind Common Dance, a 2009 piece that featured fifty-three dancers (most of whom were not professionals) ranging in age from 8 to 83. Because dance uses a nonverbal bodily language, Lee suggests, it has the ability...

Visual Diary as Prosthetic Practice in Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings

British performance artist Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings , created over a decade during a struggle with mental illness for which she was institutionalized forty-one times, explores and images aspects of self-experience that have been marginalized in the humanist tradition of autobiography. Refracting her self-portraits through various forms of the inhuman—animal, vegetative, machine—she develops a tropology of visual images that "unmirror" self-representation in the violence of self-misrecognition. Her refl ections on her own process chart a posthuman prosthetic practice that does not therapeutically reincorporate her to the human, but generates a culminating self-portrait as an ahuman landscape of the self.

Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me Bobby Baker Profile Books, 2010, £15.00 pb, 232 pp. ISBN 9781846683749

Bobby Baker Profile Books, 2010, £15.00 pb, 232 pp. ISBN 9781846683749 Diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in 1996 and beginning to self-harm, artist Bobby Baker referred herself to the Pine Street Day Centre therapeutic community. For the next 10 years she meticulously documented her

Diary Drawings – Mental Illness and MeDiary Drawings – Mental Illness and Me

Bobby Baker is a woman of many parts: daughter, wife, mother, artist, performer, mental patient, cancer patient, social critic and explorer of the unconscious. She studied painting at St Martin’s School of Art from 1968 to 1972, is artistic director of Daily Life, an Arts Council funded company, and part-time senior research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She also has borderline personality disorder. Such people tend to be intelligent, articulate and creative – also eccentric, prone to self-harm and living on the fringes of society.

Reviews

Diary Drawings by Bobby Baker 19 March2 August 2009, Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE

Food Confessions: Disclosing the Self through the Performance of Food

At the end of the episode “Crowd Pleasers,” from her television series Nigella Feasts, we see British food writer and television cook Nigella Lawson in her nightgown opening her fridge in the dark. The fridge light reveals the remnant dishes of chili con carne that she prepared earlier on in the programme. She scoops up a dollop of soured cream and chili onto a spoon and shovels it into her mouth, nods approvingly and then picks up the entire chili dish. She eats another mouthful, utters a satisfied “umm” sound, closes the fridge door and walks away, taking the dish of chili with her. This recurring scenario at the end of Nigella’s programmes is paradoxically constructed as a private moment to be witnessed by many viewers. It resembles acts of secret eating, personal food habits and offers a glimpse of the performed self, adding to Nigella’s persona. Throughout Nigella’s programmes there is a conscious tension between the private and public. This tension is confounded by Nigella’s acknowledgement of, and direct address to, the viewers, characterised by the knowing look she gives to the camera when she tastes her food, licks her fingers as she cooks, or reveals her secret chocolate stash in her store cupboard; the overt performance of supposedly surreptitious gestures. Through her look-back at the camera Nigella performs both sin and confession, communicating her guilty-pleasure as she self-consciously reveals this pleasure to the viewers. At the start of her performance Table Occasions (2000), solo artist Bobby Baker explains that there are strict rules that she must follow, the most important being that she must not walk on the floor. Baker then hosts a dinner party (for imaginary guests), balancing on top of the table and chairs wearing high-heeled shoes. When the ‘meal’ is finished Baker breaks her rule; she gets down from the table and walks freely across the performance space, giving the audience a knowing look of mock-surprise, as if everyone was seduced into believing in the compulsory nature of her rule (Table Occasions). In this performance Baker confesses her anxiety and discomfort in the act of playing the host. By breaking rules of common etiquette as well as her own abstract rules, she performatively constructs her “sins” and her “confessions.” Baker’s look-back at the audience reveals her self-conscious “confessing self.”

Negotiating Selves: Exploring Cultures of Disclosure

If identity is a construct—and, more critically, a construct defined and developed through relationships with others in public and private spheres—then an understanding of the processes, mechanisms and platforms by which individuals disclose information about themselves is crucial in understanding the way identity, community and culture function, and the way individuals can intervene in the functioning of culture.

Auto/biography and identity: women, theatre, and performance

Acknowledgements Notes on contributors Introduction - Women, theatre and performance: Auto/biography and performance - Maggie B. Gale & Viv Gardner Part 1: Telling tales: Autobiographic strategies 1. The three nobodies: Autobiographical strategies in the work of Alma Ellerslie, Kitty Marion and Ina Rozant - Viv Gardner 2. The disappearing subject in Susan Glaspell's auto/biographical theatre - Nicola Shaugnessy Imag(in)ing a life: Adrienne Kennedy's People Who Led to My Plays and Deadly Triplets - Elaine Aston Part 2: The professional/confessional self 3. The way to the world: Emma Robinson and the dilemmas of identity - Susan Croft 4. Lena Ashwell and auto/biographical negotiations of the professional self - Maggie B. Gale 5. Tilly Wedekind and Lulu: The role of her life or the role in her life? - Bella Merlin 6. Troubling identities: Claire Dowie's Why is John Lennon Wearing a Skirt? - Gabriele Griffin Part 3: Auto/biography. Identity and performance 7. Latina theatre and performance: Acts of exposure - Caridad Svich 8. Being her: presence, absence and performance in the art of Janet Cardiff and Tracy Emin - Jen Harvie 9. Peforming lesbians: Constructing the self, constructing the community - Dee Heddon 10. Re(ci)petoires of the self: Autobiographical aspects of Bobby Baker's performance works. Bobby Baker interview - Catharine Maclean Hopkins

Making a Spectacle Out of Herself

Drawing on Mary Russo’s theorization of ‘female grotesques’, this article analyses Take a Peek! – a circus, fairground-styled ‘freak’ show by British performance artist, Bobby Baker. While making a display of or a spectacle out of herself can be argued for all of Baker’s work, Take a Peek!, the third show in her ‘Daily Life’ series, is especially concerned with ‘woman’ on display. The article argues that in Take a Peek! Baker turns herself into a ‘spectacular’ demonstration of ‘failed’ femininity in a way that constitutes a site/sight of feminist critical ‘work’. The analysis proceeds by detailing the various ways in which Baker realizes her performance through strategies that serve to grotesque the feminine and figure an archaic maternal, the sorceress and the hysteric. In conclusion, Baker’s invitation to laugh at the grotesquing of her own body is proposed as a means of empowering those who look, to look differently at the ideas and ‘ideals’ that shape the feminine in contemporary cultural and social systems, and to expose the symbolic feminine for what it truly is – a freak show.

Performing the Self

Performing the Self

Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity (review)

This book presents a refreshingly honest account of theory and performance practice, one that is prepared to engage with the difficulties, frustrations, and excitement of theorizing practice and to practice theorizing theory. The study is unusual insofar as it narrows the focus on practice to just three practitioners, or more specifically to three performances: Rose English's The Double Wedding, Bobby Baker's How to Shop, and Annie Sprinkle's Post Post Porn Modernist. One of Harris's stated aims is to examine certain theories in relation to these specific practices and, by doing so, to give more critical attention to the work of women performance artists in a British context than they have hitherto received.

‘Transforming’ Women's Lives: Bobby Baker's Performances of ‘Daily Life’

In an earlier issue ofNew Theatre Quarterly, NTQ55 (August 1998), Marcia Blumberg examined the setting of the kitchen in performances by Bobby Baker and Jeanne Goosen, arguing for the ‘transitional and transgressive’ possibilities of this domesticcum-performance space. Here, Elaine Aston returns to the ‘kitchen’ in Bobby Baker's performances of ‘daily life’. The article examines Baker's ‘language’ of food which ‘speaks’ of domesticity, and her conjunction of comic playing and the hysterical marking of the body, to show how her performance work constitutes an angry, feminist protest at the lack of social transformation in women's lives. Elaine Aston has authored a number of studies on contemporary women's theatre, and is Chair of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies, Lancaster University.

Domestic Place as Contestatory Space: the Kitchen as Catalyst and Crucible

‘Kitchen-sink’ drama was a term used (in the main by its detractors) of the drama of the late 'fifties and 'sixties located outside the drawing-room milieu then preferred by conventional West End playwrights. It was always an inaccurate term, in that many of the plays so described neither took place in domestic kitchens nor – more to Marcia Blumberg's point – addressed the issue of the place's usual attendant: a woman. Recognizing the dominance of the kitchen as an icon, and of its related domestic chores as traditionally the tasks of women, two performance artists have recently, and in very different ways, explored the actuality of ‘Kitchen’ occupations and preoccupations. Bobby Baker's Kitchen Show (1991) used ‘found’ environments of actual kitchens, including her own, to produce ‘new and often subversive significations’, while in Kitchen Blues (1990) the South African dramatist Jeanne Goosen constructed a ‘complex feminist bricolage’ through the voices and actions of a quartet of women, embodying ‘the multiple intersections of gender in a shocking tragi-comic evocation of personal upheaval during a period of flux in South Africa’. Marcia Blumberg, herself a South African, has recently been teaching in Britain with the Open University.

Blending in: The Immaterial Art of Bobby Baker's Culinary Events

Through her performance events, Bobby Baker presents us with a genealogy of everyday tactics and surrogate practices that reveal creative techniques for daily living. Whether a recipe for relieving anger (throwing a ripe pear against a cupboard door) or instructions on the art of roaming (a complex dance of several activities performed while talking, such as sorting out some notices, throwing bits of paper towards the bin under the sink [Baker 199I:n.p.]), Baker cultivates their immaterial significance. With skilled deliberation she uncovers the invisible, unacknowledged chores of motherhood and domestic life, which, unfinanced and disrespected, daily threaten to erode identity. By choosing to investigate these often solitary pursuits within the parameters of a performance, her scrutiny celebrates and valorizes the skills involved. Historically, these practices (or wisdoms), like the saws of so-called old wives tales, have been disregarded, considered inadequate for official discourses. Baker, while celebrating the creative potential of these practices, also capitalizes upon the blind spots of cultural ideologies. Apparently acquiescing to the repressive stereotypes proliferated within misogynistic culture-by identifying herself as a mother/housewife and discussing shopping and cooking-she simultaneously undermines them by contravening their limits. Employing a peculiarly British gamut of emotions-reticence, irony, and embarassment-she concocts theatrical images that resonate with unspoken desires and frustrations. In keeping with its character, her performances have appeared in unexpected places-including other peoples' kitchens and her own home.

How to shop: The lecture— an interview with Bobby Baker

This paper introduces the reader to Bobby Baker's latest piece of live art How to Shop: The Lecture, which was commissioned by the London International Festival of Theatre in 1993. How to Shop is the second show in a series of five entitled Daily Life. Following a brief description of the work, is an edited interview between Bobby Baker, Polonca Baloh‐Brown and Alison Oddey. This interview explores the collaborative process of making How to Shop, indentifying initial ideas for content and form, the progression and development of Baker's work from solo artist to group collaboration, the role of co‐director, and use of technology in performance.

Some Ethical Problems of Congress

A recent Gallup poll illustrates the fact that the profession of politics continues to be held in low esteem by the American public, an opinion probably reinforced by the Bobby Baker case. The President has issued an Executive Order set ting high standards for federal government employees, but Con gress lags behind the Executive branch. Among the ethical problems which confront the congressman are obligations in curred during the campaign; pressures from constituents, both as individuals and as groups; the conflicts which sometimes occur between the national interest and that of his district; low ethical conduct on the part of some colleagues; and occasional conflict between the real interests of his constituents and their expressed ideas as to what those interests are. There are four general areas where reform is needed to raise the ethical stand ards of Congress and its reputation with the public: legisla tion requiring comprehensive disclosure of the congressman's finances; legislation overhauling laws dealing with election campaign finances; diminution of the errand-boy aspects of the congressman's job; and elimination of political patronage at the federal level. Politics is a fundamental activity of our society, and if its ethical practice is not at as high a level as we might wish, the fault is in ourselves.—Ed.