Images from:

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/how-to-shop

Bobby Baker is a site-specific feminist practitioner, her “work as a performance artist has raised issues about femininity, families and food in sufficiently complex and interesting ways” (Barrett and Baker, 2007, 3).

It’s interesting to understand that “our perception of an object changes when it is placed in an artistic context” (Barrett and Baker, 2007, 5). The fact that Baker uses food to create art is what makes her performances feminist as “ephemerality is reinforced by the way in which Baker’s materials are foodstuffs not paints – are ones that will perish, will decompose” (Barrett and Baker, 2007, 130). She then goes on to explain that her food sculptures, or performances, can “not [be] preserved: [and] will not be kept for cultural consumption as has generally been the case with ‘images of women'” (Barrett and Baker, 2007, 131).

She uses abjection within her performances which “she argues, is caused by what disturbs identity, system, order” (Barrett and Baker, 2007, 13). She controls the abjection within her performances though and instead of leaving her audience feeling degraded they are uplifted.

In How to Shop, she uses abjection through “a mortification of the self, it is masochistic [as] it silences the woman on stage, who can only mumble indistinctly” (Barrett and Baker, 2007, 14). In this performance she is shopping by herself in a supermarket and a voice in her head tells her to put a whole tin of sardines in her mouth which she does, she then has to continue shopping in this way.

Works Cited:

Barrett, M., and Baker, B. (eds.) (2007) Bobby Baker redeeming features of daily life. Oxon: Routledge.