Construct is one of my favourite words. I love its versatility and the way it can relate to both theory (the construct of gender, for instance) and to the physical process of making (the construction of shelves or garments, etc.)

This weekend I have thought variously about all aspects of constructiveness.

My first thoughts relate to the construct of gender, and to the idea of constructive criticism. At Bobby Baker’s (utterly brilliant) Bumper Package in the Toynbee studios the opening discussion between herself and Lois Weaver caused me to reflect on the troubling issues surrounding criticism and the artist. Bobby Baker now introduces herself very consciously as ‘a woman’ because one damning review by Caroline Tisdall many years ago had a very crushing effect on the young artist, and insultingly misidentified her work in the ICA as being by a man. During the talk yesterday one of the audience members intelligently asked whether or not learning not to justify your work in art college might leave an emerging artist vulnerable to just this kind of misinterpretation by curators, reviewers etc.

A very quick scan of articles like this and the comments on this page show that artists being currently educated in art colleges are learning how to make the very work that attracts enormous vitriol from the general public. Common criticisms of contemporary art include the oft uttered ‘anyone could make that,’ ‘it takes no work at all to do this,’ ‘ I don’t like it’ and (my personal favourite) ‘Well I wouldn’t have that on my wall.’ By far and away the most intelligent exploration of these tensions between audience and artist I’ve ever read is the one by Carol Becker in her book, Zones of Contention. She problematises the distance between the artists’ intentions and the audiences responses thus:

In practice what often occurs when a person walks into the sterile museum setting and tries to grapple with a difficult piece of contemporary work is that he or she is left the question, “What does this work mean?” or “Why don’t I understand it?” And then, if the work generates a bit of uneasiness or anger, the question becomes “Is it art?” …Those expressing such often-heard statements likely feel a great deal of frustration. For them the work is not serving the function that they assume it should. Such audience members question the incorporation of found objects, the way the work is constructed; to them the craft is not precise enough, the materials too mundane, or the representation too minimal – in short, the work appears not to have demanded enough labour. These viewers therefore suspect they have been duped and that they too could construct something of equal merit. Because they are able to step outside, to question its authenticity, it is clear that this work does not satisfy their need to be entranced, amazed or swept away. They may or may not be sympathetic to the notion that the work might intentionally wish to transcend preciousness by negating the experience of its own rarification and that it is in fact successful in these terms. Not only might we say that the viewer has found the experience of the work wanting and in this sense has not “gotten” the artist’s intention, but also that the viewer has not understood why this work has been called art at all.

Bobby Baker’s typically funny and moving account of a recent social situation illustrates clearly for me what the difficult situation is for the artist who is creating work in this climate. Bobby revealed yesterday during her interview that recently, while at a wedding and looking to make polite social conversation, she outright lied about her occupation. She announced she was a watercolour painter in order to avoid an inevitable attack on her profession and was obliged to ‘fess up when the gentleman beside her showed great enthusiasm for the topic of watercolour painting and began to inquire in increasingly greater detail about her work. Although it was a funny anecdote, it did reveal the dread with which Bobby (and I, to a certain extent) dread the question ‘What is it that you do?’ and the inevitable outburst of hatred for ‘Modern Art’ that inevitably follows the truthful answer, ‘I’m an artist.’

Christine Hill said to me during our epic conversation some years back that she is on the side of the producer in the art world and it is true that without the artists making the work the curators have nothing to curate, the journalists have nothing to write about, the media have nothing to hype up and the galleries have no work to show. Yet in the economic structure of the art world it is the artist who must be self-employed, who must forgo the permanent position and regular salary the curator or museum director enjoys and who must risk constantly the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of their work in the hands of those who ‘manage’ the work they produce. At best the relationship between a reviewer and an artist should be reciprocal; the journalist gets something to write about and the artist gains exposure through the journalist’s engagement with their work. But so much criticism is lazy, and that is where we come to the issue of constructive criticism and the lack thereof in contemporary art journalism.

It is incredible to me in the case of Bobby Baker vs. Caroline Tisdall that during the week when Bobby Baker’s show was up in the ICA Tisdall wrote a review so badly researched that she failed to identify the most basic facts about the artist correctly, yet still managed to have a long-lasting and incredibly damaging effect on the young artist and go home with a substantially higher and more secure wage than Baker likely subsisted on herself at the time. As an artist, the consequences of ‘failing’ in the task of creating a pleasing and important work of art as per the opinion of Ms. Tisdall are apparently much more devastating and long-term in their overall career-effects than the consequences of ‘failing’ to research your article correctly if you are an art critic. How is such a power-relationship possible – or right – when without the artists’ endeavors to make work in the first place, there is nothing about which the journalist can write?

And yet at its very best good journalism and constructive criticism can be important tools for the artist’s growth and could serve to bridge the gap between what artists are currently producing and what the public expect from art.

And I think, in answer to the question that was asked, that it is essential (for me at least) to be able to justify and explain my own work, to write and theorise about it and to be able to put into words what it is about. Because without these skills how am I supposed to access funding, deflect lazy criticisms and silence naysayers whose negative and ill-considered words can have such dire consequences for creativity? The other side of this defensive strategy is that I believe I am accountable for my work and that I am responsible, as an artist, for the meanings and reactions my work may provoke. Criticism is valuable to me inasmuch as listening to and engaging with responses to work provides vital clues about how it is received and understood by an audience.

We need more tools for critical engagement; we need better questions than ‘Is it Art’ and ‘Is it crap.’ So I have been thinking a lot about constructive criticism and wondering about the consequences – and power – of destructive criticism.

But Bobby Baker, in spite of criticisms and bad reviews and a general disinclination towards writing or theorising about her own work, has created an oeuvre of brilliant works so it is conceivable that I am completely wrong about the artist’s need to be able to theorise and articulately defend the things they make in order to be a success. Which leads me finally to a hopefully constructive consideration of her work.

Bobby Baker’s work achieves an amazing resonance among women because the forms she uses and the situations she references are commonly shared yet largely undiscussed amongst us. Unlike Judy Chicago’s infamous Dinner Party which represents a very special and extraordinary kind of eating ritual, Bobby Baker’s work involves the actual consumption of very ordinary food and communicates through an appropriation of commonplace items. Where Judy Chicago’s much earlier work is deliberately grandiose and imposing, Bobby Baker’s materials are deliberately humble and ordinary. You would never eat from Judy Chicago’s incredibly vulva-like, rarefied and commemorative plates. Contrastingly, as part of Bumper Pack yesterday, we were invited to eat customised cakes decorated with an edible print of a bread breast-plate that Bobby Baker baked for one of her previous performances.

This provision for the audience is a fairly constant element in Bobby’s work. In Kitchen Show she bandages her hand into the position required for stirring tea with a teaspoon after explaining that she cannot bear for anyone visiting in her kitchen to be without a cup of tea. The image of servitude and care that this evokes is familiar to many of us, and Bobby’s almost pantomiming action results in a certain amount of self-examination since the work is referencing common experiences and feelings.

In the performance last night, she wore a costume that was covered in ladles. The ladles hampered her mobility, made it awkward to move and bore an air of absolute ridiculousness. But as these ladles were filled and emptied of liquid, and as Bobby explained the significance of each of the dances performed to accompanying ‘Showtoons,’ the costume began to communicate effectively. Water, milk, wine, tea and other liquids were tossed into the ladles and spattered all over the stage in a kind of grotesque and compelling parody of all the human exchanges that take place along the course of our lives. The ladles are able both to catch and receive what is poured and to dish it up again and as such, effectively evoke the messy exchanges of human relationships and life. The performance ended with Bobby Baker covered in red food colouring looking for all the world as though she had been shot, standing underneath an eye-wateringly bright image made from all the spilled liquids and apparently ‘dancing off into the sunset’ with her troupe of young dancers. As an articulation of where Bobby Baker finds herself at this point in her life, this final image is poignant. Bobby takes to new extremes the idiosyncratic British tendency towards keeping ‘a stiff upper lip’ by exposing on an irrefutable scale the violence of that very mentality. Presented with the image of a wounded, broken Bobby Baker grinning from ear to ear under the violently colourful ‘sky’ created during the performance, we the audience are forced to ask ourselves how many times we, being similarly destroyed, have similarly presented an image of being ‘fine’ to the world.

There is something very important about the work she is doing in this territory of mental health and attitudes towards emotions and survival. In 2000, Pull Yourself Together involved Bobby Baker being strapped onto a bus with a loud-hailer from whence she exhorted the public to ‘pull themselves together’ and to follow other familiar instructions associated with ignoring one’s own feelings (and especially one’s distress.) Establishing such a militant position from which to shout ‘pull yourself together’ exposes the real violence inherent in the sentiment. It is brave, timely and necessary for someone to address British attitudes towards emotional life in the way that Bobby Baker does. I am excited to see what work she ends up developing in this vein as she spoke yesterday about war, trauma and the history of mental illness in her family and specifically about how she is currently developing work from these areas of experience.

In this way, Baker articulates very publicly ideas that are often retained privately. Other artists have used much loftier means of referencing the passages of life than milk, water and wine; they have elevated our daily lives by representing them in gold-leaf, pure pigments or carefully edited film, providing escape through the fiction they make of reality. In so doing, such artwork safeguards itself from criticism, because such work is easy to like in its flattering portrait of life. It is easy to like a pretty watercolour that describes life in delightful colours; less attractive to contemplate, for instance, the private rage that Baker talks about when she flings a pear ‘with great force’ against the wall in Kitchen Show. In using the familiar and worthless objects with which we eat and drink to articulate emotional truths about relationships, growth and mortality, Bobby Baker does not provide escape or abstraction for us. Rather she draws our attention constantly to the inescapable significance of our most ordinary moments.

Her symbolic language is one derived from the frozen peas, the ready-meals, the sandwiches, the chores, the tasks and the components with which our lives are imperceptibly filled. Her performances come wrapped in the guise of amateur dramatics (the nervous laughter, the cue cards) and cookery demonstrations. In this way the conventional borders between the ‘expert’ artist and the ‘ignorant’ audience are collapsed; we are very close to the artist performing before us. We know her tools for we have used them ourselves in our own kitchens.

Thank goodness, then, that with all this difficult content, Bobby Baker manages to make us laugh and to feed us with delicious cakes and to always offer hope at the end of her performances. Far from being niceties that detract from the serious things her work explores, I think these details are the very thing that grants safe passage in and out of her work.

I don’t know if that is a useful or a constructive engagement with art but I am glad that whether or not I write this, Baker will continue to construct brilliant works.