#5 'Let's always stare into the sun'
On Bobby Baker, Sophie Taueber-Arp and being mountain
I did my last solo gig a couple months before I gave birth to my daughter. It was May, maybe, in 2013. I was wearing a Supreme/CDG hoodie, the logo embroidered backwards in red thread on a navy blue background with white dots, which I got rid of afterwards.
Thinking on it now, I don’t know why I did that. I’d worn it all nine months and I think I thought it felt shapeless. But, actually I think I felt shapeless. I could no longer understand or even discern my own contours, my ends. I remember being with my friend Jessica (whose Substack and forthcoming novel you should know about) and her saying of my kid — who is just days older than hers — “but she just thinks you’re an extension of her own body”.
I knew how to dress my kid but figuring out how to dress myself became one of the bigger of life's small challenges. I don’t mean not being naked. Then again, that is a very low bar. I mean feeling like myself, like a person who enjoys what they’re wearing, like a person who knows what they look like. I just couldn't crack it. It's like me and my body were on different banks of a river threatening to flood. It took an age for me to cross back over.
These days, I miss that hoodie every day. I hadn’t bought it. It was a gift and it was possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever worn. I look for it on Ebay all the time.
That last gig was at Café Oto in Dalston. My friend Ute, a cellist so good Tarek Atoui once described her to me as a full-on rock star, played with me and it was completely wonderful. Yasuhiko Fukuzono, being the world's most patient and believing label owner, is still waiting for me to record those songs though. “I was doing so much with new songs when i was pregnant,” I told him, “but then…”. But then. I guess I just got stuck.
On Sunday this week, I was at Greenbelt festival, in conversation with artist-in-residence Bobby Baker. We were scheduled to speak after a screening of her 1988 work, Drawing on a Mother's Experience, which she has performed hundreds of times around the world and reworked in recent years into an updated Drawing on a Grandmother's Experience.
We arranged to meet a couple hours before our slot and as soon as I saw her getting off her mobility scooter, I was giving her a hug and she was mid-story, telling me about her grandchildren and her work and her daughter's kitten and her mother and the book she wants to write about her, provisionally titled Screaming in Sidcup. She was brave and fierce and tender and funny and undaunted and fragile and forthright and roundabout and forever caring and altogether marvellous.
(To watch the original in full, just sign up for a free Vimeo account).
Drawing From a Mother’s Experience was Baker’s response to the dominant 20th century view of painting as a male pursuit and of childcare as incongruent to artmaking. In a recent interview with the excellent art critic and art historian Hettie Judah, she said how, despite the fact that her career was booming — as an artist, she was going places — as soon as her first kid was born, she “immediately felt like a bad smell” when she went into art spaces. She remembered taking her baby to an artist meeting before a show at the ICA and how, “apart from Susan Hiller, who was friendly and kind, everybody looked away. There was a sense of shock. Babies felt taboo.” (read Judah’s new book, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, a most excellent investigation).
In the performance, she does a Jackson Pollock-style all-over painting on a crisp white sheet using things like treacle, Guinness and biscuit crumbs in place of oils or acrylic. She commentates the gestures with an impeccably arch and self-deprecatory delivery, telling you what was going on in her life while also, truthfully/sardonically, finding beauty in the colours of the stains she’s making and making you laugh as much as you want to cry. Baker is hilarious. My friend Sophie took the above pic of the two of us, "just after you started laughing.." she said, "and your head went back...".
You know when a baby smiles and it literally lights up the room? It's redundant to say that capturing that kind of moment is not easy. I can count on one hand the number of pieces of music I have on instant recall that, for me, do joy justice (see tunes below).
But I've been thinking about how the joy that a child brings to a parent requires an absolute, undiluted combo of fierceness and tenderness to meet it. To countenance it. To protect it. To wield it. To remember it when so much else exerts enough pressure on you to threaten your very physical integrity.
In an interview in 2009, Baker spoke about the trauma of her father drowning while on a family holiday, when she was 15. “How did your mother cope?” asked the journalist. “What is coping?” replied Baker.
It struck me that that question is a useful lens through which to unpack her wider oeuvre, along with its twin, “What is caring?” — caring as caring for, and caring about.
What moved me most about Baker is her insistence on the value of caring for children and other domestic labour as equal to any other work and as the foundation of a healthy society. It’s not that she resented doing it, she said. What made her angry was that it was deemed, socially and economically, to be less valuable — and that she was therefore disregarded for doing it.
At the end of the performance, Baker rolls herself up in her drawing. Watching it again, I kept thinking about the dissonance of Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, wherein the artist, himself in a bow tie and suit, would cover a full-grown naked woman in the blue paint he’d patented, so he could make his artwork with her as his human paintbrush. What a small, a reductive idea of a woman that gesture betrayed.
I thought too about how the curators of the Sophie Taueber-Arp: Living Abstractions show (at Kunstmuseum Basel, Tate Modern and MoMA, in 2021) told me that Sophie Taueber-Arp — a maverick hyperactive multihyphenate — made early colour-field works in the 1910s that predate Kandinsky’s as pioneering abstractions, but that they hadn’t been considered serious artworks until now because she’d made them with beads, a so-called “feminine pursuit”. What reduction she encountered.
Holding Baker and Taueber-Arp in my mind, I’ve found myself singing again one of my unrecorded songs from that gig. It’s a one-liner, the lyrics of which I’d chant to the sound of an ancient windchime that has since kind of fallen apart. It goes:
Let’s always stare into the sun
It felt to me then at seven months pregnant, and it does now too, like a raised fist and an open palm both. Like mountain pose. It’s a resolution, I guess — which really isn’t the same as having everything sorted. It’s more like a map. It’s got me reaching for Arthur Russell again and that moment at the end of the Barbican gig that I mentioned in post #1 where the band (a magnificently expanded Speakers Corner Quartet) did a lengthy version of In the Light of a Miracle, in which Russell sings:
Holding in the light of the miracle
Holding in the light of the miracle
Living in the light of a miracle
Living in the light of a miracle
Holding in the light, in the pouring rain
Holding in the light, in the thunder
Holding in the light in the pouring rain. That’s something isn’t it. So hold on tight, ok? Keep going <3 Just keep going/
Notes
To delve deeper into Baker’s wider oeuvre, here are some more videos: Kitchen Show, Box Show, How to Shop, Table Occasions. And a good interview too.
For Sophie Taueber-Arp, go here, here, here and here.
World of Echo
I’m always thinking about this opening paragraph and the beautiful essay that follows it about UK rapper, singer and Afroswing pioneer J-Hus, by the excellent Aniefiok Ekpoudom:
"We were British kids raised in African hall parties. On Saturday evenings, in community centres turned banquet halls, we huddled by round tables and scraped jollof rice from our plates while Afrobeat and African highlife blared from heavy speakers. Vocalists floated over pulsing drums and jazz-tinged brass. The songs sounded like sunshine and our parents danced through the evening till the sky went pink."
So for some songs that sound like sunshine or like daybreak or like going to spin/pounding pavements with Grace and that, in itself, being a good way to start the day:
Max Richter, Spring 1 - Recomposed: Vivaldi's Four Seasons
Yo La Tengo, Return to Hot Chicken
J Dilla, Sunbeams (Extended)
Raphael Saadiq, The Answer Live at Maida Vale
Pharoah Sanders, Love Will Find A Way
Lojay x Sarz, Monalisa
Star Feminine Band, Peba
Arnab Chakraborty & Anwesshaa, Saagar Kinare
Pull up a memory
Always eager to hear what you have to say, what you’re listening to, or what walks you’ve been on. A friend left me a voicenote today saying she’d found cds — cds! — I’d burned for her on what can only have been another planet. I wonder what I put on there …
Working sidewalks
London’s still buzzing from carnival and I can’t get enough of @itchy_videos : New Orleans footwork and second-line dancing.
I'm loving the blog and so very much identify with your description of trying to reconcile with my body again. Not that I exactly disliked my body's changes after childbirth, but just that what I thought I was like and what my body insisted on being like remained vastly different, and somehow that was a much bigger question than simply what clothes to wear.