The sensible woman makes her mark

In a scene from Life of Brian, Monty Python’s send-up of the follies of organised faith, an unwitting messiah tells the crowd: ‘You are all individuals,” to which they concur in unison. Then a lone voice in the undifferentiated mass protests: ‘I’m not.”

Bridget Baker’s creative voice is a bit like that. Her quirky takes on life and art are refreshingly free of the PC and guilt-edged imagery produced by many of her peers. Her perfomances and public interventions are firmly positioned within contemporary cultural discourse. Yet her personalised iconography and idiosyncratic vision place her outside of it.

Her current show embodies the dichotomy of being part of — yet apart from. It is also about faith and the power of myths to transform the mundane. It is a monumental exhibition, both in terms of the arduous processes involved in producing it, and the conceptual density of the works themselves. It also signals a homecoming for Baker from a form of exile that began in 2001 after her Official BB Project in Stellenbosch. At the time she felt constrained by the cloistered art audience. But even though she eschewed conventional art sites she continued inserting her private iconography into public spaces, producing works that directly intersect life.

An ensemble of craft, conceptual and filmic elements, this exhibition represents the culmination of a self-funded photographic project spanning three years in Cape Town, Gent and Maputo. Although predicated on the theme of ‘the sensible woman”, there is nothing sensible about the central heroine’s efforts to transcend her passive ‘every-woman” status into the domain of wonder-woman. Her duel is between the invisibility of her prescribed status and her quest for invincibility. She desires to perform heroic deeds and make her mark — even if the impact amounts to little more than a fleck of ash falling from a skyscraper.

Assisted by an intrepid production team who perform subtle on-set manipulations, Baker constructs sequential narratives shot on location. Despite the specifics of their geography these cinematic stills serve primarily as hyper-real sites for the staging of lavish epics. Star billing goes to The Blue Collar Girl (an obvious reference to her working-class origins), whose signature ‘super-heroine” cloak — an azure PVC coat — recalls a halcyon era of matinee idols and screen goddesses. She is Liz Taylor, Jackie Kennedy and Baker’s alter ego, equipped with a ‘Zelig”-like ability to insert herself into disparate histories and situation. But unlike Woody Allen’s quasi-documentary Zelig, Baker’s alpha-heroine rebels against the sociological urge to conform. She might waft invisibly through crowds — a jazz club in Maputo, the entrance to a building in Gent — but her azure attire becomes a beacon of non-belonging. Yet despite her costume and feisty feats, the blue-collar girl’s presence seems to shrink as the narratives progress. In a crowded market in Delhi, she virtually merges with the amorphous throngs.

In the exhibition catalogue, Kathryn Smith describes this super-heroine as an avatar. The mystical message she imparts is ‘Only You Can”. Continuing her predilection for parodying trademarks and brands, Baker has appropriated this nondescript phrase from the Bible, and transformed it into her personal pay-off line. It could just as easily serve as the slogan of the motivational speaker, or the mantra of the diehard individualist. Like Baker’s eponymous heroine, as well as a photograph of a glamorous 1950s actress, it reappears throughout the narratives — on the rusted hull of a shipwreck, the window of Cape Town’s Old Mutual building, and on the torn fabric of the blue collar girl’s cloak. But these ‘recurring motifs” are like talismans, they serve as symbols of power, nostalgia and desire.

Smith mentions that this exhibition marks a shift from Baker’s earlier explorations of personal biography. But her trajectory remains profoundly personal. Her fixation with 1950s memorabilia relates to a desire to unravel the myths and masks of an era to which her parents belonged. Fostered by the growing tide of commercialism, the fantasy of the 1950s generation was to live a sitcom-style life. Key elements of the ‘Ozzie and Harriet” middle-class dream were safety and a sense of belonging.

The tenuousness of these desires is resoundingly evoked in two works, which continue the theme of the blue-collar girl, albeit more subliminally. In The Botched Epic Attempt to Escape the Maiden, the photograph of the screen goddess has been miniaturised into a license disc. This intricately crafted work may be read as a modernised inversion of the St George and the Dragon tale. It abounds with the ‘artefictions” of faith and fate, such as fishing nets and the Tarot’s 10 of swords — signifying loss and painful change.

Tragedy also pervades The Maiden Perfect, despite the mannered pose of its heroine. With her pageant sash neatly in place, she is about to drown or be strangled by the ribbons of her red shoes — a symbol of desire and hopelessness. The sensible woman has been stripped bare. Unlike the anthem sung in Life of Brian, one can’t always look on the bright side of life.

And faith might not move mountains, after all.

Bridget Baker’s photographs are on exhibition at the João Ferreira Gallery, Hout Street in Cape Town until March 4