Ranking with Bobby Baker
Exceptionally funny, Bobby Baker, is a performance artist of rare quality and distinction. (Daily Telegraph)
For over 20 years, and from my early days as a drama student, Bobby Baker has been an inspiration to me and many others like me. In my mind she ranks amongst the most interesting and radical artists in her exploration of womanhood, madness and life and living.
The first time I met Bobby Baker face-to-face was nearly 2 years ago now, in her infamous kitchen, where so much of her work has been hatched and even staged.
I remember her in a headscarf in the drug-addled wake of cancer surgery and chemo, moving chairs and biscuits and coffee this way and that, in a bid to make me feel comfortable. At the time, I couldn’t have felt more cosy being there.
Bobby has an almost childlike nature as an artist and as a person and she's constantly in awe of the human condition and the need to communicate the darker and more absurd sides of her experience.
She soon became the most perfect partner to unpack some Sync stuff on the subject of rank and circumstance; she’s made the two years of doing so, a delight.
An odd bird
Stately was pivotal (Bobby Baker)
When I first talked with Bobby about the idea of doing an article on rank, it took a while for us to find which tack we were going to take.
We started with conversations about bullying; the experience of it in our professional lives, about what happens to us when people pull rank, and how impairment is woven into how we respond to this when it happens.
Most importantly how do we retain our position and our rank or develop it, when all is crashing down around us?
Bobby has often spoken about how she has managed to keep going at her most dark moments, refusing to be boxed in, defying what people might think about her and doing this, by rushing around like a Roadrunner.
“I wouldn’t have been where I am today if I hadn’t been a Roadrunner. I used to scuttle ahead of my team to get to meetings, moving in this strange crouched way, and the funny thing is, that running on the tarmac is really such an inappropriate place for a bird to run!
It was my physio who told me that my road running antics were playing havoc with my body. ‘You’re a very impatient woman. Walk slowly. You’ve got to be stately Bobby and walk upright.’
Stately was pivotal: having a commanding presence. Not only did being still help my struggling body, but it allowed me to consider my emotions. It gave me such power, keeping silent. I still do the occasional bit of road running, when no-one is looking, but most of the time, my car does the running now.”
Rank and artist
I think you have to find a way to observe, to step outside the situation you find yourself in; you need to talk to others and see how things operate and learn, and then work out how you are going to work your way through those systems and go back in (Bobby Baker).
In our time together, she has said that whilst she used to feel inferior as a person and sometimes as a disabled person, she never feels this about the work that she makes, knowing full well when her work is good.
That said, she’s had to spend a good deal of time rejecting the ‘pathetically grateful artist’ diatribe inside herself, no longer choosing to take this position.
Instead, she’s been putting together a different set of values to complement her art and her role as Artistic Director of her company, Daily Life Limited.
In 2009, she spoke at a Sync South East meeting about what she has had to change in herself to put a stop to this ‘apologetic’ position.
She talked about strategies she has developed: of taking things into her own hands, learning to understand the systems and protocols that make a ‘healthy organisation,’ and more importantly, taking more responsibility for developing her own company to underpin her artistic practice.
It was only in grasping this that she could begin to work with her team to make her work more visible and profitable in the widest sense of the word.
Fourth plinth artist, Yinka Shonibare, employs another tactic in this respect. He has also a strong team working alongside him. For him being an artist is something that is not a very ‘realistic occupation’, so he denigrates the position of artist, almost laughing at the gall of it.
Yet he is, in no way, grateful or apologetic. He knows the system and is working it. Here's what he says on a You Tube Video, click and watch it.
TRANSCRIPT: [Yinka] You’ve got to be a bit utopian to be an artist because it's not a very realistic occupation. The thought of being an artist is, in itself, a utopian idea, because I don’t really make anything useful and I think that that is itself an illustration of my own disposition. Half the time I don’t believe that I am doing what I’m doing! I’m realising my dream which is somehow, also, my profession. There is no line between the personal and the professional and so in a way, I feel very lucky that I can do that. I can realise my utopian dreams and still survive through doing that.
Watch a film of Yinka Shonibare MBE: Being an Artist | Art21
Pecking order
A pecking order is a hierarchical system of social organisation in animals. It was first described from the behaviour of poultry. (Wikipedia)
Our second tack was unpacking the insidious pecking order many of us experience in the disability sector: the age old diatribe around rank and disability, and who is more marginalised than ‘the other,’ who is more disabled or deaf, and why?
This week, the message coming through is that the recession is ‘all our fault,’ as our fabulous BBC Ouch Disability Bitch tells us in no uncertain ironic tones! She urges us to quit pecking and unite in the fight, wherever we sit on the competitive suffering hierarchy of things.
“If you have something to say, put down your doughnuts, take to the streets, pick up your pens, do whatever is most accessible to you - and tell the politicians how you feel. Otherwise, do not come moaning to me when that brown envelope falls through the door.”
Syncopation
For Sync itself, it's always felt incredibly important to explore notions of rank and circumstance in leadership circles and to make a lasting impact on the leadership learning mainstream.
So how does the Sync project show that its methodology and approach is powerful, and an altogether better way to stage leadership learning; and that everyone could learn a thing or two from the way we do things? (Well we would say that!)
More importantly, how are we going to collaborate with the mainstream to change the leadership position for our membership, rather than continuing to remain trapped in a silo.
One way is to ensure our membership or 'alumni' are showing their leadership in new and exciting ways, in whatever way they chose to do so, whatever their position or impairment and at whatever pace, fast or slow, they need to go.
One of the most important aspects of this is how we strive to make what we do inclusive to leaders with learning disabilities, and who we include in all of our programmes of work as a matter of equality and principle.
This is powerful for both Bobby and myself: Sync is committed to developing the lives and leadership of artists with learning disabilities and making what we do accessible to them. It also resonated with the work of Bobbys’ daughter, Dora Whittuck.
Dora is a clinical psychologist working in and around language and learning disability and has played a key part in curating the Diary Drawings exhibition for the Wellcome Trust and shaping Bobby’s newly published book Diary Drawings, Mental Illness and Me.
The language of rank
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
No-one can make you feel inferior unless you give your consent, but if you don’t know how to give your consent or what the word consent means, this is problematic.
An easy mistake that we all make is to patronise. Patronising behaviour results from not seeing the whole of a person, but instead we notice that which is immediate in its impact, from a social rank viewpoint, so we see the other as less than us.
Arnold Mindell, founder of Process Oriented Psychology describes rank as ‘the power to act in a particular situation; defined as the sum of one’s privileges in a given moment or context’.
We are consistently reminded of this when we sit in a room with our disabled peers and the jargon flying around the room means there are some people who do not understand and do not have a voice.
The rank inherent in the language we use is horrible and we’re all guilty of it and we need to continually challenge it.
If we do not create a level playing field, we deny people their right to thrive and lead through their own experiences and stories.
The nature of the beast
We know the material otherwise we wouldn’t have broached it. (Sarah Mainwaring, Back to Back Theatre)
Last week at the Barbican, Bobby and I sat in a sparse audience watching Food Court by Back to Back Theatre as part of the BITE festival 2010.
Not only was this a beautiful, powerful, provocative and uncompromising show exploring bullying and abuse, it was made more uneasy for many by the fact that actors with learning disabilities were ‘doing these things to each other.’
You could feel people in the audience thinking 'how could it be possible that ‘people like this’ could hold such dangerous and powerful material?
In the post-show discussion we learned this work came directly from the artists' improvisations, their spontaneity, what they see and experience in the world: be it bullying or playing Grand Theft Auto on Playstation.
They were showing us all that we are all, irrespective of impairment, capable of being dark and vile as Sarah Mainwaring, one of the actors told us when asked about the drive and content of the work.
“We do this work for love, honesty and openness and we do this to give you a good show. We know the material otherwise we wouldn’t have broached it.”
The same goes for learning disabled people and leadership. Robin Meader is a learning disabled artistic director, storyteller, advocate and on the Sync Intensive Programme.
Robin uses the power of stories, from his own experiences and those of his peers and weaves in those from across the world to show us the nature of beasts, where and how we make less helpful decisions in our lives and how we might achieve equality and harmony in our world.
Creating the right circumstances
And so, all this chat about rank and circumstance, where does this leave us now? We've still got lots of knots to unpick here yet none of this really takes away the sting of the word "rank". Somehow it will always, in my mind, be a word we use to describe a particularly bad smell as well as a position of power.
We know that when rank appears in a room and is used in the wrong way it can have catastrophic results, if we let it.
Should we, like Bobby, find different ways to be ‘stately’ and remain grounded when the more sinister side of rank prevails?
Should we think harder about the best way to move through the ranks to get into positions where we can be the best we can be?
Do we consider the ways we ourselves pull rank and exclude others?
Should we become more pro-active about creating the right circumstances for more disabled leaders to lead?
Why don’t you join us in thinking more about rank?
