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Director
Polona
Baloh Brown

Performed by
Bobby Baker

 

Box Story
by Bobby Baker
The Barbican

28 January - 14 February 2004

Bobby Baker is a performance artist. Box Story is a story about boxes - a washing powder box, a corn flakes box, a matchbox, and a few others, including a box big enough to hold Bobby Baker herself. While progressively emptying the boxes, pouring their contents onto the floor to make a map of space with the world in it, she tells the story of her life. 
      Unless one knew this endeavour was "performance art" one would think it an embarrassingly trite and amateurish affair, crude in conception and dull in content. But it is "performance art", so it is of course highly significant and artistic. The fact that there is already "performance art" (theatre, live music, mime, dance) performed by gifted, highly trained and accomplished professionals, seems to have escaped Bobby Baker, for it is they with whom she competes; and on every count of the comparison with them, her "performance" of emptying of boxes on the floor and faux naif raconteurship pales into the opposite of significant and artistic.
AC Grayling

 
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