Is art eternal? Bobby Baker’s forthcoming installation at Tate Britain is built not to last. But it also confirms that the best work endures. The gallery is presenting a restaging of her influential 1976 cake sculpture, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home. Visitors are invited not only to touch but to literally consume the work, in the form of five lifesize family members made of biscuits, meringue and cake (including, in an updating of the original, a vegan option). Its success may be marked in part by how quickly it disappears.
Baker has said that her interest in consumable art partly reflected her lack of interest in selling work. But it was also a joyous overturning of the elitism of the art world. She described decorating a cake for a friend as a “revelation … What I loved about it was that it was so badly made, it was sort of dribbly”, in contrast to the creations of fellow students at St Martin’s who “reverently followed Anthony Caro … making these huge macho sculptures which had Greek names”.
