Sabine, 38 and living in Melbourne, is a fairly successful conceptual artist. Woo Woo, Ella Baxter’s second novel, is set in the week before the opening of Sabine’s “career-defining” exhibition entitled Fuck you, help me. The psychological pressure of her impending public consumption is already distorting Sabine’s relationships with Constantine (her husband, a cook), Cecily (her gallery owner) and Ruth (her best friend, also an artist). A stalker, whom Sabine calls – not a compliment – the “Rembrandt man”, gets caught up in this shimmering stress.
The stalker is not a metaphor – Woo Woo, says Baxter, is a “scorched earth response” to her own. Her novel presents art not just as a balm, but as a tool for regaining personal sovereignty.
No one in Sabine’s life knows how to deal with her intruder. Her social media followers think it’s a bit like that. Ruth is concerned but wonders if it’s “some kind of career advancement.” Constantine, who worryingly can’t believe it’s even happening, thinks Sabine is simply going into a downward spiral. The police are believably ineffective.
Baxter’s debut, New Animal – about a grieving undertaker who stumbles into Tasmania’s BDSM scene – promised something stranger than it delivered. Woo Woo’s snappy humour seems less cautious, a sharp brio it borders on slapstick as Sabine stomps through the city with bleached eyebrows and a silk slip, demanding with lustful depravity that her nearest and dearest confirm that her work is still “unbelievably seductive and topical.”
For Sabine is, among many other things, passionate and sincere about art. (Woo Woo is lush and explicit with aesthetic influence: individual works—from Cindy Sherman, Tania Bruguera and Tracey Emin to Eartheater, Ovid and the Kama Sutra—introduce each chapter as an epigram.) Sabine and Constantine are happy to finally be on the rise, but the “unusually rich” creative class around them makes Sabine uneasy. The pointed irony and “exquisite mullet hairstyle” of Melbourne’s tasteful “children” scare her—as does the magazine redesigning her studio to make it look “more artsy.” She continues to search for the “skeleton of beauty in her environment,” obsessively counting the followers who join in and comment as she livestreams her lunch or delivers monologues from a toilet. It all exudes anxiety about how and from whom one gets recognition. Behind Sabine’s “permanent audience” lie darker questions about exposure, vulnerability and control.
The stalker asks these questions in real time. He stands motionless outside her windows, leaves notes and “writes a role for her that becomes increasingly terrifying.” But with Sabine’s sense of doom comes a ruthless energy that exceeds the boundaries of normal life. In wildly surreal detours, Sabine is joined by the ghost of experimental artist Carolee Schneemann – who acts as a kind of anger doula. Schneemann makes Sabine overcome her fear and consider “that artists are violent by nature”; that “fear” can also mean “anger”.
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Sabine listens. And finds that her anger is fruitful and erupts in furious, animalistic creativity. The visceral catharsis refreshingly does not read like therapy; Baxter treats autobiographical elements (an artistic practice, a run-down rental apartment, the stalker himself) as compost, not a garden. Woo Woo is, in this sense, a spiritual cousin of Pola Oloixarac’s superb satire “Mona”: sexual, dazzling, angry invention, pulled from the clutches of a tale about a would-be predator.
Sabine’s body becomes a battleground for her creative and literal autonomy. The stalker has invaded her psyche and her personal space: his gaze has “become her own.” She makes art while “rotting with fear”—but then, by naming it, she rips back her agency. “My bones have dislocated with fear,” she screams in one of her most dramatic performances. “My flesh has abandoned me, falling from my skeleton like boiled beef, like slow-roasted lamb.” Baxter observes the body everywhere with carnal curiosity. Sex is a “Mariana Trench of… sweat and spit… completely aquatic.”
Not everything gets through. Uneven sentences recall earlier criticism that Baxter overexplained “the emotional moment.” I don’t need a mention of the “generally lawless energy of the night,” or that there is “much to be said” about art and money, or that Constantine sums up Sabine’s writhing improvisation as “wild”—or, indeed, the changes in his perspective that dilute things.
But where New Animal has been accused of being “afraid of taking risks,” I don’t think that can be the case. Its splashy, wild energy holds it together like a force field. Baxter has graciously swaps a too-sweet ending for a disturbing one – but even without that, Woo Woo’s guttural, extravagant imagination would make it stand out. As Sabine explains somewhere along the way, “Making art is an athletic feat.”
