Sabine Rossi is a week out from the opening of her solo art exhibition at a gallery in Melbourne, Australia, at the start of Ella Baxter’s second novel, “Woo Woo.” Each of the show’s 15 photographs depicts the artist in a costume comprising the mask of a female archetype and a sheer “skin” — a “wearable puppet” — that sheathes her body without concealing it.
But Sabine, an established artist in her late 30s, is beginning to doubt whether her works are as “good” and “disruptive” as she’d like. Her crisis of faith coincides with a series of visitations from both the ghost of the 20th-century feminist performance artist Carolee Schneemann — one of the novel’s most endearing characters — and a living stalker who is spectral in his approach, showing up in Sabine’s yard and sending venomous letters that fixate on the nudity in her work.
“Woo Woo,” which follows Baxter’s 2021 debut, “New Animal,” is a hyper-focused character study of a working artist in the age of platform capitalism. It at once lampoons and indulges the quirks of the self-marketing creative; Baxter subtly checks what the book jacket calls Sabine’s “neuroses” while allowing the artist to engage deeply with her emotions, especially the unflattering and egocentric ones. In the novel’s opening scene, Sabine says to her husband, as he’s snapping promotional photos of her for the exhibition, that “I am impregnating every image with my unruly, creative juju. Are you getting my full body in? … The shoes?” before she dashes off a tweet that reads, “Art is my life.”
Despite the abundance of art-history references in Baxter’s textured prose — particularly in the chapter headings, which name-drop the likes of Tracey Emin, Ana Mendieta, Cecily Brown and Tschabalala Self — Sabine does not seem as concerned with being in dialogue with other artists as she is with the supposed singularity of her “genius work.” As a result, she glazes over its innumerable precedents: the Western women artists of the ’60s and ’70s who contended with an art world rigged in favor of their male peers, as well as with the mundane and gruesome realities of gendered violence. The performances that Schneemann pulled off in her lifetime — often involving human and animal flesh, bodily fluids and unmediated physical contact — were some of the first to be classified as feminist art.
On the night before her exhibition, Sabine stages an impromptu performance that appears to be Schneemann redux (even Carolee’s ghost points this out), calling into question whether a digital-era restaging of a feminist provocation from 60 years ago can hope to be as powerful as the original. The work in question is a live-streamed pastiche of Schneemann’s “Meat Joy” (1964), in which the artist and seven other performers slathered their bodies with paint and rolled around in a mess of raw meat. In anticipation of her climactic confrontation with her stalker, Sabine buys pigs’ feet and ties them to her ankles and wrists, makes a mask out of bones, and begins oinking on all fours inside her house.
As Sabine’s performance progresses, netizens take turns expressing their disapproval. “YuletideHam commented: I am so tired of seeing the same stuff from female artists … yawn,” Baxter writes. “GlutenPutin commented: Immediately no.” Then TheGoetheGalleryOfficial jumps onto the thread with a cringe-worthy plug: “Opening night of Sabine’s exhibition tomorrow, West Melbourne, check our socials for location and times. We look forward to seeing you all there!” It starts to appear that Sabine’s creative agency has been zapped from her antics.
Then again, “Meat Joy” was misunderstood when it debuted, too: An infuriated audience member came out of the crowd of Parisians and tried to strangle the artist. (It was not until the ’90s that Schneemann’s oeuvre began receiving serious critical attention.) As both a satire of the contemporary art world and a sincere portrait of the “chronically online” artist, “Woo Woo” effectively captures the emergent energies of a generation accustomed to transgression and feminism, but still struggling to metabolize these terms when a living woman embodies them.
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