Review: Woo Woo by Ella Baxter

There is perhaps no time as fraught for an artist as the period leading up to an opening. So it is for conceptual artist Sabine and husband Constantine, whom we meet in the backyard of their home in the “suburban-dry-grass quiet” of northern Melbourne, where “transmission lines … ran like staples between the car-wrecking yards, wig wholesalers and custom-made bathroom factories”. Constantine is taking photos to promote Sabine’s exhibition, Fuck You, Help Me, a series of images of a naked Sabine dressed in ghoulishly transparent “puppets” representing female archetypes. They are “something about discomfort and vulnerability”.

As the opening looms, emotions heighten. Chef Constantine, recently promoted to working more than 60 hours a week, “underestimated how tender she became. Like a piece of sous-vide meat, she was extremely softened by the process”. Sabine is visited by the curt-but-ultimately well-meaning ghost of Carolee Schneeman, and a man who appears in the backyard to watch her through her windows whom she christens The Rembrandt Man. He leaves her overly familiar and terrifying notes, “You are a better runner than you are an artist … how lucky you are … do you think it’s fair?”. Sabine goes to parties with other artists — “exquisite mullets”, “von Dutch. Juicy Couture. The North Face” — and drives herself to the edge comparing herself, searching their praise (“They are instantly appealing”) for criticism. She makes increasingly unhinged livestreams on social media. The scene is set for a concentrated and pitch-perfect horror-comedy-thriller that builds pressure like a steam cooker in Constantine’s kitchen.

Conceptual art is an easy target for satire, too easy really, but Baxter achieves a delicate balance, pointedly mocking the industry of art while suggesting some truly striking creations. One frenemy makes work that:

occupied the intersection of baking and marine life. She made cakes that looked like whales, which she then threw at gallery walls … the cakes were vegan. They were ethical cakes.

Another compiles sculptures of household objects (“seven thousand dollars for a handful of river rocks in a blender”). Sabine’s own work intrigues enough for the hype around her to be convincing. Baxter offers images surprising and wonderful, such as Schneeman’s apparition in Sabine’s living room carrying a literal albatross.

Sabine “prostrated herself before the altar of art. She spent her whole life in the process of making or recovering from art,” Baxter writes. “Her art had its own ideas of what it wanted to be, and it shrugged off her plans for it like an insolent teenager”. Woo Woo is a study of the tyranny of the creative impulse, the chaos and iron grip of its reign. But it is also a study of the tyranny between people, particularly those connected most intimately. Sabine would not be surprised “if a psychic told her that in a past life [she and Constantine] had been feuding lords”. While Sabine’s art seems to dominate their lives, Baxter undercuts presumptions in an unsettling portrayal of domestic hetero life.

Gay rating: 3/5 for several queer characters and relationships.