Book review: Ella Baxter, runner-up for an Australian novelist of the year prize after the publication of her 2022 debut, New Animal, returns with her sophomore offering. Woo Woo is a sticky and somewhat gory look at the art world, performance, gendered violence, online voyeurism and leaning into the beast within.
Conceptual artist Sabine Rossi prepares for the opening night of her new exhibition Fuck You, Help Me, which comprises a series of photographs of Sabine wearing her “gothic skin” body puppets and a seven-minute film of the artist dipping herself in animal blood.
In the days leading up to the opening there are dinner parties and exhibit openings of her art world friends to attend, plus Sabine’s gallery wants her to write an artist statement and live-stream on TikTok to connect to fans.
Then two strange things happen: Sabine is visited by the ghost of the experimental visual artist Carolee Schneemann, and she sees a man outside, a stalker she names the Rembrandt Man.
“Hell,” Sabine’s gallerist Cecily says, “is an artist three days before their opening,” and that seems to be true. Sabine is exhilarated yet paralysed; she’s energised to the extreme yet unable to sit down and write more than one word of her artist statement. Each day, she unravels a bit more, until, as her husband would say, she goes truly “feral”.
She live-streams herself defecating in a hole in the garden, and instead of keeping the stalker’s notes as evidence for the police, Sabine “sucked on the paper until it was reduced to soft bitter hairs across her tongue and then swallowed it, letting her membranes and muscles shove it deep into the wet dungeon of her body”.
As the Rembrandt Man looms nearer, Carolee encourages Sabine to embody her rage, so Sabine rages against everyone who has ever wronged her: “The man who ran after her and insisted she give her number to him. The bartender who made her cocktail extra strong and then again and again. The friend who said she was good at a lot of things but great at none. Shitty paintings of faces and fruit that sold for 10 times more than her own work. Curators and galleries, the public! Anyone who had told her, no thank you, not this time.”
Sabine prepares to meet her stalker in a set-up steeped in animalistic imagery, while 400 people watch her live-stream. “The irony was not lost on her that even while she obsessively checked her windows and doors to keep someone out, she was actively inviting complete strangers – perhaps even the Rembrandt Man – to look at her through a screen.”
Baxter’s critique of online performance and disconnection is cutting: while Sabine is being chased by her stalker, her followers make comments like, “I need your face care routine”, and “this is so insensitive for people who have actually experienced assault”.
A dip into the book’s acknowledgements proves real events do underpin Sabine’s world. Baxter writes about her own stalker and that “the fear and distress and fury they brought into my life has led me to make my proudest work to date”.
There’s no shying away from the bloody and gnarly topics of the novel through dry, sparse prose. Baxter wants the book to push up against your skin and burrow inside, so the language is brash and rich: quail eggs are “skewered”, a champagne flute dropped on to a concrete floor “shattered in a shimmering smash”. Not a novel for the squeamish but a novel for the feral inside us all.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter (Allen & Unwin, $36.99) is out now.
