Album review
Sabine is a confident and devoted conceptual artist preparing to launch her new exhibition, Fuck You, Pay Me, when she’s visited by two spirits: the ghost of Carolee Schneeman, a feminist performance artist, and a stalker she deems the ‘Rembrandt Man.’ As she immerses herself in her city’s art scene, where exorbitance, ego, and absurdity abound, her own ideas take on a transcendent, weighty role in her life, helmed by legions of TikTok followers. Sabine is driven to paranoia through her continued stalking, and she takes it out on her chef husband, gallerists, and the seams of her own projects start to burst before she loses control of it all.
At once a ridiculously funny satire on the art world and feminist rebuttal to bodies commodified in the name of creativity, Ella Baxter’s Woo Woo is a bizarre and astute reckoning with art itself.
Our Culture chatted with Ella Baxter to discuss her own stalking experience, delusion and over-confidence, and the violent nature of art.
Congratulations on your second book! How do you feel now that it’s out?
I feel fine now; I had a bit of a conniption at first. But I’ve adjusted and it’s all good. I thought it would be similar to my debut, but it’s been really different — I think I know too much now. It’s been good though!
How has it been different?
I went into interviews with New Animal having no idea what I’d be asked or how long it would take. Just actual facts of the things you do for PR. Now I feel like I have more ease, which actually does help a lot. It’s weird; I had to send some photos from around the time I was writing it, and I realized it was three years ago. It’s a long time between when you make it and when you talk about it. It’s a real trip.
Speaking of, from what I remember of New Animal, it was a little more somber and subtle, and Woo Woo is satirical and often very very funny. Was this a conscious change?
I guess so. I feel like I wrote Woo Woo really consciously — I designed the novel I really wanted and wrote to that. And New Animal was way more intuitive, I just didn’t know what I was doing. First book stuff, you burn off all your ideas, and for the second, you can be a bit more intentional. It was a bit more somber; I think I was sad when I wrote it. With Woo Woo, I was really furious. And with fury comes humor sometimes.
Yeah, you skewer the arts world very well, in the esotericism everyone desperately tries to have and the absurdity that comes from it. Is the Melbourne arts scene this way or was it mostly fiction?
No, that’s the Melbourne arts scene. [Laughs] A lot of that was written quite straight. I mean, I love it so much, I have a deep affection for it, the art industry here, but it’s also so profoundly silly. It’s so easy to write about, there’s so much to write about. I went to a gallery the other day and the curator was wearing a leather beret. It’s just so… there. It’s all the information you need to write about.
You can love something and still make fun of it. I feel the same way of DC, the over-analyzing.
100%. And the dead-seriousness, but everyone is actually quite broke, or is upheld by their family, but they’re engaging in this medium that’s quasi-abusive because it keeps them in a holding pattern. I fucking love art so much, though.
Let’s talk about Sabine, this very sharp and interesting conceptual artist, saying things like “pure, uncompromising rigour is needed to make transcendent, supernatural art.” When did the idea of her first start to form?
She is an aspect of who I am, and also people I’m close to. There’s elements of her that are completely real. What I wanted to do was create a character that people could read and understand why she was spiraling so hard before her exhibition. I wanted to lay out the risks and stakes for her, and to do that I had to explain just how meaningful her own art was to her. That is why she’s so fluorid in how she describes the art and the muse and the process of art-making. I feel like that was integral to understanding why she just spiraled so hard later in the book.
As a writer, I often have to convince myself that what I’m doing is beyond me, and there’s a bit of delusion in that. Likewise, Sabine is drowned in the importance of her own art. Do you have a similar experience with that and did it help with crafting Sabine?
I feel like to release any art into the world, whether it’s books or paintings or sculpture or whatever, you have to have equal parts of rampant ego and hyper-neuroses. The two are needed to make good art. You need the ego to withstand the horror of your work being viewed and responded to by the general public, but you need the neuroses to make sure it’s the best work you can possibly make at the time. The state of being you’re put in as an artist and creative person, it’s just an intense atmosphere. But you have to be to make art. I just don’t think you can be normal and do good work. I haven’t seen it done.
Once, you write, “it had been impossible for her to believe she was anything less than a young god.” Could this kind of thinking turn dangerous?
Yeah! It’s so egotistical. It’s completely alien to a lot of people, which is why I think her normie relationship with her chef husband — there’s so much friction. She kind of has to see herself as a young god to push work out and to be okay with that happening. I feel like it’s a necessary state for her to be in, but it’s totally dangerous to any other soulful, deep connection in her life. I think what ends up happening for a lot of creative people is that their biggest relationship becomes them and their art, so other relationships fall away, or are not as valued, perhaps. That’s what I’ve seen.
Yeah, I’ve definitely mined life experiences in the name of art, or maybe thought about it in a way that hardship could benefit it, and it gets you through it.
Exactly. I feel like that’s just how the muse calls through the rigor of life. I have made work when I’ve been in a stable, healthy place with myself and my life, and it’s still good, but when it feels like I am in conversation with the muse and I am just holding on and riding this beast of creativity, it often comes directly after a horrible life event. It’s like equal parts processing and creativity that are smacking against each other, and I really enjoy it, honestly.
Two visitors haunt and teach Sabine — the ghost of Carolee Schneemann, and a stalker called the Rembrandt Man. Though they obviously have different goals, what did you want to explore by having these two people with her?
I think what I wanted to explore was this sense of voyeurism and how Sabine consents to being online, in all these ways, and those are on her terms, but when she’s viewed outside of that, how awful it is, and what the psychological warfare of having a stalker can do to a creative brain. I wrote Woo Woo while I was being stalked, and I was trying to turn all that horror and that sense of being watched and pursued into art, and having a response that is artistic rather than being threatened. That was my whole goal — writing something that was almost like a fantasy for myself, rather than the reality of the situation.
Yeah, I read that the inspiration for the book came from a real-life experience you had — your stalker’s even thanked in the acknowledgements. How was that experience and how did it shape the story?
I think once I let myself fantasize about all the ways I could confront this person — and they were anonymous, but they clearly knew me quite well, so it was someone close to me — I felt very sick of these internal thoughts, because I was worried it’d happen in real life. If I thought about it too much, I’d bring it into existence. Putting it in a novel seemed like a really interesting way to explore it.
I realized that inviting your stalker into your home is not a realistic response that will end well for you. But at the time, that’s exactly what I wanted to do, in this fantasy world. I really wanted to say, ‘Come in, the door’s open. Who the fuck are you?’ That energy was so addictive. I felt like anytime I lost my place in the book or didn’t feel like writing, all I had to do was think about this person sitting at my kitchen table, and I could write another five days worth of work. I found it really… [laughs] inspiring, the horror of that situation.
That’s so interesting. Has the situation become better now?
I’m not stalked now. I’m not sure if that’s because they’ve decided to stop or I’ve just moved houses so many times and I’ve reduced my social circle a lot. I don’t really know, it was years ago when it happened. I still have a camera, a lot of locks. Anytime I move I do a whole security thing. It changed how I live in the world forever.
I was really interested when Sabine inadvertently livestreams her own stalking one night, which the viewers take as performance art and not an actual crisis. Do you think that a life could ever tip too much into the online sphere, such that it’s not mostly yours anymore?
For sure. I love Gen Z so much, I actually adore them as a generation. They’re such an unserious online presence. That juxtaposition of [Sabine] being completely scared for her life, and they’re like, ‘Wow, she’s not self-conscious about her stomach at all!’ I just love that. I’ve seen similar things on TikTok where someone’s having a real come to Jesus moment in front of the camera and everyone’s not taking it at all, they’re just spewing it back at them. That’s an online dialogue we’re familiar with and it’s brilliant, I love it, there’s so much humor in it. The voyeurism is fascinating.
Once, Sabine imagines both Constantine and her stalker as her “loyal, obedient, needy dogs.” It even calms her. Why do you think she groups them together in the same category?
I think it was an element of control. Her husband was floating away emotionally from her, she couldn’t quite grasp him, and the stalker wasn’t in reach either. I think, for her, having the stalker and her husband within sight was a comfort, because if she could see them both, she’d know where they were. They weren’t distant things she was pre-empting or worrying about. Placing her as the owner of these two Dobermans, on leashes, in a fenced yard — there’s so many parts where they can’t get away from her. I felt like that chapter was the turning point of getting her power, a little bit, and finding her sinisterness in the scope of the narrative.
Sabine and her friends make sculptures, whale cakes, puppets, videos, piles of food, performances, as art. What did you want to explore in the idea of conceptual art, or art that possibly won’t make sense to a viewer but would mean everything to the artist?
I think it is really mystifying, a lot of conceptual and performance art. But what I love about it is it’s kind of anti-capitalist — I mean, I say that, but it’s not. The banana [from the art piece Comedian] just sold for $6.2 million. But in the beginning, it was anti-capitalist, you couldn’t buy the performances, they just existed in a time and space, as they were, often, with the body being abstracted by the work. I really like the place that feminism and performance art intersect, in the 60s or 70s. I think it does lend itself to the ridiculous, but at its core, it is a political form of art.
I love when Carolee tells Sabine one night, “Just let in the idea that artists, through their very nature, are violent.” Do you agree?
100%.
Really! How so?
I feel like the act of art-making is a constant process of destruction and creation, and you always have to be killing off good and bad ideas, ruining work, throwing things in the trash, literally binning a whole manuscript, maybe getting 10,000 words from 70,000. It’s a decimation of ideas and content. I feel like it is a violent process. Not necessarily physical, but the way creative people think, the depths they allow themselves to go to in their darker psyche — you have to plum those parts of yourself for good art. It’s a violent space at times. I believe it, do you believe it?
When I first read that line, I knew I wanted to ask you about it. I do think that was a good argument.
And the way you have this collection of avatars you create havoc within. You’re like this benevolent god — or malevolent, at times. It’s this universe you ruin and destroy. And there’s lots of beauty in it, too.
The chapter titles are all quotes from poems, paintings, exhibitions, and books — tell me a little about selecting these and what inspired you to put them in the book. Were they matched to particular chapters?
Yeah, they were — each chapter heading is the tone, if you look at the art or listen to the piece of music. I had a document on my computer just filled with all the artwork, triple what was mentioned in the book. It was just a way to settle into the novel — each time when I went to write it, I’d look through all the art, I’d listen to the songs, it’d transform me into the atmosphere. It created this mausoleum of Woo Woo to write in, and I really needed it, since I wrote a lot of it in the pandemic when I was quite separate from art. I couldn’t get to shows, and I would have loved to be going to see performance art pieces while I was writing this; that would have been the ideal, but it just wasn’t available. The amount of content I’ve absorbed of Carolee Schneeman is wild — I was fully obsessed with her for a decent four-month period. I felt like the novel needed it, too. It’s following [Sabine’s] mental state, and the art pushed it in directions I wanted it to go, it was like a series of arrows.
Finally, what’s next? Are you working on anything else right now?
I’m getting into screenplay writing, and doing stuff for film and TV. That’s where I’m aiming my bow now. And I’ve got a third book, ticking along, but I haven’t had time to fill up with ideas and energy for it yet. At the end of Woo Woo I was so depleted, I was a sack of skin. So I just have to reform so I can write another one.
Woo Woo is out now.
