Inside a Spirited, Angsty Message to the Art World

The world of contemporary art can be overly academic, wildly pretentious and often downright maddening. What’s the difference between ironically bad art and genuinely bad art? Is there a difference? Is this outfit de rigueur for the big opening or will the wrong shoes get you laughed out the door?

All of this can feel confounding, confusing, even slightly ridiculous. Where to find some clarity, or at least a few laughs?

I have a one-word answer for you: Wendy! The beloved, recurring graphic novel anti-hero and the quasi-autobiographical avatar of Kahnawá:ke-born, Toronto-based artist Walter Scott, Wendy’s misadventures will be familiar to anyone who has tried to make a serious run at the quixotic life of a working artist.

The Wendy Award is Scott’s fourth book with the artist-in-crisis and one-woman hurricane at the centre of the storm.

Wendy sprang fully formed from the mind of her creator in an impromptu bit of doodling on a bar placemat. At the time, Scott had recently completed an arts degree at Concordia University and was trying to figure out his own path forward.

Anyone who has stood at the edge of the existential chasm between the big hopes and dreams for oneself and the agonizing path towards making those a reality will relate to Wendy’s — and, by extension, Scott’s — struggles.

In reading the first few tomes of Wendy myself, I alternated between groans of recognition and screaming at the page over the many disasters both self-created and endured.

While Wendy might be brimming with ambition, she’s also her own worst enemy when it comes to making solid decisions. Equally maddening and endearing, Wendy was an embodiment of her creator’s experiences, and offered an acutely funny takedown of the contemporary art world in all its lofty ludicrousness.

The Montreal powerhouse Drawn & Quarterly published Scott’s first graphic novel on Wendy’s art-world tribulations, titled Wendy, in 2014. That was followed by Wendy’s Revenge in 2016 and Wendy, Master of Art in 2020. Now in her 10th year, Wendy has garnered a number of superstar fans like Zadie Smith, as well as critical acclaim aplenty.

The meta narrative of Scott’s books is always a source of joy. It’s well in evidence in this latest outing, where Wendy’s newfound fame comes from her own thinly veiled Roman à clef cartoon strip Wanda.

Thanks in part to the success of her own bit of self-cannibalization, Wendy is celebrating the fact that she has finally attained the badges of success that she has long been chasing. She’s got a degree of recognition, a good apartment, plus a pleasant, beardy partner.

Our heroine has also secured a greater financial toehold in the art world thanks in part to the National Foodhut Contemporary Art Prize. This award bears a close resemblance to similar prizes in the actual art world, such as the Mozilla Rise 25 Prize, that come with more than a few sticky strings attached, including onstage appearances, as well as supporting the corporation itself.

In an interesting parallel universe, Scott himself was nominated for the Sobey Art Award. Although the Sobey isn’t quite as money-influenced and high stakes as the Turner Prize, that comes regularly under fire for accusations of jury bias, it has its detractors.

But not everything is sunshine, roses and free wine at gallery openings. Even after having pocketed the much-coveted corporate cash for her art, things are never that easy for our girl.

The challenges of navigating complicated friendships, old boyfriends, new fame and the creative impulse itself is an ongoing source of high anxiety, offset only by bouts of binge drinking and drug-induced debauchery.

Before you can yelp, “Wendy, no! Don’t do it!” All hell breaks loose.

In addition to the usual stuff of jealousy and insecurity, the entrance of COVID-19 blows apart the delicate dance of money, fame and polyamorous romance. Then there’s a disastrous interview in support of the Foodhut Prize that incites an internet pile-on from the endlessly critical comment section, followed by a (predictable?) bender. Hello, chaos. We witness a slippery slide into full-on meltdown in inimitable Wendy fashion.

Wendy’s ongoing state of disaster is interspersed with that of her friends Screamo, a gay man trying to navigate Montreal hookup culture, and Winona, an Indigenous artist nominated for the same award as Wendy, but forced to contend with an entirely different set of issues.

Even as she’s making the world’s worst decisions and self-destructing in epic style, there is something fundamentally sweet about Wendy. Her impulses, like a great many millennials (Scott himself was born in 1985), come out stumbling in the dark in an increasingly fraught time period.

Add in the incomprehensibility of much of the contemporary art scene, and you have a recipe for gleeful excoriation.

Scott takes the boots to many of the cultural communities’ sacred cows, leading us through gallery openings, encounters with fans and foes (often they turn out to be perilously close together), and smartly exploring the influence of corporate money in the art world.

A particularly pointed skewering takes in a scene at a Foothut panel where finalists offer obscure statements about their relation to their audience. Each artist’s statement is more eye-rolling than the last.

To wit: “I make work exclusively for my KIN and CHOSEN family. I make art as a form of HEALING. PERIOD.”

Or conversely, this kind of stuff: “I have a team that runs my social media and posts to my followers based on peak viewing hours. They’re separate from my team of studio assistants, of course.”

One of the running jokes in the first three novels was the idea that no one knew what Wendy’s actual art practice looked like. In the most recent iteration, entirely the opposite is true. Thanks to the ever-present intrusion of social media, everyone gets an up-close and personal look at Wendy’s art in action. And it is something to behold.

The conclusion of Wendy’s big adventure, like the best picaresque stories, is both poignant and very funny.

And what will happen to our heroine next? Only time will tell, art fans. Meanwhile, even as Scott has stated his intentions to step away from Wendy for a while, he’s not entirely abandoned her epic journey.

In a recent interview he said might resurrect the character in a decade or so, bringing her back in “her Jennifer Aniston skincare commercial era.”

I can’t wait!