Walter Scott remains my absolute favourite art-world satirist ever. But his spaghetti-armed anti-hero Wendy has flailed and fallen through four comic books now, and possibly out of my heart forever. I might be over her. It could be that I’m less amused by self-sabotaging shenanigans, but parting still feels sorrowful.
Wendy was the consummate art school party girl. A real hot mess. Now, a full decade later, her drinking feels less punk rock, more rock bottom. Alcoholism can make people hard to love, and Scott drew hungover Wendy so effectively. I could smell wafts of booze metabolizing through her pores. Or, maybe it’s not her. Maybe it’s me. I’ve gotten older too, which in my case means I’m just too tired for this.
Today, anyway, the art world’s elitism, nepotism, and performative activism bother me less than they used to. There are other things to worry about.
Apparently, Walter Scott is saying goodbye to Wendy too. In an interview with CBC this past June, he told Q host Tom Power, "Wendy and I have been together for a while. It's time to explore other things."
In Scott’s first book, published in 2014, Wendy optimistically drops her artist residency application in the mailbox. A thought floats above her head: “It was not my decision to become a cultural bearer. My own innate inquisitive nature has coerced me into this de-centred modality of creation, reflection, and existence, which runs parallel to the norms of post-industrial society… It’s a heavy cross to bear.”
This made me laugh. Gosh. It is a heavy cross if you’re a young, intelligent, dippy, self-congratulating art martyr who’s unaware of your own privilege. But I winced too, because I’m pretty sure I’d had that very same thought. I knew there was a Wendy in me. A spoonful of humour helps the shame go down.
Scott’s ability to draw depraved states is second to none. His character’s eyes turn on a dime into two deep holes. These fast fade-to-blacks feel so true to life. Ennui is swift. It comes for us all.
Ten years and three books later, Wendy has survived a master’s degree, a failed polyamorous relationship, a pandemic. When we meet her again in Scott’s latest book, The Wendy Award, she’s busy enduring the pressures that come with being shortlisted for the prestigious FoodHut art prize. Wendy has finally “made it” in art, but she hasn’t made it in life. Her and her pals are elder millennials now, but still can’t get their shit together. Screamo, for one, is still drifting, bored, hungry, jobless, still having sex with lame guys he doesn’t like so he can crash on their couch and eat their ham.
At what age do talented, lonely screw-ups become pathetic? At 35? 38? When reading this book, I had to wonder — when did these characters lose my empathy? All of us, every single one, experiences late modernity as a sinking feeling, a kind of gnawing malaise. The world can be such a hostile place. So when did I get so intolerant?
Walter Scott, “The Wendy Award,” excerpt, page 8
It's not that I don’t feel for Wendy. After waking up with mysterious bruises and no memory of the night before, she heads to WAH, the Westside Addictions Hospital. Here, Scott breaks the fourth wall to heart-rending effect. Wendy’s eyes well with tears, but then she catches us staring. “Can you please cut away to something else for a bit? God!” she says with a scowl. Her art project, a self-satirizing book entitled Wanda, is well received, but it’s also raked over the social media coals. Gorla, a pitch-perfect haggardly arts administrator, is tasked with writing the FoodHut profiles. “So, ‘Wanda,’” she asks, her voice spiked with incrimination. “What’s it like to create a thinly veiled piece of fiction that is SO inseparable from your personal life that it completely exposes the private life of you and those around you?” Upon reading the comment thread on Gorla’s scathing take-down, a tarred and feathered Wendy heads to the bar.
Maybe its not Wendy and Screamo I’m breaking up with, but the big picture, the whole milieu. In the earlier books, it felt good to see the art world so effectively skewered. But maybe that subject is stale now. Not just in the Wendyverse, but here. Scott is so adept at capturing the cross pressures of our identity obsessed age. A character named Goo, in heavy mascara, scolds Winona, an Indigenous artist, for making a “they” joke. But in the next frame, Goo starts to sweat. Winona, it turns out, is an Indigenous elder. But these scenarios have become ubiquitous. They feel very 2020.
2024, though, is all about poly-crisis. There are new and deeper levels of disillusionment, now. Humanism, religion, and politics have failed. Totally and epically. Has art failed too? This is purely anecdotal, but many artists I talk with admit to walking that line between full-on cynicism and fragile belief. So what are we creative types supposed to do? “Maybe this is a time to look for something else in art, to look at art that resonates with this moment on the precipice of authoritarianism, and to learn from it,” writes Greg Allen for The Brooklyn Rail. I suppose I’d like to see the Wendy artists battling the various heads of the poly-crisis monster. But doltish Octavia is busy making cordage out natural fibres, or something. And Moonstone is courting another big brand collab. Wendy feels the hostility of the city and the void in her soul, but she can’t peel herself off the floor.
Walter Scott, “The Wendy Award,” excerpt, page 88
Scott’s ability to draw depraved states is second to none. His character’s eyes turn on a dime into two deep holes. These fast fade-to-blacks feel so true to life. Ennui is swift. It comes for us all. Honesty like this makes Scott’s scenes of optimism feel so sweetly frail. When Wendy stands before her piece in the Foodhut exhibition - a massive video projection of her at her absolute worst, a falling-down-drunk, blubbering, gyrating fool - her face dawns clear for a moment. She smiles at her larger than life, wretched self. It’s all so charming and enigmatic. We know a penny finally dropped. But which one? Does she know she’s reached the end of what she can do, with art? Does she know the time has come for a recovery program? Will she break up with the whole milieu, too?
Read this book to laugh, to sigh, to test your own mettle. Can you still tolerate your artist friends? Can you tolerate yourself? When so much is at stake, what will you do with your innately inquisitive nature that has coerced you into this de-centred modality of creation, reflection, and existence? ■
The Wendy Award by Walter Scott, Drawn & Quarterly, 2024
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