Wendy, Master of Art review – witty graphic novel unleashes hipster hell
Walter Scott’s titular character, Wendy, a chaotic arts graduate whose millennial ideals are kept in check by a self-destructive streak many women will recognise, first appeared in book form in Wendy, in 2014. A sequel, Wendy’s Revenge, followed two years later, and now here’s a third in the sequence: Wendy, Master of Art, in which our heroine signs up for a visual arts MFA at the University of Hell, a small, distinctly out-of-the-way town in Ontario, Canada. Needless to say, things don’t always go entirely well for Wendy in Hell, and not only because the place has only four restaurants. If art-speak makes no sense at the best of times – one of her fellow students plans to ponder feminist photo practices “through allegories of kombucha fermentation” in her end-of-year thesis – when you’re hungover, it might as well be a foreign language.
While some of the other characters in Wendy, Master of Art, will be familiar to fans – her cynical gay friend, Screamo; her passive-aggressive sometime collaborator, Winona – in Hell, she encounters a whole new crowd of pseuds, wannabes and has-beens. Among their number are Cliff Masterson, her superannuated tutor (“you might remember me from my last solo exhibition, in 1998”); Yunji, a sculptor who’s interested in the “semiotics of pissing and really long string”; and Maya, an art-world star who has already caught the attention of Hans-Ulrich Obrist (if you don’t know who HUO is, this book may not be for you). However, flawed as they are, she still finds it hard to keep up with them – and not only because she will keep going out and getting hammered. What is this art thing about, really? “I was, um, reading Lacan,” she tells Masterson, when he visits her studio. “I took one of his books and embedded it in resin… which is a reference to fossilised theory… and then I stuck it in a table… to represent the institution.” Nice try, but Cliff is unimpressed. Why is she making objects? Has she even read Lacan?
Scott, a practising artist himself, completed his own MFA in 2018, and the world he depicts here feels fully fledged, for all that he deals unashamedly in types. But as well as being very funny and acute, Wendy, Master of Art is also weirdly touching. For all her faults, his heroine is intensely likable. When she texts men late at night, half-cut, you long for someone to wrest her phone from her hand; when she cries (or tries not to cry) you feel for her, even though you know she’s deluded to tell herself that her boyfriend’s two-timing is in fact polyamory. On the page, rendered in Scott’s thick, black lines, she’s so vivid. You know she’s getting in a state because her lips tulip comically, and her big, round eyes become two unseeing black craters. Like just about all of her contemporaries, so broke and uncertain and desperate to do the right thing, poor Wendy inhabits a particularly precarious world – and thanks to this, even when she’s at her most ridiculous, we’re inclined always to give her a pass.
• Wendy, Master of Art by Walter Scott is published by Drawn & Quarterly (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
