Jill Jordan & Stacy Lande

Interviewed by Hope Urban

Jill Jordan and Stacy Lande are two artists with many talents; between 'em they could paint you a picture, perform on a stage of their own design and then tattoo a picture of the whole proceedings on yer ass. They are "chick" artists who make art that provokes thought as it titillates. These sure aren't your pliant Goya nudes reclining on a couch with come-hither looks. Among Jordan's sexually charged technical pen drawings are women in control, drawn in a style which utilizes her background in illustration and tattoo art. Lande's works are pages from a photo album of a most unusual life. Rendered in acrylics and rich glazes, depictions of her associates from underground alternative and gay clubs stare back at the viewer, defiant in their various stages of undress. We met for this interview at LA's infamous Jumbo's Clown Room bikini bar but soon acquitted ourselves to a Thai restaurant down the street, to accommodate the necessary tape recorder...

Hope: Stacy, I know you just returned from a two week tour of the kitsch spots of America, where did you go?
Stacy: We started out in Arizona from Meteor Crater. We did the complete lunar craters and Santa Fe and then we saw the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo. That was really inspiring. At Mt Rushmore they had this giant fiberglass prairie dog, a Mr. Peanut and a giant jackalope.

How was it? What did you take away from the trip?
S: It was incredible. To me, the trip was reassuring. I thought that America had pretty much just vanished. But it is like a Frank Capra movie and in fact it isn't this horrible oasis of corporate signs, like you see here in LA. I just had this urge to see landscape flying by at 85 miles per hour.

Jill, you've done a trip like that, haven't you?
Jill: I used to ride around with the Blasters on their tours all the time so I saw a lot of old America.

S: It's like a romantic fable.

J: Unless you've got Gene Taylor farting in the van it's pretty romantic, but when you're in a snow storm, boy, he's like an old saxophone player. Yeah, you get to see great stuff. Meridian, Mississippi, I love that place, they have the Jimmy Rogers Memorial.

Stacy, you've danced for L7 and Ethyl Meatplow and at a ton of clubs, but the one time you tried it at a regular strip bar, you quit after fifteen minutes.
S: Well, I've always had this idea about go-go dancing, wearing beautiful costumes and doing it for myself so that I would get some growth out of it. I thought I could do that in a strip place. So I did it on tryout night and it was fine, I did okay. Then I showed up to work my first night. It's all these kind of guys you'd see at 7-11 that would give you a hard time. To have to try to please them was like, yuck! So, I walked right out. I went up to the box and said, "I can't do this, I'm sorry."

J: All those great old movies with Shirley MacLaine and stuff make you think it's going to be really great and Robert Mitchum is going to walk in and fall in love and want to marry you.

S: You hit right on the nose. It's funny because Cabaret is my favorite movie of all time.

J: And it ain't like that.

Jill, do you have anything like that in your history?
J: Well, hell, I'm a tattoo artist. That's probably considered one of the most sleazy occupations there is. I've looked at many a sailor's ass! I think I fit right in there.

What about your art education?
J: I have a degree from Otis Parsons in design and illustration an I taught there for four years.

S: I have a BA from Cal State Northridge in two-dimensional art.

Two-dimensional art?
S: Yeah, that's their label for it.

J: They wouldn't let you near that third dimension?

S: I tried, they said, "No, You've gotta focus. We're sorry."

We just came out of the bikini dance bar where I used to work. Jill, you had some reservations bout being there.
J: Those places give me the creeps. I can't help it. I just feel sorry for everyone, the girls and the boys.

How do you think male and female notions of the female nude differ? What about the female nude in your art?
S: Maybe it's challenging the viewer because it's confrontational, the characters are looking directly at them. Also, I've done some studying on archetypes, myths, the sacred prostitute and these sort of inner goddess images that populate the male and female subconscious. I was interested in trying to trigger in people some of their own unconscious imagery when they look at it. Maybe they'll get an extra charge out of it.

J: I really enjoy making art that's completely non-threatening and that, in fact, is quite the opposite. There's so many threatening images out there. I'd rather make art that tries to draw you in and says "Look, I'm just a pretty babe, enjoy me." I'm gratified that women seem to like my tattooing and my art as much as men do.

S: I think that the one thread that runs through your work and my work and other artists like Christine Karas...

J: And Pam Roberts...

S: And Pam Roberts too-we all make images of the sexy girls that we grew up drawing in our notebooks. When I was a little girl I was drawing girls with big boobs and little Bob Mackie outfits and head dresses and false eyelashes. I wanted to be that girl when I grew up. It's an innocent thing to go back to this way of drawing and see it in your work.

What about the kind of materials you use?
S: I paint on cabinet doors that I find on the street. I tell everybody save them or tell me and I'll go get them. I like the idea of the vertical skinny thing because it compresses the figure and torques it a bit. Gustav Klimt's work was probably the biggest influence for that.

J: That's weird. I was doing a Klimt tattoo today on a girl's back. I've already done a couple of Klimt's pieces and now I'm connecting with Klimt's backgrounds, all the little rosebuds and all the little eyeballs in a pyramid and the checkerboards and wacky triangles.

Jill, how long have you been a tattoo artist?
J: Eleven years.

How does tattooing figure in with the visual art that you do? How do they tie together?
J: Both tattooing and fine art, for me, help each other along because I get stuff from tattooing that I put into art and from art I get stuff that I bring over into the energy of tattooing. I like working with a technical pen and ink and working with the physical skin and ink. Simplicity is important in a tattoo design, so that over the years it still appears to be exactly what it's meant to be. I think it's important to transfer that into visual art. You shouldn't have to be right on top of the art to see what it is, it should knock you over from across the room. Also, like you were saying about stripping, for me, tattooing is a really romantic thing. It's still the hearts and flowers and banners and the beauty of it and the idea that people feel so strongly about something that they want to commit it to themselves forever. That's a sacred trust.

S: I'm happy that we are moving back to a time where there is a community of people that are interested in making images that are accessible, imagery that doesn't require an art school vocabulary. There was nothing more alienating to me than going through school during the whole 80's period of super conceptual art...

J: When everything was art.

S: That over inflated art thing just collapsed in on itself and from those ruins we are constructing hands-on, user-friendly images. It's art by people who have no interest in just showing work to a bunch of academicians or art school teachers. I think it comes from growing up with punk rock and the music scene, things that were immediate and hit you on a guy level. For me the mythical stuff hits you on some other level and people don't really know what it is that they find pleasing about that, but they do.

What were some other formative things for you?
J: My mom was an oil painter and now she's a watercolorist and my whole family is artistic. When I was 2 or 3 years old my mom would set me on the floor with a Big Chief tablet and a bunch of those pencils that didn't have erasers. Remember those? They were thick wedgy blue pencils. I'd have to draw really well the first time because I didn't have an eraser. I always drew animals, that was my deal. Birds, horsed, dogs. I almost never drew the human figure. Even my first paintings were pretty much all animals. Until I felt I had mastered the female figure I wouldn't even attempt to put it out there. It's one of those things that if you screw it up it looks so pitiful. You've seen pinups where one boob's going straight out and the other one's completely in profile. the person who drew that did not own a pair of those.

S: I was always inspired by the German Expressionists of the '20s who painted cabaret performers and other well-known figures. I just think it's important to document this time and this city and the people that we know. For me it's very personal. It's like a scrap book of friends.

J: It almost seems to me that you are sanctifying your friends into icons. What I mean is, with all these people dying, it's like you're creating these relics.

S: I'm going through the death of my mom right now and I just lost a good friend this year. I haven't had that much death to deal with before this year and this year seems to be all about that. So, yes, there is that sentimental connection.

I was talking earlier about becoming disenchanted with the art world and all the academic shit and not having a clue when I graduated school. I tried illustration and this and that, but I didn't feel very inspired at all. I only started painting on a serious level three years ago. I got back into painting through participating in peoples' performance pieces, go-go dancing and the theatre carnival stuff that we did. I think just rediscovering costumes and the fun of it unblocked me as a painter. These paintings all document performance pieces I've been in and people I know who are performers. It'll just remind me, when I'm a little old lady, of those happy days when I was a youngster doing all this kooky stuff.