Le Tigre, former Bikini Kill icon Kathleen Hannah’s dance-rock band, is famed for its feminist, up-yours roller-skating songs, biting lyrics and meticulously synchronized wardrobes. JD has taken some of the recognizable Le Tigre elements—the reflexive bubblegum pop, the naked enthusiasm and political idealism—and applied them to new media. One of these is a lesbian pin-up calendar turned art piece—a collaboration between several queer women artists and JD’s longstanding photographer Cass Bird. The theme of the calendar and subsequent show at the Deitch Art Gallery was a search for queer community. Cass Bird documented JD, five friends and an RV as they took the search in its most literal sense and went on a 15-day crawl across the nation taking pictures.
At the gallery opening, several people, including JD, happily crowd-surfed to the sounds of Canadian electro-rockers Lesbians on Ecstasy. Scarlett Johansson and Josh Hartnett showed up and the gallery got so humid and sweaty that the Louis Vuitton print wallpaper was peeling off the walls next to the gorgeous, idyllic prints of girls rope-swinging into glassy lakes, and wandering around large golden fields. JD explained that the calendar project began some four years ago with the three Le Tigre members messing around with a digital camera and asking the question: “Who would be willing to hang this on their wall?” JD created a calendar as a way to promote butch lesbian identity. The first calendar highlighted the 12 months of 2003 with pictures of JD in various poses in working class uniforms and work environments that corresponded with the lack of social recognition her androgynous sexuality receives in media imagery.
It was the first time JD, who always has her hands in several different projects at once, saw her notoriety as a tool that she could use for her activism. “If someone is willing to put the calendar in their home on their wall, 365 days a year—that is visibility,” she noted.
Well, the calendar sold out, went through a second printing and up to six months ago, people were still e-mailing, asking to buy the 2003 calendar.
And yet … this visibility is also a business, one that raised questions for JD about branding and political appropriation. The singer was recently approached by a management group in Los Angeles who wanted to facilitate her commercial opportunities. They offered to promote her publicity deals: DJing, acting and modeling, putting JD on, say, American Apparel billboard ads.
JD says,“It was at this time I had to really think about the complications regarding what I wanted to do for my community. Did I want to go huge, become as visible as a butch lesbian as possible, or stay in my community as much as possible?” It was the old medium-changing-the-message problem, which coincided with the contradictory themes of JD’s two calendar projects: How do you resolve the conflict between a wish for public awareness with the desire to promote the cohesiveness of a community that is defined, in large part, by its non-normative identity and exclusion from the mainstream?
“I think the idea of doing ads is interesting, because even though there could be a butch lesbian on a billboard, which is incredible activism to me, there are just too many details about each company that could stand for everything I am against, and that, in the end, was the part that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. After years of working with my community and my fans for a common goal and a sense of togetherness, the last thing I want to do is alienate people.”
And JD’s art reflects this sentiment: the visibility is less about being seen and more about showing, which, she hopes, will make for a persuasive kind of art based in self-realization.
