Stella Marrs - about

Stella Marrs
interview with Everett True
edited versions of this interview were published in Punk Planet and Plan B, Spring 2004

Whatšs the attraction of Olympia? Does it hold more attraction for you than other places? Do you feel it enables you to follow your own path more than living in Seattle, or LA or Dublin would, say? You once created a project called Girl City...

In 1980 Olympia was still undeveloped enough to be able to live cheaply and afford enough space to live and work in without trading all your time for that. Did Girl City really happen? Did I really stand on the sidewalk with my broke and bored girlfriends and say "Hey Judy! lets rent this storefront and spray paint Girl City on the window in pink! It'll be our clubhouse for making events and developing product lines. It will be our space to have fun and make something." This was in a still hippie culture that viewed this act as unfeministic treason.

And just like making stone soup we had a carwash and took that money and gave it to the landlord as rent for the weekend. Renting the spot for the weekend we used it to have a garage/bake sale and made the money for the first month's rent.

I had this one very basic idea about the whole project- that if girls could just make things and see themselves reflected in what they made, and then trade it for money, that could be a window to empowerment about alternatives for economic survival. Because if you get to live outside the normal system you just might have a chance for a different vision, which could mean ultimately an alternative voice.

I remember very specifically looking out my apartment window across the street at the girl city storefront the morning of the fund raiser. This boy showed up with muffins he had baked for the sale. Witnessing this gesture of kindness inspired so much love and hope in me. I was part of the fabric of this place and these people trying to make something in our small town world.

...do you feel this has come to fruition where you live, or am I being too simplistic?

Well, I love that Ladyfest initially happened in Olympia, and that there was a consciousness about documenting all of the meetings developing it and posting them on the web to serve as a blueprint for other Ladyfests. The whole trajectory of envisioning, organizing, working through the bazillion problems that come up, and concluding a project can only test character and assumptions about community.

So what is it about Olympia? Utopia? I donšt think so. Small. Yes. Higher incidence of eating dinner together and laying down the framework for ideas and plans? Maybe. For two years these amazing artist girls did something they called "The Red Horse Cafe". Every Sunday night you could go there and buy a beautiful vegetarian dinner, and sit at tables with people you might not know, and have a good time, and end up leaving with new friends, or plans, or projects. It is a very powerful social act to bring people together "to the table".

Why would opening Girl City be viewed as un-feministic treason? I thought the whole point of hippie culture was to step outside the mainstream and create alternatives for oneself. Or had it long since degenerated?

Well, this is when the hippies are the Olympia mainstream, but still think of themselves as alternative, and really hate spray paint and glitter because that implies punk, which implies vandalism to our more conservative landlord males.

The "girl" work is from a deep place that tries to counter this culture's shackles on girls. It is a reaction to the ridiculous taboos on girls being too silly and friendly with each other, having too much fun, or having a strong viewpoint and sense of self worth and being able to articulate it.

I lived in Japan at age 10. When we came back to the states I had a good girlfriend with a Japanese mom. We would walk around the playground holding hands. I remember we would get all this negative response to that innocent and joyful gesture. I knew it was okay in Japan for girls our age to do this. Why was it so taboo here? Why were girls my age being restricted in this way? It pissed me off then. In some way the girl work tries to lay down girl action as the status quo.

50 Girls /50 States/ Women for World Peace. Išm an old magazine whore. I've looked at every single one I could get my hands on my whole life.

How many images of Debutantes in big puffy dresses have I looked at? Why couldn't I wear a big puffy dress? I would have to make an event to justify wearing that type of dress. Obviously, the event would need to be large and altruistic to qualify the dress and its wearer as a Debutante. So the idea went like this: 50 girls would be Debutantes for World Peace, marching in the summer Lakefair Parade. Each girl would represent her chosen state by creating a dress based on that state and her idea of world peace. All these colorful amazing dresses show up - Miss Wisconsin in a dress trailing beer cans throwing brewers yeast at the crowd, Miss New Jersey in a dress that had freeway lanes and little cars all over it, etc... I realized that to be a large - scale event it needed to pull in a larger cross section of sensibilities and interests. So there should be a "Ball" that night that would be a fund raiser for Safeplace - the local women's shelter. It would need entertainment. How about the Melody Makers, an older person swing band? It needed another element to expand it further. How about seeing if I could commission local classical music composer Tim Brock to write a score of all 50 state songs that would open the Ball? He was interested but needed $500 dollars to do it. Where would I get the money? What if I went to 50 businesses in Olympia and asked each one for $10? Only 4 turned me down. The unforeseen bonus of that action was the long-term relationships I established with the business owners as a result.

I like how when you go into a project with a room full of people with one goal, that 6 degrees of separation concept can come into play. How can we get X? Either someone has an uncle owning X, or knows that the uncle might know someone with X. It was amazing the resources that seemed to rain on us by just asking. 50 girls/50 states/Women for World Peace started to teach me what I didn't know about making a large scale community project. I didn't know how to pace myself so I wouldn't completely burn out. I realized I really didn't know how to properly take care of my physical body. I was hyperaware of every action and interface in this process as "ART". I discovered too how much inevitable conflict was involved in trying to do anything in this world. The idea of world peace became impossible in my mind as any achievable reality. As a debutante for world peace I had to continually check my responses and thoughts about the situation I was in. How to reframe my response peacefully and still meet my objective was the inherent struggle to complete the project. Personally I realized that world peace could only be a series of simple thoughtful and kind gestures. The day of the parade, I basically had set up this simple situation; show up here, then go there, then march in the parade, then come to The Ball. The more specific details were not worked out. I am comfortable with inventing as you go, but some girls were upset about not being told exactly what to do. I think they wanted to know where they should stand or something. I think it was good to get girls in high heels to think and respond in a more anarchist way than they might be used to. They definitely were on the spot. That was a challenge.

Science for girls was a piece of writing I wrote in response to my biological drive to create a successful family. It allowed me to research and think through how you could run a kissing experiment with boys while retaining emotional objectivity as a girl scientist. The end goal was to match the test results with your specific objectives for a best mating partner. I was driven to make a family for myself and was desperately trying to be smart about it.

Why have you chosen the medium of postcards to work within?

After college I made hundreds of different paintings,products,and events. I never put my name on anything during that period, I preferred to think of it all as some sort of warm up exercise for what I was really going to do. I finally settled on using my name on the back of postcards because I realized I better accept this medium by the default since I could afford to start manufacturing it, it was endlessly a challenge to come up with a new design for each image, it could be educational, and I could travel and sell it on public transportation because it was small and I didn't have a car.

Is it possible to make a living from postcards?

Is it possible to make a living selling bubble gum?

I wonder how to answer that. I am twenty years into this. When I think back at how it took every possible late night, and bit of luck, never accepting no as an answer, and the efforts of many brilliant people contributing, I realize that all that work, that type of perseverance could have been applied to anything and probably have succeed. Do you really want to work that hard to make a living selling bubble gum?

But here is the other critical lucky piece of being in business.

I have had the amazing good fortune of working with Sean Tejaratchi who is a graphic punk genius. Much of what has been printed by "Stella Marrs" is the gift of his moral designs, and unfailing humor that is either completely off the wall or inspired social criticism.

What is your motivation? Why do you do what you do?

I went through basic training in the U.S. military at age 17 for 6 weeks and then was "honorably" discharged. I was there for the same reason that 99% of the women in my platoon were- they had nowhere to go, no other economic or personal options for survival. Basic training is a brutally destructive force to human will and cultivating any sense of personal responsibility to an individual vision. Which is the whole point of basic, to erase your sense of self to make a you part of the killing machine. To make sure that all soldiers will first and foremost blindly FOLLOW THEIR CHAIN OF COMMAND. Witnessing the efficiency and scale of this organization set up a reaction in me where I realized that ANY ACT OF CONSTRUCTION was in itself of HUGE VALUE. This was a very forgiving view for me to have about myself and art making. It freed me from the destructive self judgment that happens when you start something and it isn't "great" yet.

How flexible is your path?

I'd like to think there was still some flexibility - which there must be since process is really what excites me. Right now I am looking at the past with this perspective of what happened in a twenty year unit of time. I realize how lucky I was with the ability to focus on certain goals in one place and achieve them. So I am thinking about that time unit and trying to imagine what the next one could accomplish.

Name me five of your favorite people, with some reasons, please.

Obviously Eleanor Roosevelt and Malcolm X are great inspiration. Then German Artist Joseph Bueys has been a touchstone for a long time. Planting 7000 oak trees as an art act. Being fired from the Art University he taught at and starting a free school in the parking lot across the street. Buckminister Fuller is someone we all need to remember about as we rut ever deeper into concrete. His thought processes were so envisioning of the future that in a 1965 New Yorker there is an interview with him where he is describing the internet and how it will transform society. But I need an alive an active heroine for NOW! Luckily there is someone named Suzanne Lacy - an artist with a body of work about feminism and community and communication, and perception alteration. I read the most amazing essay she wrote about the goals of Buddhism and how those ideas are present currently in art activism. The essay is called Not Fast Enough: Looking at Engagement.

Please tell me about some of your recent art projects.

I have this slide show/lecture I put together to deconstruct how we think of our omnitoxic world around us and all the poison present in trying to function normally.

I show, through old seductive advertisements, how we were sold "safe" products that had never been tested. The purchasing public are the guinea pigs. We are now witnessing the fallout with "allergies", a cancer culture, serious fertility problems and unexplainable autism explosion. I'm talking about mainstream dish detergent and bathroom deodorizer here. I also describe the non existent regulatory system and how it doesn't protect human health. Here is a simple idea that we can't develop and implement fast enough in this country - the Precautionary Principle which switches the burden of proof to the manufacture about safety issues. I would love to give this talk many, many times in the next year.

You choose to use cats as a symbol of opposition and resistance Išm thinking of slogans like "The average American is exposed to 3,000 advertising messages a day resist", "Privacy it's your right" what is it about the feline form that inspires you that way? (I do appreciate that therešs a lot of humor there, too.)

I don't choose cats because I like them so much - although I do love my cat - she's a really, really good cat! - cats star in the postcards because generally their sales numbers do better than other cards. Making sure I print a few hits every time lets me pay for the cards that have narrower markets.

Cats are more subversive than other cultural signifiers?

No, no, no. Cats are cute, dude.

I'm particularly admiring of your "environmental" range of postcards. Could you tell me a little more about that?

You know, in a way the rest of the postcards exist just so the environmental cards can. They are my desperate attempts to say "Do you know about this? How about this?"

Could you talk me through a couple of your favorite pieces of art?

Here is one: I love to think of Joseph Beuys coming to New York in 1974 and living at the Rene Blode Gallery with a coyote for a week. It was a piece called, "I like America and America likes me." He had his staff and was wrapped in a wool blanket coexisting with the coyote in the gallery for a week. Just imagine- the coyote is checking you out- you are breathing- the coyote is breathing- who goes to sleep first? Who wakes up? What happens to each through all that time? How do you understand yourself and the other? Bueys viewed the work as "an attempt to understand the complexities of interdependence between nature and culture, and as a step toward ecological sustainability."

I would like to come and talk on college campuses 2004-2005. Please contact me.