Kirsha Kaechele: The Ladies Lounge at MONA

The Ladies Lounge at the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania.

By JANE RANKIN-REID August 12, 2024

Misogyny is one of the deadliest weapons on earth. In remote regions like Tasmania, the impact of women’s inequality is felt as a series of micro aggressions. At the peak of the international #MeToo movement, a local male thought leader essayed an advisory to corporations to set aside reparations funds, rather than the urgency of instituting equality awareness training programs. Others argued for retaining the ‘flirt economy’, an unusual market of achievement for waving the indignities of inequality aside. ‘Woke’ is the barbed club berating those of us daring to point out that women in this part of the world are readily set apart, diminished in status and barely heard on issues that would make a genuine difference. All these regressive attitudes continually sting us, and no one more so than artist-curator Kirsha Kaechele who, after marrying David Walsh, the owner of the  Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), has made the island her home for the last 14 years.

After being offered a seat in the ‘ladies lounge’, a room off the main bar at a local Tasmanian pub, Kaechele saw red. These lonely anti-rooms were intended to ‘protect’ women from men’s bad behavior in the main bar. I too have been relegated to such spaces where the desolation was so palpable, I went outside into the cold night air to finish my pint.

Kirsha Kaechele’s response to this level of exclusion has been to create The Ladies Lounge as a luxurious retreat for all those identifying as women. The velvet curtained chamber stands prominently within the gallery. Inside its gorgeous green walls are displays of appropriated Picasso plates, Greek, Roman and Latin American antiquities, an exquisite Murano glass chandelier and until recently, an appropriation of a late Picasso portrait of a woman, “Luncheon on the Grass, After Manet (1961)”.

The Ladies Lounge is the first ‘social sculpture’ to join the museum’s extensive collection of exceptional examples of antiquities, tribal art and modern and contemporary works. From an art critical point of view, The Ladies Lounge’s deliberately luxuriant setting belongs amidst the illusive, but highly affective genre of ‘social sculpture’. Examples include Buenos Aires born artist Rikrit Tiravanija’s 1999 Tomorrow Can Shut Up and Go Away installed initially at the Gavin Brown Gallery in New York, and later in the Liverpool Biennale as Apartment 21.

At the time, New York bad boy critic Jerry Saltz called it a ‘laboratory of human contact’. The Ladies Lounge shares Saltz’ observation about Tomorrow’s impact upon its host, the museum, just as it insinuates its moral message within the gallery. Inside its permeable green walls, The Lounge is both sculptural as a living environment, performative, in its hospitality offering everything from a massage, to high teas, and ephemeral, at least in its intricate ‘reciprocal relationships with its host’. Most importantly, like Tomorrow, The Lounge is inviting, at least to women. Saltz goes on to write of Tomorrow that it is ‘art as infection’. This citation of my colleague’s insight is deliberately mercenary. There has been very little written in support The Ladies Lounge’s artistic status and genre in comparison. Yet it most certainly is a case of ‘infection’ in pointing out the habitual devaluation of women in Tasmania, if not the rest of Australia.

The Ladies Lounge at the Supreme Court of Australia. Curated by Kirsha Kaechele

Established as a social setting in memory of the artist’s great grandmother, a socialite who threw high teas at her estates in Beverly Hills and Basel, The Ladies Lounge began as a retrospectively tender environment, though its contemporary message was ever present in the museum. Quite recently, its paradoxical exclusivity became far more pointed when Mr. Jason Lau, a male visitor to MONA launched a lawsuit against the museum for discriminating against him in denying his entry into The Ladies Lounge. This could not be a more illustrative example of a masculine perception of entitlement to freely access a private women’s-only artwork. Even so, and not for the first time in Tasmanian women’s experiences, the state’s Anti-Discrimination Tribunal found against the museum and the art work which was ordered to cease operation within twenty eight days. Unsurprisingly, MONA has lodged an appeal in the Supreme Court of Australia.

It is most important now to protect The Ladies Lounge status as a work of art. Hence my efforts to align it with any number of subtly executed ‘social sculptures’, in addition to Tiravanija’s work. Whether it could be the act of inhaling in Vito Acconci’s 1972 Seedbed, the artist’s daily masturbatory event conducted beneath a ramp in New York’s Sonnabend Gallery, or David Medalla’s many environments of art as ‘radical inclusion’, or lying with a lover on a sunny afternoon in Agnes Dene’s 1982 Wheatfield; A Confrontation, or Joseph Beuy’s 1974 I Love America and America Loves Me, when the artist lived in a cage with a coyote for 48 hours at Rene Bloch’s gallery in Soho. Or, my forever favourite life changing artistic experience of locking eyes with the rebellious Afro American artist David Hammons at his 1983 Blizz-ard Art Ball show of differently priced snowballs lined up at the St Mark’s pavement market. My awareness was irrevocably altered by Hammons’ artistic gesture as he watched me holding my snowball slowly melting into nothing.

The Ladies Lounge at the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania. Curated by Kirsha Kaechele

Each of these art works tend to be called ‘performance’ art, whereas, it is my belief that these artists are not performing so much as irrevocably altering the atmosphere for viewers and their host galleries. Beuys called his coyote experience a ‘social sculpture’ at the time, hence its usage here. I’m happy to be wrong, but to me The Ladies Lounge is as fierce as hosting a man trapped in a cage with a wild animal. Why? Because aside from its enticing aesthetics of rich forest green and gold and crystal, its mode of operation as an art work is of atmospheric change. We female guests don’t just feel that special awe of our own beauty welling inside us in the lounge’s cosy viridescent environment, we also immediately understand how restful the experience of sexual segregation can be. And how wrong it is. Which makes us feel all the more special in being right all along about what is wrong. 

The Ladies Lounge as a transgressive art work has created such a vociferous debate, most welcome in this community. To survive the Tribunal’s order to close, it has been relocated to a newly designated ladies’ toilet in MONA, reminiscent of East Village pioneering gallerist Gracie Mansion’s early 1980s exhibitions in her tenement bathroom. In another act of creative cross breeding, one of Gracie Mansion’s most prominent artists at the time was Mike Bidlo, who replicated several Picassos as well as Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles saying he wanted every museum to have one. Ditto The Ladies Lounge’s interpretation of Picasso’s voluptuous “Luncheon on the Grass, After Manet (1961)”, created by Kaechele and her beautician’s niece. Several gentlemen of the Australian arts press were unimpressed when the artist came clean about her appropriation. “The entire episode is childish, unprofessional, and reflects poorly on Mona,” art critic and author Christopher Heathcote, wrote. “What is being passed off as an art activist statement is the standard excuse used for attention-seeking sensationalism,” art critic John McDonald claims. Not a whisper of commitment to The Lounge’s raison d’etre then? Being called ‘childish’ for treading in the footsteps of appropriation artists Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Bidlo et al, feels like a playground Chinese burn.

Funny how suddenly EVERYONE is feeling cheated by The Ladies Lounge’s faux creative exclusivity! Its floor rugs are also fantastically fake. In fact, much of the Lounge was made up, which is part of its objective. But, in the wake of the Tribunal’s ruling, The Ladies Lounge must survive. Artist Kirsha Kaechele’s lavish performative protest events, such as her posse of female supporters surrounding her in at the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal’s hearing among other notable events, are also to be applauded. She is unafraid of the self-appointed arts establishment in Australia who’ve long suppressed as many forms of deviant creative expression as could possibly be fitted into a ring bound folder. It goes without saying that the government’s cultural decision makers are ill equipped to contemplate such radical artistic experiences. This has abetted a deafening silence from Hobart’s publicly funded museums, art school, artist spaces and galleries whose failure to speak out on behalf of The Ladies Lounge, is another act of passively sidelining its presence and its message.

We’re pretty starved of artistic risk-taking in this part of the world. The Ladies Lounge’s host, MONA is the stellar exception. In its fight for its right to party, MONA will continue to argue for The Ladies Lounge’s legal status as an art work rather than just an ‘act’ of some kind. From its new home, Kaechele suggests men may be allowed in on Sundays, but only to learn ironing and laundry folding. “Women can bring in all their clean laundry and the men can go through a series of graceful movements (designed by a Rinpoche and refined by Tai Chi masters) to fold them.” How audacious, honestly, an art work undertaking housework? Bring it on! WM