Has a visitor who succeeded in bringing an anti-discrimination action against Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) been the unwitting catalyst for the offending work to reach its ultimate expression?
That is one way of looking at the case after a tribunal this week determined that a piece of performance art by Kirsha Kaechele was discriminatory under the terms of the Anti-Discrimination Act.
Under the decision by Tasmania’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal, Mona has 28 days in which to stop excluding men from Kaechele’s work, the Ladies Lounge.
The Ladies Lounge opened in 2020. It was designed by the Mona curator Kaechele, who is married to the museum’s owner David Walsh. The work’s intention is to protest against the exclusion of women from gentlemen’s clubs.
Kaechele has been reported as saying the work also responded to the confinement of women to separate “ladies’ lounges” in Australian pubs before the law was changed in 1965.
Kirsha Kaechele's Ladies Lounge at the Museum of Old and New Art © Mona/Jesse Hunniford. Image courtesy of the artist and Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Mona’s Ladies Lounge is dimly lit, sumptuously decorated in emerald green, and admits only those who identify as women. The one exception is the butler, who serves champagne to women visitors who can sit on a phallus-shaped lounge.
When the New South Wales resident Jason Lau visited Mona in April 2023, he paid for a $35 entry ticket and was unhappy to find the ticket did not give him access to the Ladies Lounge.
He filed a complaint with Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner. This led to a legal dispute that was heard in the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
During the hearing, Kaechele told the court that Lau had experienced the Ladies Lounge work exactly as it was intended—in other words, by being excluded from it.
In his published decision handed down on Tuesday 9 April, the tribunal deputy president Richard Grueber said the dispute was “a conflict between an artwork which deliberately and overtly discriminates for artistic purpose and legislation which has the objective of prohibiting discrimination”.
The judgement found Mona was in contravention of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act, and ordered the museum to allow men to access the Ladies Lounge, or to remove the Ladies Lounge completely, within 28 days.
A Mona spokeswoman told The Art Newspaper that Kaechele was today preparing to fly to Milan but declined to disclose the reason for the trip.
"We are deeply disappointed by this decision,” the spokeswoman said. “We will take some time to absorb the result and consider our options. We request that the artist’s privacy is respected at this time.”
The artist’s witness statement read: “We are so deeply embedded in the dominion of man that we do not even see the myriad ways in which we adhere to and multiply his reign. And for this reason we need the Ladies Lounge: a peaceful space women can retreat to; a haven in which to think clearly, and relish the pure company of women—to escape the invisible story woven through history.
“The Ladies Lounge is a space exclusively for women, excepted only by a retinue of male butlers who live to serve women, attending to their every wish and showering them with praise and affection (in chivalry—the unequal rights component of any good reparations deal). The Ladies Lounge is an essential space for perspective and reset from this strange and disjointed world of male domination. There should be more of them.”