Kirsha Kaechele banned men from MONA's Ladies Lounge — and won

She made her mark with the Ladies Lounge — a women-only, smash-the-patriarchy feminist art installation. But artist and curator Kirsha Kaechele admits that in her marriage, she's happy to be less than equal.

It's complicated, says the US-born wife of uber-wealthy David Walsh, a mathematician, professional gambler and creator of Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (MONA).

On the one hand, the feminist in Kirsha finds it irksome to be pigeonholed as "Mrs MONA" or "David Walsh's wife".

On the other, David's power means she can "get away with more" in her creative pursuits — and it just suits her.

"I can only be with a very powerful man," Kirsha tells Australian Story. 

"I need a man who's a little more powerful than me, a little smarter, a little richer.

Art connected them. It was 2007 when David sidled up to Kirsha at a posh art show in Basel, Switzerland, sporting torn jeans, a "F*** Terrorists" T-shirt and an Australian swagger.

"I was impressed," Kirsha says. 

"I was like, 'Who are you? You are so fascinating.'"

Three years later, Kirsha moved from New Orleans to Hobart to be with Walsh and ever since, the highly styled, self-proclaimed "aesthetic dictator" has grown as a creative force in Australia.

Her greatest triumph is the MONA Ladies Lounge: an opulent, boudoir-style room for women only, complete with fake Picassos and a phallic-shaped sofa, which created much-hoped-for headlines when a man took umbrage and sued for sex discrimination.

But just what kind of art is this?

Artist Michael Zavros, who brought the Ladies Lounge to the Gold Coast this year, describes Kirsha's work as both performance art and installation with a social activist bent.

Artist Emma Bugg says Kirsha's art is a blend of artwork, protest, fundraiser and party.

Actor Rhys Muldoon says Kirsha is the art. 

"She is kind of living her life as a work of art," he says.

Kirsha's abiding credo is that life is art, but even she admits to being baffled by some of her work.

"I'm like, 'Is this art? Does this count for art?'" she says.

"But it does tend to come around and I realise, 'Yes, this is art.'"

Some in the established art world, however, remain unconvinced.

"I have had to deal with these serious art world critics who just tell me that I'm not an artist, I'm not relevant and I'm not making art," she says.

That hurts, Kirsha says — and spurs her on.

'An exotic, alienating experience'

As the cameras are set up to film Kirsha's interview, she's busy directing the look of every element of the room.

The yellow book under the model sailing ship has to go, she tells her staff. It detracts from her yellow jacket. And the blue side table? No, a wooden one will look better.

"I'm completely attached to aesthetics," she says. 

"I need everything to be beautiful."

This obsession with beauty was forged by her mother, Tania, an "extremely charismatic, eccentric" artist who made their home an "insane and magical" artwork.

"So, it's no surprise that I do installation art," Kirsha says.

While Tania is unpredictable and passionate, Kirsha's late father, Lloyd, was calm. A scientist — he worked as an aerospace engineer with the RAND Corporation, "the epicentre of the American war complex".

The family moved to Guam, a US island territory in Micronesia, when Kirsha was five. It was an experience both exotic and alienating. She remembers local kids calling her "honky" and "white bitch".

"I had to learn how to connect with people that saw me as different," Kirsha says. 

Tania accepts it was hard for her daughter, but says: "It made her very brave and able to go out into the world in a very unique way."

Kirsha knows some think her father was a CIA agent, but she doesn't believe it. One reason: he took a lot of LSD as part of RAND's exploration of the uses of the drug, something she believes is incompatible with the life of a spy.

Kirsha has some knowledge of psychedelics. Lloyd died when she was 17, causing the bright student to question the predictable university path. Kirsha took off to see the world, and at one stage, she lived with ayahuasca shamans in the Peruvian Amazon.

A psychic told me to go to New Orleans

In 2000, a psychic told her to go to New Orleans. She did, arriving there confused about life.

"I had been exploring Buddhism and all kinds of mystic belief systems or practices and had really, through those, dissolved my sense of self," Kirsha says. 

"I didn't actually know how to be in the world."

She found the answer in the art scene.

"I was so mesmerised by their creative world, by their subculture," she says. 

"I'd been with New Agers and hippies. I'd been with the Hezbollah, I'd been with all kinds of groups, but I'd never actually just been with artists."

A bohemian life of performance art projects, marching bands and art-inspired community work followed, before her first big project in the aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Katrina.

She bought six derelict houses in a rundown part of New Orleans and converted them into art spaces.

She spray-painted one entirely white. Fallen trees in the yard and piles of rubbish were blasted white too, an attempt, she says, to "create order on what was hopelessly chaotic".

It was an artwork as well as a place for artists to exhibit and people were intrigued. Prestigious publications such as the New York Times came knocking. 

"There was a buzz," she says.

Hiding in a bunker called MONA

The buzz followed her when she moved to Hobart — but not in a good way.

The derelict properties had a form of tax, known as liens, attached to them. Kirsha maintains that because she was not renovating them as houses but using them for art, she was not liable for the tens of thousands of dollars in liens, something she claims to have successfully argued at city hall.

But when she left New Orleans and word got out the liens were unpaid, it hit the media.

"Suddenly, I was this terrible tax dodger hiding in a bunker called MONA," Kirsha says.

Life in Australia was not off to a great start. Her ego was bruised and she felt a loss of identity, cringing at being considered David's "arm-candy".

But she was in love and wanted a child.

"I just really wanted to be a mother, and I really just had to do it," Kirsha says. 

In 2015, the couple welcomed a daughter.

Supreme Court rules on Ladies Lounge

Kirsha sashayed into the tribunal room last year with a sea of female supporters, all in navy suits and red lipstick, all channelling the dancers from the music video to Robert Palmer's classic 1980s hit Simply Irresistible.

It was the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal hearing into NSW man Jason Lau's complaint that his exclusion from the Ladies Lounge was discriminatory on the basis of gender — and Kirsha was thrilled to be there.

"I just think it was perfect that it landed where it landed," Kirsha says. 

"With the people and not locked up in a museum."

Zavros says Kirsha "spun it into her web of performance and it became art, it became theatre".

The world's media lapped it up. Age-old questions about equality and women's rights were highlighted in a fresh way, "difficult questions but [asked] playfully and lovingly".

Kirsha says the Ladies Lounge had a dual purpose: to give women a place to relax together and to show men how women have felt "for millennia" when excluded. 

"[For men to be] turned away at the concierge desk is the experience, is the work," she says.

She lost the discrimination case, which meant more publicity — exactly what she'd hoped for. 

"It was a dream," Kirsha says. 

The Supreme Court would later rule in her favour, but not before the great Picasso scandal broke.

Rather than let men into the lounge, Kirsha closed it and put the Picassos in MONA's female toilets, a place where the law allows discrimination.

The gall of exhibiting such precious art, notably by a renowned misogynist, in the loos gained more publicity — and the probing eye of Picasso's estate.

Turns out, the Picassos were fake, painted by Kirsha. The fakes had been in the Ladies Lounge for three years and seven months — one of them hung upside down — and no-one had twigged.

It caused another media storm, and another iteration of the art, albeit with legal heat from the estate and reported disapproval from David about the damage the display of fake art might do to MONA's reputation.

But, says her friend Muldoon: "Fake Picassos in the toilets — this is just grand wickedness and it's brilliant. I mean, what's not to love?"

A thorny dispute

In Kirsha's world, boundaries are there to be crossed.

It's one reason she decided to apply her creative flair to perhaps Tasmania's most polarising issue — native forest logging.

"I felt hatred was preventing forward movement," Kirsha says. 

"And I thought, 'What better way to melt hatred than through art?'"

In 2023, she invited loggers and conservationists to MONA for a Forest Economics Congress, plying the disparate guests with art, tequila and workshops.

"We should get smashed with someone who doesn't agree with us so we can actually hash it out," she says.

It was a wild three days but reviews are mixed about what was achieved. Some conservationists believe Kirsha, who considers herself a greenie, is now too close to loggers, but she counters that "everyone lobbies in their own way".

Others questioned whether the US import could make a difference. But Landcare Tasmania CEO Peter Stronach says Kirsha has facilitated conversations between the two opposing groups, and that's no small feat.

"With her position, with her creative brain, with her influence of power to talk with all sides, I think she's perfectly situated to be able to make some serious change," Stronach says.

The darling of the art world?

Exactly what Kirsha's next artistic project will be is unclear, but lately she's been dabbling with creating characters based on her extraordinary life. She acts them out in full costume: a Catholic nun from her Guam school days and a hippie called Sunfeather.

Then there's Hans Richter, a snooty German curator who embodies the serious art world. Kirsha lets him loose to mock her desire to be welcomed into that club.

"She is darling of the art world?" Hans/Kirsha asks incredulously in a thick German accent.

"Nein, nein. I think she's the nightmare of the art world. No-one takes her very seriously."

She does it well. Self-deprecating, funny and rocking a goatee beard.

But as always with Kirsha Kaechele, the question is: is it art?

Watch Australian Story's 'It's my pARTy' now on ABC iview and YouTube.