Selected by Karen Archey
Los Angeles-based Ann Hirsch is one of the foremost young artists working with issues related to contemporary feminism. The body, its incarnations online and the representation of women in popular media are all her fodder. Yet, perhaps unexpectedly, she is also incredibly, profoundly funny, making appearances on reality TV shows and creating short, one-liner videos under the moniker horny lil feminist (collected as a work of the same title created 2014–15).
One of her earliest works, The Scandalishious Project (2008–9) finds her as an ebullient hipster YouTube CeWebrity who convulsively dances along to pop songs. Though Hirsch was parodying the ‘camwhore’ stereotype, her Scandalishious YouTube channel gained a real cult following, from an audience unaware this was an act. She further experimented with playacting to a mass-media audience in her appearance on Frank the Entertainer In A Basement Affair, a 2010 reality television show airing on VH1 in which she competed as fun- loving artist Annie to wed Frank, a reality TV star who lives in his parent’s basement. In Here For You (Or my Brief Love Affair with Frank Maresca (2011) she documents the manner she was kicked off the show for purposely straying away from her sweet-but-weird girl-next-door character by singing a lascivious song during a singing contest.
Hirsch’s most recent effort is hornylil- feminist.com, a website the artist updates regularly with quick, witty videos. In yuppie life (2015), Hirsch screen-records herself scrolling through her own department-store wedding list to the Lesley Gore 1963 anthem You Don’t Own Me. Another, vaginal hygiene haul (2014), features Hirsch narrating, deadpan, a haul video of various vaginal hygiene products. That Hirsch can convincingly perform so many versions of femininity without coming off as mocking is one of her unique strengths. She has been extensively quoted as saying, ‘Whenever [a woman puts her] body online, in some way you are in conversation with porn.’
Hirsch’s first institutional solo show at MIT List this month includes the video about her Frank the Entertainer experience, an installation of her Scandalishious project, and a jailbroken iPad with the digital work Twelve. This app narrativises Hirsch’s preteen experience in chatrooms and was developed in tandem with her 2013 work, Playground, an autobiographical play starring ‘Annie’, a twelve-year-old Hirsch who hangs out on instant messenger and Jobe, a twenty-seven-year-old guy roaming chat rooms for underage girls. Ever the frontierswoman, Hirsch has seen both her app and publisher banned from the iTunes store, as Apple contends Twelve contains content related to child sexuality.
With an MFA in art video from Syracuse University, New York, Ann Hirsch has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Smart Objects, os Angeles, American Medium, New York, and Arcadia Missa, London. Her work is included in Electronic Superhighway (2016 – 1966) at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 29 January – 15 May.
This article was first published in the January & February 2016 issue of ArtReview.
