Ann Hirsch

Ann Hirsch (born 1985) is a contemporary American video and performance artist. Her work addresses women's sexual self-expression and identity online and in popular culture.

Early life

As a teen in the late 1990s, Hirsch developed a significant chatroom presence. Her experiences on chatrooms and online would inform much of her later work, including 2013's "Playground."

Hirsch received a BFA in sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2007, and an MFA in Video Art from Syracuse University in 2010.

Video and performance art

In 2008, Hirsch initiated the "Scandalishious" project, a series of videos posted to her YouTube account, "Caroline's fun fun channel." Using her computer to record herself, Hirsch performed as Caroline, a SUNY freshman. Many of the clips show Caroline dancing to music ranging from MGMT to Katy Perry to Meat Loaf. In other videos, Caroline reads poetry or confides to her viewers about her personal life. By using her computer to record and convey videos of herself in private to a wider audience while seeming to directly address that audience, Hirsch makes an apparently intimate experience into a very public one. The channel has reached over one million views. Of her motivation in creating "Scandalishious," Hirsch has said,

While I was growing up and becoming a woman, I hated myself. I knew I was smart but other than that I thought I was just a disgusting girl that no one could be sexually interested in. I started performing as "Scandalishious" because I was tired of feeling that way. Or at least, I was tired of appearing as though I felt that way. So I started pretending I thought I was sexy and I quickly learned that if I pretended to be confident, people would believe it. And then I actually became more confident as a result.

This personal motivation coincided with a desire to present a multifaceted female YouTube figure to a community already filled with images of women which, as Hirsch saw it, were either speaking to the camera or dancing for the camera, with very little overlap between the two roles. Hirsch combined these camgirl tropes to create a character who was, to use Hirsch's words, both sexual and human. By merging these distinct and established roles available to women online, the "Scandalishious" project explores questions of femininity, extreme publicity, online communities, and the appropriation and dissection (in the harassment or approval by YouTube commenters, for example) of bodies and personalities on the internet. Hirsch also went on to display and discuss segments of the "Scandalishious" project in galleries.

In 2010, Hirsch was a participant on the VH1 reality TV show Frank the Entertainer in a Basement Affair. Hirsch went by "Annie," one of fifteen women trying to win over Frank Maresca, himself a former reality TV contestant on I Love New York 2 and I Love Money. Hirsch's incentive in joining the show was to create a performance piece and to investigate the derogatory stereotypes surrounding women who vie for publicity. As was the case with "Scandalishious," Hirsch was also interested in the transformative possibilities of playing this particular role, and of the effects such a role could have on her personally. Hirsch's participation on "Frank the Entertainer" highlighted the nebulous line between performance and reality. She found herself cast as "the nice girl," and realized "the non-sexualization of my character, both through my own doing and through careful editing...rendered me an inadequate partner for Frank." To avoid this carefully packaged characterization, Hirsch performed an expletive-filled rap song and was promptly sent home. Her demonstration of the sexual, outspoken side of the "nice girl" character altered the narrative the producers had envisioned. Historically, video art has borrowed from and been shown on TV, but Hirsch's role on "Frank the Entertainer" was itself the completed work, rather than any later documentation of the performance. In an interview with Hirsch, Karen Archey suggested that reality TV itself was the medium for the performance. Even so, a compilation of clips of her appearances on the show along with her application video, entitled "Here For You (Or my Brief Love Affair With Frank Maresca," can be found on Hirsch's website. Hirsch also participated on the TV series Oddities.

After Hirsch's work with Frank the Entertainer ended, in 2011 she collaborated with performance artist Genevieve Belleveau (also known as gorgeousTaps) to create The Reality Show with gorgeousTaps.

Hirsch's "Playground," a play about a coming of age, teenage girl engaging in a relationship with an adult man through an internet chatroom, debuted in 2013. The set of "Playground" consists of two desks where the actors sit at computers, appearing to chat with each other, while the textual component of their conversation is projected onto the wall behind them. The play was inspired by Hirsch's own teenage experience of meeting and engaging in a multi-year online relationship with an older man. Hirsch also collaborated with designer James LaMarre to produce "Twelve," an app that recreated the now-defunct AOL chatrooms of Hirsch's adolescence. Though the app recreated the appearance of the interactive chatroom space, an app-user would be met with a pre-conceived narrative of a young girl chatting with an older man. Hirsch explained, "My point with telling this story is just to be honest and convey both the benefits I got from this relationship (intimacy, sexual knowledge) but also show the manipulation and exploitation that was involved in a relationship like this as well." The app was eventually banned by the iTunes Store.

Hirsch participated in "Body Anxiety," a 2015 online exhibition featuring work by video and performance artists based on questions of the female body through the lens of the internet.

Hirsch has cited Cindy Sherman, Andrea Fraser, Jill Magid, Alex Bag, and Laurel Nakadate as key influences. In the wake of work by these and other artists, Hirsch’s multi-media oeuvre operates within a history of feminist artwork concerning the representation and objectification of women and other crucial feminist concerns. Along with Petra Cortright and other contemporary artists who employ Photobooth and YouTube in their work, Hirsch reimagines long-standing feminist questions, particularly in the context of the internet, reality TV, and other modern instances of mass communication and publicity. Hirsch has expressed interest in the videos of and reception to internet camgirls like Boxxy.