Andrea Zittel: A Place Outside the Art Basel Herd

[image source]

UPDATE (2/7/06):
via StrangeWeather.info: Andrea Zittel: Critical Space
A THORN TREE IN THE GARDEN, by Jerry Saltz

The year 2005 was the hottest on the planet in recorded history; there is open water for the first time ever at the North Pole; the snows at the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro will probably disappear within 25 years. A power grid the size of Houston is being added to China every month; the United States, with only four percent of the world's population, emits more than 20 percent of the world's carbon. "Fifty years from now," a noted scientist speculates, "you may be living in a world where you don't go outside between one and four in the afternoon." In short, our increasingly brutish country, with its end-time mentality and barbarian attitude toward the environment, would gladly trade the last frog for cheaper gas prices.

The gypsy-visionary, social-scientist, explorer-architect, eco-rogue, control-freak artist Andrea Zittel will not be able to stop any of these things from happening. But her circuitous journey away from New York to what she calls her "High Desert Test Site," 40 acres of parched land two and a half hours east of Los Angeles and two hours south of Las Vegas -- as Zittel puts it, "23 miles past the sign that says 'Last Service for 100 Miles'" -- where the weather is brutal, the snakes are poisonous and the water is trucked in, is a glimmer of selflessness, creativity and fearlessness in the face of a technologically advanced culture flirting with geo-meteorological suicide. Zittel uses HDTS as a part-time studio and a site for other artists to execute ideas. Its existence is a reminder that chaos is a choice breeding ground for art -- an unknown zone and mental garden that can produce new thought patterns and exotic artistic fruit. [read on...]

UPDATE (2/3/06):
via NYTimes: Art Review | 'Andrea Zittel'
Rethinking the World by Cutting it Down to Size
By GRACE GLUECK - Published: February 3, 2006

As a child, Andrea Zittel cut out the crotch of her tights so she could wear them as a top, making a perfect reciprocity with those she wore on her legs. Given this precocity of invention, it seems only natural that she would grow up to be a painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, carpenter, seamstress, fashion designer, merchandiser, nutritionist and social engineer who keeps redesigning her own and other people's lives in a Utopian thrust toward more fulfilling use of time, space and place. [read on...]

via New York Magazine (1/23/06):
The Non-Manhattan Project
Andrea Zittel bolted New York for the California scrub—and now the art world comes to her desert home.
By Karen Rosenberg

"My boyfriend and I have a secret house in L.A.," says Andrea Zittel, conspiratorially. "He complains that in the desert it's all me, it's not us. So I'm trying to make a place that’s not my testing ground." Zittel's desert house, in Joshua Tree, is known as A-Z West, and it's all about her in the way that Turkey Hill is all about Martha: It's a homesteader's cabin turned into a studio and lab for the playful, thoughtful, radical art-and-life experiments for which she's becoming widely known. At A-Z West (there's a defunct Brooklyn branch, A-Z East), she wears the same self-designed uniform for months. She recycles junk mail into a grayish pulp. Her mission statement says, "Home furniture, clothing, food all become the sites of investigation... to better understand human nature and the social construction of needs." It's not hard to understand how these things can strain a relationship.

Her relationship with the art world, meanwhile, is thriving. With a traveling survey about to open at the New Museum and the Whitney, the 40-year-old joins those artists who escaped to the margins—Donald Judd, Michael Heizer—only to find themselves at the center. In Zittel's universe, it’s okay to show at the cutting-edge Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea while incubating radical ideas amid the hippie squats of Joshua Tree. Zittel has become a self-described "tourist attraction," hosting a parade of art pilgrims—a version of the cocktail parties she held weekly during her time in Williamsburg. She's definitely out of the way, rationing water when the delivery truck doesn't show, but she's not off the grid.

Zittel is, essentially, a one-woman corporation; under the moniker "A-Z Administrative Services," she acts as industrial designer, copywriter, and tester. Some of her inventions, like the Living Units (trunks that unfold into kitchens, bathrooms, and the like) are meant to make daily routines easy and efficient. Others, such as the podlike Escape Vehicles, appeal to fantasies of isolation and security. As an archivist at Pat Hearn, in the early nineties, she was flummoxed by the fashion codes of the trust-fund set, so she had one black dress made and wore it every day for six months. It's a classic Zittel strategy, circumventing rules by inventing new ones, and it inspired a series called A-Z Personal Uniforms. Now, she quips, "I can wear a $6,000 dress to an opening, but it's $6,000 because it’s mine."

Shelter magazines have a tendency to confuse Zittel's work with architecture and industrial design—careers she rejected. "As a designer, you have such an obligation to people. As an artist, you have a lot more freedom," she says. When an innovation proves less than useful (say, the A-Z Chamber Pot), Zittel simply moves on. Critics don’t quite know how to categorize her; some call her a Conceptualist, others an object-maker. A few of Zittel's collectors actually live with her creations, but most show and store them like sculpture.

She wants to make A-Z West a place where she and other artists can escape the pressures of the Art Basel herd. "I wanted to show that there could be a viable arts community outside a cultural capital like New York or Los Angeles, somewhere more affordable," she says. As it happens, the housing market in the Coachella Valley has exploded, and an artist can no longer snap up a piece of land for $20,000. But life at A-Z was never purely Utopian. "I think there's a dark side to everything good—for instance, the minute you have a prefab house with alternative energy sources, people are going to build everywhere." If all goes well, A-Z West will one day become a foundation, with Zittel, her boyfriend, and their 17-month-old son settled in their L.A. abode, where "we just bought a sofa," she says. "It took us a year to find one I liked."

(Photo: Susanna Howe)

Andrea Zittel: Wagon Stations
Whitney Museum of American Art
February 9 through May 7.

Andrea Zittel: Critical Space
New Museum
January 26 Through May 27.

See also Artforum Scene & Herd (01.30.06):
A-Z Does It
By Michael Wilson

"Do not touch" signs are a museum staple, but it was odd to see the officious warning plastered so liberally around an exhibition of work so explicitly dependent on ideas of physical interaction and practical function. I'd barely ventured into the main gallery at the first of two Wednesday night opening receptions for Andrea Zittel's touring survey show "Critical Space" at the New Museum of Contemporary Art when a guard sternly directed me away from a carpeted area near one of the California desert-based artist's sculptures-for-living. Confronted about the feet-and-hands-off policy, Zittel readily admitted to a simple concern for the work's survival over a four-month run, a sensible but unavoidably disappointing decision. (The temptation to clamber into her isolation-tank-like A-Z Escape Vehicle was visibly eating away at even this evening's modest and well-behaved cadre of friends and supporters.) [see opening night pics & read on...]