Andrea Zittel

Since the early 1990s, Andrea Zittel (*1965) has used the arena of her daily life to develop and test prototypes for living structures and situations, gleaning from them an understanding of the ways in which humans construct their values, social norms and belief systems. Based in the California Mojave Desert, near Joshua Tree and its national parklands, the artist has produced works spanning sculpture, drawing, painting, video, textiles and installation that illuminate how we attribute significance to the physical spaces we inhabit, and how qualities we may find concrete and rational are often subjective, arbitrary and invented. Zittel’s first projects developed out of her small apartment in Brooklyn, New York, and reflected the craft-based, “do it yourself” ethos of the 1990s. She lived within the carefully ordered confines of her A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit (1992)—a seven-by-nine foot “living unit” that offered space for the basic necessities of eating, sleeping, storing and cleaning—to explore how design and its accompanying ideologies could turn a seeming constraint into a liberating experience. Other early experiments involved living without running water for a year, spending extended periods without access to measured time, and sewing spare “uniforms,” of which she only wore one per season. Ongoing over twenty years later, the A-Z Uniform series has expanded into an array of designs in natural fibers that perfectly encapsulate Zittel’s impulse to simplify, but also critique, our perceived need for objects, variety and individuality. In 2000, Zittel moved cross-country to establish A-Z West , her home and testing ground where physical works are created and lived with as an experiment in “investigative living.” Situated in the desert approximately two hours east of Los Angeles, A-Z West has come to encompass an eighty-acre site designed by the artist that includes a main house, personal and communal studios, homestead cabins, Wagon Station Encampments (small trailers with well-appointed interiors for rest), and site-specific sculptures. From this fecund compound, Zittel has produced paintings on wood featuring colorful geometric abstractions and views of A-Z West ; sculptural Planar Configurations that create modest living spaces out of parallel and perpendicular panels, in muted primary tones and overlaid with weavings and textiles; and suites of precise watercolors echoing the planes of her three-dimensional structures. These and other projects continue to question our materialist impulses, while also savoring the beauty and orderliness of well-designed forms.