Andrea Zittel
Jill Conner
Space is the necessary evil of living within the density of New York City but it can also be a droning monotony in the scope of outlying rural or suburban communities. To accept one style of life is to sacrifice another, including all of the desires that go with it, paring down everyday happiness to a limited environment. As Gertrude Stein wrote, "There is no there there." Andrea Zittel has embraced the challenge of establishing place out of placelessness by designing environments along with performances and utilitarian sculptures that weave together an array of individual and shared experiences. "Critical Space" functions as a mid-career retrospective that will continue touring to museums in Upstate New York, Los Angeles and Vancouver, B.C. In conjunction with the Whitney Altriaís shorter exhibition titled "Wagon Stations," Andrea Zittelís work-process reaches a point of crystallization, where the boundaries between art, anthropology, architecture and design are suddenly fluid, revealing the depth of the her art that has evolved since she arrived in New York City in 1990.
Zittel began using herself as an index of socialist critique with the intention of extending her performative installations into larger, pragmatic environments. In 1991 she designed several fashionable dresses and suits worn by women and men that were referred to as "uniforms," immediately cutting off any association of gender that could be connected to the basic need for clothing. By the mid-90s the artist opened up her Williamsburg apartment, known as A-Z East, to cocktail parties that involved friends and neighbors, who fit into a larger sociological critique of group gatherings. Within two levels of architectural space, Zittel transformed a storefront room into the "Personal Presentation Room," and the bedroom into the "Comfort Room." Although the presentation room was intended to reflect the fact that an early 20th Century family operated a small business there, over the course of three generations, Zittelís photo documentation of friends sitting in a perfectly designed room around an exquisite dinner table for one of her presentations washes out any sense of toil that used to exist there. The comfort room was set up as a multi-purpose gathering space for more intimate conversations. In this setting a group of wood-framed, cushioned ottomans served as separate storage spaces as well as individual seats for visitors or, when clustered together, a double-sized bed.
Echoing the earlier inventions of Bauhaus and Corbusian designs, Zittelís work is at once polished and reductivist in appearance but complex in utility as it seeks to simplify a combination of needs and desires into small, enclosed spaces. From 1992 to 1995 the artist assembled several "A-Z Living Units," that condensed the acts of eating, working, socializing and resting into a single space. The "A-Z Processing Unit," from 1993 is a small black case that opens up into a collection of shelves that house dishes, pans, a sink and two waste buckets. The ability to create small, mobile space that could move to and from larger ones became central to Zittelís work. Previously Zittel had turned her attention toward smaller species that successfully live in compact environments such as houseflies, chickens and quails. The "A-Z Breeding Unit Averaging Eight Breeds" (1993), examined small-scale housing as a site for domestic reproduction. As traditional as it sounds, Zittelís experiment intended to address the fact that life could evolve within the confines of restricted boundaries.
Much of this stands in direct contrast to her own effort of destroying a larger notion of mainstream uniformity. Her fabrications of small escape vehicles that serve as containers within which one could retreat or of wagon stations that offer one a small slice of resort are too idealistic to be applied to the larger scope of practical life. But for Zittel, art and life are one as soon as a sense of harmony can be achieved. By the year 2000, Zittel opened up A-Z West near the Joshua Tree National Park in California. As a relic of the Five-Acre Homestead Act, this desert features an abandoned grid with a small home upon every five-acres of land. Since opening her studio there, A-Z West has attracted others who are willing to partake in this unique commune that serves as an open-air think-tank for better standards of living. During that same year, Zittel also fashioned her own livable island that was 54-tons of floating concrete which consisted of a landscaped yard, home and vehicle, but it failed to provide the sense of peaceful isolation that she has found at her home in Joshua Tree.
Like many other contemporary artists, Andrea Zittel does not have an interest to see her work within the scope of art history. But the over-idealism that appears consistently throughout each piece brings to mind the artist-architects of the early twentieth-century, namely Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, while also posing as an extension of Land Art that flourished in the late 60s and early 70s. Michael Heizer was one artist who took sculpture beyond the confines of the gallery out into the heart of the Midwest at a time when there was a large concern over how well Americaís natural environment connected to the larger idea of art. Zittel, on the other hand, inserts her self-fabricated designs and participants within the landscape in order to create a specific kind of environment. These small, isolated situations exist at the intersection of curiosity and desire, but they place restrictions upon any individualís full potential to live and exist harmoniously.
