Andrea_Zittel

1. It is a human trait to want to organize things in categories. Inventing categories creates an illusion that there is an overriding rationale in the way that the world works. 2. Surfaces that are "easy to clean" also show dirt more. In reality a surface that camouflages dirt is much more practical than one that is easy to clean. 3. Maintenance takes time and energy that can sometimes impede other forms of progress such as learning about new things. 4. All materials ultimately deteriorate and show signs of wear. It is therefore important to create designs that will look better after years of distress. 5. A perfected filing system can sometimes decrease efficiency. For instance, when letters and bills are filled away too quickly, it is easy to forget to respond to them. 6. Many "progressive" designs actually hark back towards the lost idea of nature or a more "original form" 7. Ambiguity in visual design ultimately leads to a greater variety of functions than designs that are functionally fixed. 8. No matter how many options there are it is human nature to always narrow things down to two polar, though inextricably linked choices. 9. The creation of rules is more creative than the destruction of them. Creation demands a higher level of reasoning and draws connections between cause and effect. The best rules are never stable or permanent but evolve naturally according to context or need. 10. What makes us feel liberated is not living in total freedom, but rather living in a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves. 11. Things we think are limiting can ultimately becoming restrictive, and things that we initially think are controlling can sometimes give us a sense of comfort and security. 12. Ideas seem to gestate the best in a void - when the void is filled it is more difficult to access them. In our consumption-driven society almost all voids are filled, blocking moments of greater clarity and creativity. Things that block voids are called "avoids". 13. Sometimes if you can’t change the situation, you just have to change the way you think about the situation. 14. People are most happy when they are moving towards something not yet attained. (I also wonder if this extends as well to the sensation of physical motion in space. I believe that I am happier when I am in a plane or car because I am moving towards an identifiable and attainable goals.) (1) Andrea Zittel. Artist. Designer. Architect. Craft Practitioner. Visionary. Her work has been debated and theorized, exhibited globally since the month of her graduation. She is represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. (2) Born in 1965 to middle class parents whose hand built house lay in the outskirts of Northern San Diego California. A normal and happy, outdoorsy childhood paved a privileged path to the San Diego State University, where, in 1988, she obtained a BFA in painting and sculpture, before moving on to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she was awarded an MFA in 1990. (3) Andrea Zittel’s middle of the road upbringing was the root from which her desire to improve, transform and reinvent grew. On discussing her family home she says: “My parents built our house in what was originally a very rural and undeveloped area in dry scrubby rolling hills a little north of San Diego. At the time, the area was becoming completely developed. I don’t think that people from cities can understand how parasitic that kind of rapid growth can feel. Each family that moved into our neighborhood built a large home on a freshly surveyed piece of land. I remember feeling very aware of how the resulting yards were then landscaped. Each was thematized as if it were its own country; one yard was a jungle, the next a forest, and perhaps the next parcel would be a desert. People lived as if they were isolated in self-contained estates that were wholly separate from the larger community” (4) Zittel moved to New York in 1992, a 200 sq foot dingy apartment was all she could afford and the subsequent frustration with her exiguous living arrangements spurred her personal revolution; art as antiphon. This Grungy New York shop front apartment, being a world a way from the cleanliness of suburban California became the laboratory whereby the examination and scrutinizing of every day life was to inspire some of her most notorious works (5) The artist’s daily routine, her furniture, the food she prepared and clothing she wore; all went under scrutiny. Being a poor new graduate much of her furniture was found on the streets and from here “Repair Works” grew. As Cornelia Butler notes in ‘Andrea Zittel Critical Space’ (6) When I first visited Zittels Williamsburg studio - which was even then more of an office inhabited by projects than a conventional studio – she was researching the breeding of chickens and simultaneously was occupied with the repair of everyday objects she had found on the street. It now occurs to me that that theses concurrent activities observed in that visit in some way foreshadowed the duality that has come to characterize Zittels Practice: one an almost primitive agrarian impulse, thoroughly at odds with the Brooklyn neighborhood in which she worked, and the other a typical New York urban activity, the culling and resuscitation of objects from ones anonymous neighbors. A kind of happy coexistence of East and West coast impulses, both projects constituted the beginning of her investigation into living systems. Essentially she was making work from nothing- which though now is a familiar mode of operation, was then very arresting to confront in the studio situation. Zittels “Collective Domestic” functions as a site of production that extends this trajectory by exploiting the marginal territory of personal space as if it were a ready-made. ‘Orphans’ as Zittel named them at the time, an old hubcap, a legless table, plates, tacky old garden sculptures: New York in the early 90s was awash with debate over sexual identity and AIDS. The new DIY culture was emerging, hip-hop, graffiti and the rave revolution. It was an exciting place to be. (7) http://www.babelgum.com/beautifullosers/channels/180797/featured/play Whilst many of Andrea Zittels contemporaries (Mathew Barney, Mel Chin, general idea) (8) “Pursued an expressive language that engages the personal sphere and employs a metaphorical idiom” (9) Zittel chose to create purpose and meaning through the exploration and exploitation of functional objects. A process she defines as “Literalness”(10) A grand reevaluation was afoot. Zittel’s current living arrangements, as financially challenged artist inspired a deep-rooted questioning of personal and cultural and attitudes towards living space. Frustrated by “contained spaces that weren’t mine” the “Living Units” were born. Structures, which contained everything one might need within a simple design system, a collapsible home, which could be, erected anywhere, a place of comfort, security, and permanence. Functionality. Safety. The portable structures could be folded away into the size of a ‘steamer trunk’ “I wanted to create a highly personalized space, it was like owning a house that would fit inside a shell within a house other people owned” (11) These units were: “A response to the idea of having limitations. And that's something I have come back to in my practice. There's a lot of rhetoric about freedom out there, but ultimately, most people feel more free when there are certain parameters, and I think we are really unaware of that. We are always trying to abolish parameters and abolish rules. But actually, rules can be constructive sometimes. They can catalyze creative impulses.” (12) The intention of this work was to solve the real and physical problems faced by the artist in her daily living arrangements, it was also a comment on a culture driven by consumerism, a critique on the obsessional consumption we cant get away from; a shrinking down to the bare essentials. A search for perfection. Most interestingly however, once the first unit was built, Andrea Zittel was faced with a groundbreaking realization; the elusive idea of “perfection” had remained just that. An idea. This ‘loss’, and, in turn, the acknowledgement of perpetual dissatisfaction was in fact the destination, the end goal was the process. “When it was perfect and there was nothing left to do to it, I felt completely despondent, very listless and depressed. At that point...I had this revelation that no one really wants perfection; that we're obsessed with perfection, we're obsessed with innovation and moving forwards, but what we really want is the hope of some sort of new and improved or a better tomorrow” (13) ‘A-Z Administrative Services’ was formed in 1992. A One Woman corporation which would oversee the production and manufacturing of Andrea Zittel’s plethora of utopian solutions. This corporate face, complete with logo, headed note paper and Nation wide advertising was a response to the expectations of ‘social norms’ the artist encountered when aspiring to appear, as she puts it, an ‘acceptable’ member of society. In 1999 Zittel was commissioned by the Danish government to build A-Z Pocket Property, a 44-ton floating concrete island, which was anchored off the coast of Denmark Pocket property: A microcosm. An exploration into isolation and escapism. (14) A physical manifestation of the essential creative breeding ground or ‘space’ she so often talks of. A ‘private universe’. For me, this piece is the conceptual epitome of all Andrea Zittels work. The double edged horizon which characterizes Zittels vision; This idea of personal freedom versus constriction, sanctuary, versus escape, isolation versus safety, possibility, feasibility, the duality of individualism; loneliness and ultimately desolation. As Zittel says of her island: “[It represents] both our greatest fears and our greatest fantasies and because of the complexity and contradictions of our desires I feel compelled to create a work that explores and addresses these desires.” (15) Zittel lived on the Island for one month; a feat of duration and a flirt with isolation; or as she describes it: a ‘scary and boring experience’; which did not, of course, satisfy her urge to experience an escape from the world. There is no divide in Zittels world; design, progress, solution, journey are all one and the same, the divisions blurred and irrelevant. This is what I admire most. Lists have been made; things the artist ‘can and cannot’ live without, escape Vehicles built. Life has been experienced without lighting for a week and lived in an experimental laboratory, without exposure to ‘real’ time. Andrea Zittel has taught herself to crochet without crochet needles, using her fingers instead, she has replaced the plates and cups in her kitchen with only bowls of one size, experimented with living off only reconstituted frozen food, she has worn the same dress for six months. The list goes on; boundaries are constantly stretched and reassessed. Art is life. Life is art. A –Z West is the current Zittel Empire headquarters, 35 acres of Californian dessert, an ongoing ‘life/art laboratory. (16) Zittel asks us to question our own rules and self imposed limitations, (17) her work invites us to question our needs and desires, to look again at the familiar and be reminded that it is by only chance that we are here now like this; a one off evolutionary fuck up. She invites us to become non complacent, to question everything. To take nothing for granted. Zittels work terrifies and exhilarates me in equal measure; it brings to mind Armageddon, catastrophe, global meltdown, yet at the same time it speaks of the good hands can do, the present moment, the sacredness of imbuing every action with meaning. 1 “These things I know for sure” Andrea Zittel 2007 2 http://www.andrearosengallery.com/exhibitions/2005_5_andrea-zittel/ 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Zittel 4 http://artforum.com/words/id=25893 5 http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/397 6 Andrea Zittel: Critical Space, ISBN 3-7913-3397-6. Page 63. 7 http://www.babelgum.com/beautifullosers/channels/180797/featured/play 8 Andrea Zittel: Critical Space, ISBN 3-7913-3397-6. Page 23 9 New museum digital archive online. Andrea Zittel. Critical space Mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262122669intro1.pdf 10 Artmag, 2004 Social Study: An Interview with Andrea Zittel 11 An Interview with DK ROW THE OREGONIAN Published: Friday, October 10, 2008 12 Interview with Andrea Zittel, “Consumption,” 2001 episode of Art: 21 – Art in the Twenty-First Century (PBS, 2001-present; Art21 Inc) 13 Art 21. Pocket property interview Andrea Zittel 14 http://theoriesneedproof.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html 15 http://www.zittel.org/az-west.php'a_id=3 16 http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/11807/a-hippie-at-heart-andrea-zittel-talks-about-her-wagons-at-the-whitney/ 17 http://lizardmeme.blogspot.com/2005/09/nyt-art-story.html