Artist Andrea Zittel is best -known for making sculptural 'living units' in New York and Europe. For the latest installment of her 'A- Z' series she has swapped urban life for the Mojave Desert. Terry Myers visited her.
Photographed at night using a 60-minute exposure, with the lights of Joshua Tree in the background.(Photography by Dan Holdsworth)
Myers: After making the celebrated drive from Los Angeles to 'the desert' to see Andrea Zittel's new digs, I am convinced that her decision to go bicoastal is one of the best things she has ever done for her art or her life. To borrow a phrase from daytime television, this move 'completes' her work, and to my amateurpsychologist yet professional-art-critic eye it doesn't look like adding a major change of venue has hurt her life one bit.
Of course with Zittel we are reminded in everything that she does that, for her, it has always been art and life, or art as life, or vice versa. All her art-making activities embody and ultimately extend the well-known philosophy of Rauschenberg, who suggested that since neither art nor life can be made, one always works in the space between them.
By transforming a 1940s homesteader's cabin, on the outskirts of the Mojave Desert town of Joshua Tree, into a second home and headquarters a couple of years ago, and calling it 'A-Z West' to complement her well-established 'A-Z East' in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Zittel has given herself both the physical space and the conceptual framework to diversify her practice, literally and symbolically. Having made a name for herself in the early 1990s with a project in the window of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art that involved building a structure for the breeding and conditioning of chickens, and continuing to attract well-deserved international attention with an increasingly ambitious array of homebuilt, customised multi-purpose 'living units' (from furniture to mobile trailers to a man-made island that she lived on for a month off the coast of Denmark), it now looks like her part-time move back west (Zittel was born in California) has enabled her to stake out new territory for her work. More concretely, she now has a lot of real space in which to make it. It might be going too far to suggest that her situation mirrors a common myth about the Los Angeles/New York axis of the art world (in the west everything revolves around production; in the east, distribution), but it isn't wrong at all to suggest that for her overall practice such a bifurcation has not only opened up the range of possibilities in that space between art and life, but also given it a stable home.
Zittel's desert cabin is much more than a metaphorical 'west side' that bookends an 'east side' with no consideration for anything in between (more on that below).
Andrea Zittel's homestead on the edge of the Mojave Desert, California By incorporating elements of the desert into the processes and techniques of making her most recent works, Zittel has given the nomadic and portable nature of her projects (see NOTES, on page 44) just the kind of literal grounding that will entice many to travel from far and wide to see where they are made. 
The A-Z Regenerating Field (detail, 2002)Twenty-five stainless-steel trays hold sculptural panels, made from paper pulp, which dry in the desert sun. The A-Z Regenerating Field directly acknowledges in its title and in its configuration Walter De Maria's 1977 Lightning Field that is permanently installed in New Mexico. There are, however, significant differences. De Maria's Field is huge: 400 stainless steel poles with solid pointed tips that are precisely positioned in a one mile by one kilometre grid. Zittel's Field fits into what can be called her front yard: a grid of 25 steel trays on short poles that cascade down a hill. Both fields take advantage of the energy that is abundant in their natural surroundings, but to very different ends: the former encourages the display of lightning strikes that from all firsthand accounts are visually amazing (I haven't been yet), while the latter at first glance just seems to sit there and do nothing. Appearances are deceiving: Zittel's trays harness energy that is less dramatic yet no less productive, for her at least.
Continuing her interest in developing new building materials for her projects, Zittel began to experiment with paper pulp compacted into plastic moulds and set into the steel trays to harden. From there the desert sun takes over, like ions to De Maria's lightening poles, transforming much of her waste paper into panels that take on the appearance of fibreglass, concrete or even travertine stone. (Artist Matej A Vogrinic also harnessed sunlight in his work Rainforest for an Australian Desert, a field of 1800 half-filled watering cans placed in the desert until the heat had evaporated them dry.) For the moment, these panels have primarily a cosmetic or decorative application: 'something that could camouflage bad walls and add softness and texture to a room'. But Zittel is continuing her experiments in order to make this material strong enough, and durable enough, to build actual structures with it.
This is where Zittel's enterprise departs dramatically from that of De Maria's or any of the other minimalist earthwork artists. Her 'regenerating' field is also an 'enlightening' field, one in which we are encouraged - as is the case in all her work - to take the results of her experimentation and come up with our own ideas about what to do with them.
Looking is not enough. Zittel has always taken a 'maximalist' position, giving us as viewers (and users) enough information to incorporate the practical and aesthetic aspects of our lives into her structures and living units (her 'personal programmes'). This spirit of inclusiveness was reinforced by the manner in which Zittel introduced her Field to the world: she facilitated a series of projects by others, located at what were named the 'High Desert Test Sites'. See Later Post.
The ultimate achievement here is that Zittel has found a novel way to add genuine accessibility to the idea of an art pilgrimage - even if the contribution of another participating Test Site artist, Chris Kaspar, directly poked fun at the drive out from Los Angeles and the substantial hiking required to see everything: a casually painted wooden sign, high up on Zittel's hill, that simply says 'I'M SORRY.'
No comments:
Post a Comment