FOR OVER
A DECADE, Andrea Zittel's art has investigated the structures
of life on every level, from the biological (selective breeding),
to the social and domestic (furniture design and clothing),
to the fantastic (self-designed escape vehicles). In her
latest project, Zittel has moved away from the mundanity
of daily life into the real terrain of complete separation,
in the form of a literal private island. What is apparent
in all of her work, however, is that rather than offering
definitive answers, Zittel's art continually poses questions
not only to her viewers but, most importantly, to herself.
Significantly, Zittel has set up her life so that she will
live with the consequences. A visit to Zittel's home is
like entering the cross between a research facility and
an artist's studio. Experiments and projects are every where,
and like a science laboratory, special equipment is necessary
to conduct the work at hand. In Zittel's case this consists
of the furniture she uses, the clothes she wears and the
food she eats, all of which she has designed and made. While
she does use some mass-produced items in her daily life,
everything has been customized: from the early Macintosh
computer she spray painted black (which looks great, by
the way) to the RAUGH workstation, a work-in-progress, where
she and her assistants take care of correspondence and other
administrative matters. Sometimes design decisions lead
to unintended consequences. Instead of regretting those
outcomes, Zittel relishes and incorporates the problematic
and the unsuccessful into optimistic and productive activities
which touch upon some of the major philosophical issues
of our day.
stefano basilico Your house is very clean!
Although it might just be the way you organize things. While
maintenance is a part of what you do with your projects,
I wouldn't expect actual cleaning to be.
andrea zittel I'm organized, but I really
hate cleaning; you spend all of your time doing something
that will eventually just go back to its previous state.
When I was living in a house with my ex, in California,
we both stopped cleaning, and our mess just got to a state
of equilibrium after a while. But any way, you clean and
then it gets dirty again, but if you spent that time doing
something creative, like building something, you'd actually
have forward motion as opposed to the stasis of a repetitive
act.
sb I was reading that one of the first
things you did as an artist when you came to New York was
to gather broken things and repair them. Which is a really
interesting gesture, if you understand it not only in terms
of art, but more importantly in terms of design and design
authorship.
az Yeah. When I moved to New York from
California I was overwhelmed by the decay here. That was
just when the recession hit and people had the sense that
everything was falling apart. In California everything had
been all about progress and newness, but here in New York
buildings were being abandoned and rents were going down
and nothing was being repaired, everything was failing apart.
I don't know if I thought much about authorship at that
point. I do think about it a lot now, though, and how it
isn't possible to abolish authorship because people feel
so alienated that they're just starved for some sort of
relationship, which is why people become obsessed with celebrities
and the media. I think as we become more and more isolated,
we look for our intimate relationships with products and
name brands; and so identification with an author gets attached
to the things that we bring into our lives and that we wear
and consume.
sb It's a designer's job to package a
product that a corporation is trying to sell. If there's
little competition and the corporation is producing water,
it doesn't matter what the packaging is, everyone is going
to buy it. If there's lots of competition and the corporation
is producing water, then the packaging becomes immensely
important because the products, as necessary as they are,
are all alike. It's interesting to wonder if the designer
might have a greater role as an interface with society than
the artist.
az I think that's what drew me, as well
as a lot of other artists of my generation, to design. We
wanted to feel like we had some sort of relationship to
our audience, and to the more general public which is actually
the audience that I'm part of, since I'm not really part
of the audience that collects art.
sb Why do you say that?
az Well, I really do like most of the
people who collect my work, and I think that they face a
lot more challenges buying the type of artworks that I make,
but these people don't really represent where I come from.
sb Were you attracted to design as a way
of potentially reinvigorating the role of the artist in
society?
az Sometimes when I project forward to
a hundred years from now I imagine an art historian trying
to talk about our times and I think that they will look
back more at changes in design than at developments in art.
sb I don't know if I agree.
az Look at art right now; artists take
a topic and then they make art about it. But I find it is
rare to look at an artwork and have a new take on the way
that the world works. Good art, I think, creates this kind
of experience.. When I see a really good piece of art, I
get goose bumps because I am experiencing an instant of
altered perception.
But before I make it sound like I'm promoting design over
art I have to say that although I like design issues, a
lot of design gets confused with corporate marketing. I
guess that an example of this could be in how Artforum has
been publishing a lot of fashion lately. The problem is
that sometimes they're not really showing a person's creative
vision, so much as advertising a corporation. I think it's
important to make a distinction between a personal statement
or vision and a product line.
sb Speaking of corporations, you operate
under the corporate guise of A to Z Administrative Services.
az The beauty of doing that was that when
I was younger, I felt very, very small. With A to Z, I was
able to create an illusion of being an entity much larger
than myself. Now I have m re of a support network, more
of a voice, and I feel more powerful, so I've let up on
the corporate guise. It doesn't always feel so necessary
anymore.
sb There's a totality to it.
az Yeah, actually the whole A to Z identity
began when I was trying to fabricate the chicken breeding
units, and no one would help me. I have a sort of young,
Southern California mall-girl accent that really doesn't
help me get things done. Even now, when I talk to people
on the phone they'll ask me if my parents are home. So,
I had an official letterhead made up it really worked. It
wasn't so much a statement as much as it was something functional
to who and where I was at that time in my life.
sb It's interesting that you needed or
at least perceived yourself to need a corporate identity
to enter into the art world and be accepted.
az I needed it to get things fabricated,
to get people to send me product manuals. I was trying to
get stuff from commercial hatcheries and chicken supply
manufacturers. And of course they are very suspicious of
anyone who doesn't sound like they are from the industry.
I registered myself as a hatchery and when I went to order
cages or incubators or breeder units or asked for some customized
feature, it was easier with my company identity.
sb The breeding pieces are the first ones
in which you try, in essence, to use Darwinian principles
to breed out or breed in certain traits in a species. The
next project was "living units" for people. They
were more liberating, more functional spaces that would
open up possibilities for living experiences. And then the
next body of works, as I see it, are the Escape Vehicles,
identically manufactured containers whose interiors would
be customized by their owners.
az You've brought up like eight issues
already.
sb (laughter) I know, I know. I'll give
you equal time. At a certain point in your work you started
talking more about America and the American credo or spirit.
You've been creating actual islands that you call Pocket
Properties no longer figurative islands such as the Escape
Vehicles, but literal islands for people to inhabit and
to, in essence, remove themselves from society.
az Yeah. Capsulation.
sb I can't help but go from that point
and end up back at the early breeding pieces.
az Oh, I'm so happy that you made these
connections. I think that this interpretation of capsulation
is so broad that it compares our mental constructs to biological
categories, and then to social communities and finally to
architectural structures. The breeding work was about human
desire to create the defined identity of a "breed."
I was really interested in the fact that breeds in domestic
chickens or dogs are not natural. We assume that the categories
have existed for much longer than they really have. It's
only been about 120 years since the idea of breeds came
about. They're totally artificial categories and it's so
odd how we cling to them, and how easy It ls to make new
ones. I was just trying to make new breeds to show what
pure fabrication it all is. I was never interested in design
until I started doing the breeding and then I started to
think, Oh, these animals are just like designs, like car
models. And then I started to think, If these designs upset
or reflect people's patterns of thinking, what other designs
will show people's basic assumptions about how the world
works?
sb So then are the Pocket Properties,
which you've described as "a portable and habitable
property a special area on the earth's surface which has
the potential to create the sensations of security, stability
and belonging," new breeding units for humans?
az Sort of in the sense that, like breeding
animals, they reflect our desires about the way we want
the world to exist. People like animal breeds because they
simplify life into categorizable and predictable elements.
A Pocket Property could do the same thing by creating a
safe and predictable environment to shape our lives and
interactions.
sb It strikes me that in our present time,
there are increasing indications that American individualism
has gone berserk, and people have become more de-socialized
and anti-social, and thus ultimately self-destructive. Whereas
once upon a time individualism was a good trait because
men and women could go off and "expand" new frontiers
which ultimately brought improvement back to the old world.
az It's that whole rhetoric of freedom
again. We think we are liberated by individualism, but in
reality we've given up so much power. People are so caught
up in the nuances of their own personal realm that they've
lost real civic relationships with one another. We've lost
the collective power. In that same sense, I am interested
in how design is reflective, and how we have become so capsulated
especially in suburban areas such as where I come from in
California, that's what the Pocket Properties are about
that experience where the frontier isolationist mentality
has gone so far that your entire world is contained in your
piece of property, in your house and your automobile. Basically
those three capsules are everything. And then what if someone
could morph all three of those things into one perfect and
infinitely reproducible capsule?
With a lot of my work I have been trying to show how these
concepts of individualism are reflected in our homes and
possessions. A few hundred years ago, the private individual
realm didn't exist in people's homes. Business and private
lives all happened within the same space. Since most possessions
and furniture were passed down, the way that interiors looked
wasn't supposed to reflect personal taste or choice. Now
we're so obsessed with the details of our homes and how
they reflect our personalities and our characters. And this
seems to coincide perfectly with a new emphasis on peoples'
inner selves. The two go hand in hand so that in some ways
our interiors have actually become externalized reflections
of our soul.
sb Yes, instead of your eyes, your carpeting
and wall treatments are the windows to your soul.
az With the A-Z Escape Vehicles I also
tried to get at that, but I don't think very many people
picked up on it. Now when you travel, it seems as if everywhere
you go it's exactly the same restaurants, the same hotels.
The sights of interest are mostly packaged in the same way.
Maybe that's why people are turning more and more inward
towards their dark mysterious inner selves.
sb We have "discovered" all
the terrain of the world and in that sense consumed it,
yet there are a whole set of experiences that are unusual
to us. I went sailing for about ten days, delivering a boat
from Annapolis to Tortola. And I was out of sight of land,
on a forty-five-foot boat, but it's miniscule when you're
in the middle of the ocean. I had been sailing as a child,
but for a day. The duration of this trip changed the experience
of it.. For instance, when a sailboat heels, it literally
changes the plane on which you live.
az You throw up when you're on land again.
sb And more importantly, just standing
up or sitting down, which we think of as essentially easy
activities, become complex or unnatural or subject to conditions
that make them new and different and to be discovered. The
other thing was the issue of time; whether it was midnight
or daybreak, if it as your turn to go and steer the boat,
you would. Daylight, or I should say, the normal time that
we live by, no longer could have its traditional effects.
You had to break your habits and get into this peculiar
rhythm of working, eating and sleeping, working, eating
and sleeping. It created a new possibility of experiencing
traditional, everyday, normal activities. Which is what
I saw in another one of your pieces, called Time Trial.
az Being lifted out of your normal routine
completely changes your perception of everything. I often
think that this time twist is like taking a drug, it alters
your consciousness. Talking about this reminds me of my
parents, who didn't have much money but did these really
crazy travel things when I was growing up. We had a thirty-two-foot
sailboat four people on it, no privacy. Once my dad got
hit in the head with the main boom, he was bleeding everywhere
and it took us a whole day to get to land. Another time
a whale kept diving back and forth under our boat and we
all thought it was going to knock us over. All I wanted
was to feel safe and secure when I grew up, because I never
felt like that when I was a kid. Everything was so precarious,
all the time. But I guess the thrill-seeking gene is still
there, and since I now know how these experiences can shift
my consciousness it has become sort of addictive. The Time
Trials was an attempt to shift perception through the smallest,
most minute change: by not doing anything different and
by not going anywhere different, to create an extraordinary
experience simply by eliminating the one single reference
point of time. I have to say the only problem with that
project was that it was absolutely impossible to translate
into an artwork. I hit the wail with that piece because
there was no way to share the experience of living without
time with an audience.
sb You lived on one of your islands, one
of the Pocket Properties. What was that like?
az I stayed on the Pocket Property island
for part of last summer. I actually planned on staying a
lot longer, but there were some problems. Originally I had
thought of this as being a very idyllic situation staying
on a wonderful warm sunny island all on my own. But probably
three-quarters of the time that I was in Denmark (where
the island was built) it was storming. At one point we made
a hole in the floor inside the island so that I could keep
perishable food cold by dropping it into the water, and
then when the sea got rough it turned into a blowhole. No
matter what I used to cover it, the water would break it
open and a geyser would come up right next to my bed.
sb Was it anchored?
az Oh, yeah. Another problem was that
I had fantasized about being completely alone on it in order
to recover from a really hectic year. Instead, when I got
out to the island, it seemed like every single boat owner
in Denmark came out to circle my island while drinking a
six-pack of Danish beer Every time I came out, they would
all wave and ask what I was doing. After a while I just
felt so overexposed that for the next project I've chosen
a piece of land out in the desert, where no one will see
me and I can finally be completely alone.
sb You thought you were hiding, or going
away to be alone, and all of a sudden you were on display
and less alone than had you just stayed at home.
az I was like a freak show out there!
Also, when I made the Property, I had this idea I was making
my own private world and I'd be totally autonomous and outside
the jurisdiction of other people's rules and laws.
sb And you wouldn't have George W. Bush
as your president.
az Oh my God! But the problem is that
when you make something on the water you have to follow
even more stringent codes and regulations than on land.
That was really frustrating. Now I'm not sure what will
happen to the island.. At first, my proposal was to turn
it loose out in the ocean, and to just let it drift off,
but that's illegal. As my parents said to me, I'd be littering..
(laughter)
sb Well, it's illegal just to leave it
unattended. How large is the Pocket Property?
az No one's measured it, but we know it's
over 40 tons because we had to lift it with a crane a few
times. And I think it's 54 feet long and 20 something feet
wide.
sb And an irregular shape, an island shape?
az Yes.
sb It seems as if you've even incorporated
the expectation for those sorts of unforeseen consequences
into your work, which is perhaps what makes what you produce
distinct from the realm of design.
az I think what makes my work art is that
it's a very personal form of exploration. I thought about
becoming a designer but a designer has the responsibility
to make products that best serve the greatest number of
people, and I don't think that's so liberating. I'm much
more interested in doing experiments to find out what happens
if I do this, what happens if I do that. And obviously there
are flaws. When I do my slide lecture, it's basically a
discussion from one flaw to the next. Every single piece
is flawed in some way, and it's that flaw that I work off
of for the next piece. So making mistakes is very optimistic
process because it's like, Oh yeah, I can fix this in the
next piece.
Only once did I make a piece that I felt pretty satisfied
with, which was the A-Z Escape Vehicles, and everything
stopped dead for about a year after that. I hope I never
make a successful piece that I like again.
sb That's extraordinary! So the Escape
Vehicles, in their closeness to perfection or success, were
not actually inspirational for you. The value of the incompleteness
of an idea, and even of failure, is really very important
and not very often thought about these days, because the
things that are most often considered "successful"
and "valuable" in our society are those that don't
fail.
az But the irony is that in any given
time period, if you look back at whatever people thought
was successful in that period, those things have generally
been proven as failures anyway. So you have to learn to
feel confident about the prospect of failing, because it's
so inevitable.
sb And you said the experience of living
on the island led you to buying a house in the desert. And
you've encouraged other friends to come out to that desert.
In essence you're trying to create a community. In other
words, the move to the desert wasn't about isolation, it
was just about going to a pristine territory that can be
built upon.
az It's about a realistic kind of isolation.
It's not like I want everyone who I convince to move there
to go hang out with me at the bar every night. It's that
I want to be able to live and make my work some place without
disappearing from the face of the earth. I think there should
be some place where it is easier for artists to function
and to get work made. But in order to be a viable alternative
there also has to be some sort of supportiveb community.
It's more logistical than ideological.
sb So what are the functional needs of
an artist today, and are they different from the past?
az Well, now it seems that most artists
have to be primarily concerned with how to stay alive and
functioning. I love the New York art community, and out
of any city that I've experienced this has been the most
supportive group, and the quality of the dialogue here is
great. But it is just so difficult to function here that
most artists have to make compromises within their work
in order to conform to the necessities of survival. I actually
think that I am better off than most artists here, but in
my perfect world there ought to be some place with the same
sort of dialogue and where existence isn't quite so difficult
and where more experimental artworks could actually happen.
The first step is defining what needs to happen within our
community and the second is taking the responsibility to
make that happen.
sb Do you think one can reengineer the
situation without moving? Do you think enough space can
be created so that adventurousness, experimentation, mistakes,
failures, promising experiments can all take place in the
communities that already exist, or is the only option to
create new communities?
az What I'm interested in is that each
person examines his own goals, talents and options, and
then based on these begins to invent new models or roles
to fulfill his or her needs. |