Resembling
the artificial rocky environments often created at zoos,
two room-size foam sculptures carved to look like tiered
granite boulders and strewn with piles of reading material
comprise this installation. The walls are painted halfway
up with three orange and lime green, and a television sits
on a pile of yellowing newspapers in the corner. On it plays
Andrea Zittel's version of an instructional video, explaining
the concept of "raugh" (sounds like raw), and its ability
to "make something out of nothing" with its intrinsic qualities
of deterioration. The female voice-over sounds like a cross
between an aging club kid doing an infomercial and the over-emphatic
intonations of an after-school special, mixed with chainsaw
sound effects every time the word raugh is spoken. The viewer
is presented with various rules and examples: something
raugh "doesn't require an expert to make it", is "absolutely
comfortable", and is "less tame than natural."
While obviously a spoof on every good-living program that
tries to prescribe a certain lifestyle for a population
of people, one has little doubt that raugh really is in
some sense that aesthetic of the artist's life and that
there is strong commentary beneath her satire. Zittel's
boast, "I made this dress by sewing only one seam!" is accompanied
by the display of a bedsheet-like frock, which by sheer
contrast brings to mind the gross consumerism prevalent
in our readymade society. Likewise, her brazenness in telling
her audience how it should be done - even in mockery„recalls
the media's incessant prodding that we live our lives in
a diametrically converse manner, namely be spending money
on new things.
With its self-reference and decree-like tenets, this installation
brings to light how presumptuous and authoritative reigning
ideologies can be, even if they favor things that "absorb
dirt rather than reveal it." Although Zittel has one foot
in the realm of the absurd with her partly tongue-in-cheek
Raugh movement, her conceptual reasoning behind the exhibition
has a serious basis. She attributes her earlier interest
in Modernism to its specific code of aesthetic values, rather
than the acceptance any pre - established societal judgements.
With this train of thought as a starting point, she has
used her installation as a means to assign personal meaning
to a code of values while deconstructing the current pervasive
ones.
While most young artists who address society's values system
- whether to condemn it or absorb it - do so through the
inclusion of its symbols, Andrea Zittel has commented by
way of omission. Instead of appropriating society's icons,
she has established her own components to express her message.
One gets the feeling that the cluttered rock formations
are her answer to - or her dismissal of - any kind of seating
arrangement or other habitat enhancer that might be found
in a Pottery Barn catalog. Providing her audience with a
zoo-like environment, a place where it's easy to imagine
high school kids cutting class, she uses the installation
to address the issue of social acceptability versus personal
estimations. While it might not be the movement that the
video professes it to be, maybe Raugh is a movement, after
all.
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