A room of her own

By Elizabeth Licata
Escape Vehicle
Andrea Zittel, A-Z Escape Vehicle Owned and Customized by Andrea Rosen, 1996. Steel, wood, carpet, plastic sink, glass, mirror, stovetop, and household objects
How ridiculous is it to attempt to completely control our surroundings, to create a separate world in which we live a life almost alien to the rest of humanity? Pretty ridiculous I’d say, but tell that to the four-year-old who sets up shop in the family vestibule with a cardboard box, a blanket, and a favorite toy. We’ve all done it; we’ve all created forts, tents, treehouses, and bunkers, to which we can escape and live better, secret lives.

Unlike the rest of us, Andrea Zittel has kept this childhood dream alive. Of course, there’s far more to her art than an incredibly elaborate set of constructions designed for escape from the real world (though two items in the show are entitled Escape Vehicles). Zittel has designed and constructed an alternative way of existence that includes all of life’s basic activities. Hungry? For your dining pleasure, Zittel presents the A-Z Food Group, twelve essential ingredients containing fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains, dried and ready to be reconstituted as stews, patties, or loaves. There are also dishless dining tables, and ingeniously compact prep units.

maintenance unit
A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit,
Model 003, 1992.
Tired? Zittel’s designs for sleep include Carpet Furniture, attractive geometrically patterned carpets in soothing colors, as well as A-Z Fled, which are thicker, pillow-like mats, equally simple but clearly more comfortable. The Carpet Furniture line also includes flat dining and conversation modules. There are also form-fitting Zittel dresses knitted from a single stand of rayon yarn or made of merino wool that can be pressed or pinned into shape.

But while simplicity and multi-functionality are at the heart of such items as the Carpet Furniture and A-Z Food Group, the escape vehicles have a zanier, more sybaritic tone. I was instantly drawn to the Escape Vehicle with bar and sound system, and could easily have climbed right in. The A-Z Deserted Islands are equally fun, made of molded white fiberglass and wood designed to float. They reminded me of sixties design, as did a few of the constructions in the exhibition. The idealized futuristic aesthetic of these objects is of a sci-fi variety, presenting a world that’s much cleaner and more compact than a real world inhabited by humans could ever be. Life should be simpler, it should be more efficient, we should get by with less. We can’t and never will, but that poignant realization does not lessen the impact of Zittel’s brilliantly inventive visions.

Zittel
Zittel at work
One of the most quixotic of Zittel’s projects is represented by a wall installation that takes up a side gallery. Free Running Ryththms and Patterns is a complex documentation of Zittel’s attempt to live for a week without paying attention to time. She slept, ate, worked, and conducted the business of life according to her internal impulses alone—or at least attempted to do so. Afterwards, she was able to total up how her hours were spent by watching a videotape of the week. The elegant work stretches around three walls, including color-coded drawings on wood panels that symbolize the activities, with video stills intermixed.

Andrea Zittel lives the life she has created in the A-Z projects. After viewing her
uniform
A-Z Uniform:
Spring-Summer 2004, (maternity), 2004.
Felted Icelandic Wool
show, I also checked her blog (azwagonstations.blogspot.com) where I learned that as of November 5, she was living at A-Z West, her cabin in the California desert, where she tests many of her designs. In the blog entries, she was reporting on some nearby Wagon Stations, small, curved living units based on the design of the covered wagon. These were in the process of being customized/used by some of her friends and associates. The blog contains homey little message like:

Carolyn: Your Station looks pretty good—I think the pillows just need a little dusting off and refluffing!

I took a good look at the wagon stations as photographed on the blog, and although they’re sharp, sleek constructions that blend into the desert more seamlessly than you would suppose, it would take more than fluffy pillows to get me into one. This does not in any way detract from the admirable nature of Zittel’s enterprise.

Very few believe any kind of utopia is possible on Earth, though many still pin their hopes on the afterlife. But it is always important to search, even if the search leads to occasional absurdities—perhaps especially if it does—for better ways to live in the here and now. Andrea Zittel’s explorations are among the most fascinating of these searches that I have ever seen.


Elizabeth Licata is editor of Buffalo Spree.


uniform


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