Why I love Andrea Zittel...

I have been following the career and work of super-hip installation and design artist Andrea Zittel for about 10 years or so ever since I saw her modified and re-designed travel trailer at MOCA while living in LA back in the 90s. At that time, I had no idea of how, in 2006, her work would still resonate for me.

Zittel is a cute chick and an artist's artist. She grew up in California. Her lifestyle is one of those that show those of us in the art/design world that it is still "cool" to be an artist. A pure artistic soul who investigates and works with life at all types of levels, Zittel embodies a modern, DYI spirit to living that would be the envy of every dweeb who reads ReadyMade magazine. She designs clothes, furniture, personal living spaces (units), food, drawings, prints, and other fun stuff including strange scientific breeding experiments, paper-making technology and other unencumbered research that the freedom of working outside the commercial world of design allows.

After getting her masters in art from Rhode Island School of Design in 1990, she moved to New York and was struck by how crappy NY looked compared to Cali. She gathered broken up shit and fixed/repaired/restored them. Through this process, her work started behaving more like design as opposed to art - although, in her case, how do you really distinguish between them? Her desire to create a relationship with her audience is probably universally acknowledged as the de facto reason one would be attracted to the business of design at the personal level.

Using a corporate identity known as A-Z Administrative Services, she does what any savvy artist or designer must do to overcome industrial hurdles of production and adopt a corporate "front" for the purpose of gathering information and resources and providing vendors with an easily identifiable "brand" in order to work withing the corporate structure. However, instead of using her ideas and motives to promote the corporate directive of brand awareness and brand identity, Zittel seems to easily deflect around that correspondence and connection by continually re-inventing the marketing keywords that could be associated with her work.

Andrea Zittel has a place in the California desert now called the HDTS which is a part-time studio and a site for other artists to work on site-specific works in the desolate land surrounding her pad. She has built a pretty cool place for really no budget and using only her creativity, produced a space where art and self-reliance come together in a kind of sexy, "film-noir-in-the-desert" kind of place where tan girls wearing straw cowboy hats drink beer and cook over open fire. The guys are probably all weird and "sensitive."

Zittel contends that, in today's art market, it is necessary "to find new ways to convey meaning and create experience."

She creates work that, in all honesty, is useful for some certain physical or psychological good. It really becomes her intent to create pieces that have a utilitarian potential. I don't see Andrea Zittel creating "plop" art in any way. Even her drawings could ultimately be used as t shirt or book cover designs.

Interestingly, some of her architectural projects incorporate, in Zittel's words, "a functionally perfect" situation. She designs a unit that allows a user the ability to live completely out of one simple steel and wood booth including cooking, eating, taking a shower, and going to the bathroom.

Ultimately, Andrea Zittel is interested in the notion of "living off the grid" as they say in terms of total liberation from authoritative systems. Personally, I really don't give a shit about becoming that extreme, but her work and interests allow me to see what this kind of neo-gypsy nomadic art babe would do in say, a terrorist attack or natural disaster response. What intrigues me, and what I am drawn to, is watching what a self-sufficient artist does for survival. Andrea Zittel is probably fairly successful financially. However, should things change, it is cool to know that she would actually continue to make art in the event of a post-apocalyptic event and look great doing it. Who couldn't fall in love with a person like that?