LA Weekly

Walking into Andrea Zittel’s new show “Critical Space” at MOCA/Geffen, a midcareer survey that first showed last winter at the New Museum in Chelsea, one runs head-on into Homestead Unit #1, a stealth, desert shack framed from light steel that evokes midcentury austerity gone off the grid. The basic design is inspired by classic homestead cabins, and its quaint dimensions are intended to avoid the permitting requirements of San Bernardino County, where, to this day, many such structures can still be found in the desert around Joshua Tree, close to where the artist’s “A-Z West” compound stands on the eastern edge of town. Since her arrival there in the fall of 1999, Zittel’s desert digs have been a magnet for culturistas from around the globe who come for the “High Desert Test Sites,” an annual show that has featured established artists like Raymond Pettibon and Jack Pierson as well as notable up-and-comers such as Eli Sudbeck (a.k.a. Assume Vivid Astro Focus), Jedidiah Caesar and Mungo Thomson.

Homestead Unit #1, with its angled, corrugated-steel roof, birch-panel walls, built-in benches, shelves and bed, is an artist’s vision realized in architectural terms: The unit serves as effectively as a sculptural work as it does as an actual residence and draws on a theme that runs throughout the obsessively reconsidered, experimental version of modern life featured in “Critical Space” — the psychological and physical paring down of living concerns.


Born and raised in Escondido, Zittel completed her formal training at the left-of-center Rhode Island School of Design and, like many artists who came up in the early ’90s, landed in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Setting up shop in that Ellis Island–like arts incubator, Zittel, by 1993, was enjoying solo shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles and, of course, New York. Her fast ascent provided the artist with little time to reflect.

Until maybe now, that is.

“I’ve always kind of laughed at my own uptightness, and looking back now at the early work, that’s just something that’s so present for me,” she laughs. “I mean, almost to the point of feeling like some of the work suffers from a complete absence of my own hand. But growing up in the ’80s and looking at artists like Jeff Koons or like Ashley Bickerton’s work, which had this very clean, well-made, traditionally considered masculine artistic authority about it, I was always drawn to that kind of superclean aesthetic and thought it might be interesting for a young woman to try producing works like that.”

We’re standing in her studio in Highland Park, and it’s not long before her MOCA show goes up. Zittel is contemplating a brightly colored panel earmarked for one of the walls.

“You know, when I got out of school in the early ’90s, that was probably the height of institutional criticism, and I was making these pieces with this kind of retro-’80s feel to them,” she continues, “but really almost as a way of rebelling from that. Now, though, as I get older and more brain cells die, I get less uptight.”

And it’s true, uptight isn’t the vibe Zittel gives off, even as she brushes aside her streaked-brown hair, clicks her mouse and frets over the 141 e-mails she has yet to open. Maybe it’s the self-professed “Southern Cal mall girl” twang that all her East Coast years failed to erase, or maybe it’s just the undeniable truth about her, but with Zittel, one feels like the defenses are quickly relaxed. She’s frank about pretty much everything, including herself — not afraid to point out her own foibles and quick to admit she’s searching for answers on all fronts at all times.

That being said, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t be sucking a little wind juggling a formidable international career, a relationship, a 3-year-old son, constantly in-flux residence/living experiments located in Brooklyn, Joshua Tree and Los Angeles, not to mention the deadline bearing down on a show surveying the last 15 years of her career — or, at least, the pieces the art handlers could manage to get through the front door.

“With these kinds of things, there’s the ideal show, and then there’s the show that’s possible,” she says, having dropped her paintbrush and moved to the other workroom, where she is now cutting triangles of cloth that will eventually end up adorning her opening-night outfit. “We made a list and then narrowed it down. Of course, there were some larger, outdoor pieces that couldn’t come. And then there was [L.A. collector] Dean Valentine’s Escape Vehicle, which the art movers couldn’t guarantee they could get out of the house without damaging. So, you know, you kinda get what you can, then do the best to try and make it work as a whole.”

The worst part about the unwieldy logistics of her bigger pieces is that the show can’t fully accommodate the collaborative nature of her work.

“A big part of the idea, and a big part of my work that’s very important to me, is that people would personalize them, so that each one had a whole life once they physically left my studio,” she says. “For me, with the Living Units and Escape Vehicles, by far the most interesting thing about them is what people do with them once they get them and what that reveals about them and what they value . . . what someone does when they can do anything.”

Hanging out with Zittel, one gets a sense of the unique space she inhabits both as a person and as an artist. She is at once engaged almost relentlessly in an individual pursuit of alternatives to the commonplace, and at the same time extremely generous and thirsting for the back-and-forth more traditionally associated, for lack of a better term, with a collective-oriented artist. After all, it’s the problems presented by everyday living, lifestyle, and modern life in general that are the essence of Zittel’s work.