Unit Structures

Andrea Zittel

Andrea Zittel takes her work seriously. Have galleries come to resemble playpens, with the artist as unruly child? Zittel emulates a product showroom—with herself its most important product. She could teach even her elite Chelsea dealer a thing or two about art's commercial potential. Probably she has.

For fifteen years, Zittel has fashioned art out of experiments in gentrification, chicken breeding, mobile homes, drab clothing, interchangeable carpet patterns, and the alleged "A-Z Administrative Services" behind it all. Does that make her accepting or critical, humorless or bitingly sardonic, painfully sincere or bracingly self-aware? Shall I call work like this conceptual or material, impersonal or self-involved, idealistic or a sell-out? Probably all of the above, which is why it helps to see so much at once.

This spring two museums offer her products an extended showroom. The New Museum has a full career survey, looking rather like a trailer park by the Hudson. The Whitney's midtown branch—itself named for a corporation—sticks to her latest variations on a theme, customized Wagon Stations for the California desert. The first displays a career of cool, methodical objects, the second a collection of intriguingly battered, varied designs, dragging in spare tires and desert sand. I may still feel half quizzical, half bored when I peer into those flimsy constructions. Still, art that points in so many directions at once definitely has something going for it.

People and products

New Yorkers know about small living spaces. When an artist moves into a fringe neighborhood, remodels a storefront, and tries to maximize efficiency, I understand. Exit Art even squeezes more than a hundred studio visits into one room. had not yet caught on in 1990, when Zittel graduated Rhode Island School of Design and began scavenging the streets for materials. Andrea Rosen's gallery had not left Soho for the wilderness of Chelsea either when the artist first showed there in 1993.

Zittel had converted not just a Brooklyn loft, she announced, but the A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit. She was exploring repetitive structures in other ways, too, including supposed Breeding Units for those chickens and drawings for imagined cloning efforts. I, for one, do not blame her for the outbreak of avian flu.

She had adopted a corporate identity as well, starting with A-Z Administrative Services in 1991. She called her brief, early efforts Repair Work. One looks like a kitchen appliance that has begun to sprout extra plumbing. The idea of assemblage as repair looks back to Robert Rauschenberg, who says that he "rescued" the components of his combines. It looks ahead to Mark Dion's Rescue Archaeology as well. However, her vocabulary deliberately confuses human caring and the machine shop.

With the shift from chickens and scrap metal comes other changes, too. Her subject now becomes human beings—specifically, how they live and work. Even more, she makes it difficult to sustain a division between life and work, pleasure and necessity, person and product. When she left for Joshua Tree, California, in 2000, she did not speak of moving. According to her Web site, "More attention is now being focused on our new project."

Most artists do their work first and foremost for themselves. In this market, they have to. Zittel's product line, too, finds her best customer in herself. She started making dresses that she could wear for six months at a time, at work or play. I hesitate to think how she did the wash. From their almost sexless design, she branched out to fabric that can shift at will from carpeting to wall covering.

Mostly, however, she produces compact, free-standing living units. The most ambitious squeeze several rooms, on two or three levels, into a space smaller than most New York kitchens. Others unfold from a trunk or trailer into barely space for a bed, in what the Whitney aptly calls "Small Liberties." Again she uses them herself. Her boyfriend had to put up with the same meal for months at a time, all that would fit on a camp stove.

Alphabet city

"A-Z" sounds corporate enough, but from A to Z encompasses everything. Work like this has the same ambition. It exists as a kind of Museum of Modern Art in miniature—at once art, design, architecture, and even new media: a video at each exhibition space follows Zittel's adventures in California. They serve as virtual wall labels, product catalog, travelogue, and personal history.

The work's ambition also includes its multiplicity of functions. To say that it includes everything but the kitchen sink does it a disservice. Besides the Homestead Units, Living Units, and other suspiciously similar titles, she has made Escape Vehicles for weary humans in need of "body processing." They offer just enough room for a hot tub, a tiny rock garden, and maybe a shelf for alcohol. At times I should say multiple lack of functions: white plastic shapes, mimicking recreational paddleboats but going nowhere at all, floated in Central Park in 1997 as Deserted Islands.

She invites buyers to "customize" the prefabricated entities. One Wagon Station has a painted exterior, patterned after spiders. Others come outfitted for rock climbing, studying the desert environment, documenting the waste brought on by military test sites, or making art. Work tailored to a client's needs suggests another kind of ambition, too, toward community. One can imagine the Whitney's eleven units as not an installation but a village. Artistically, customization links to the ideal of art as collaboration.

Even aside from their collective presence, a single unit pretends to a total environment in itself. Each replicates and displaces a natural or unnatural habitat. One of her projects combines a kitchen sink and toilet—a parable of life as garbage in, garbage out. The hinged sides of her cramped quarters facilitate hauling things into place, but they also emphasize the experience of crawling in and becoming one's own world. Think of the isolation in the very title Deserted Islands or indeed Zittel's preferred locations. Did she abandon Williamsburg because suddenly it contained more yuppies than the California desert?

Finally, the Zittel's ambition toward the total work of art includes her role. Her attention falls not just on human beings and habitats in general. Rather, she makes her art an extension of her life. In fact, she makes her life an ongoing work of art. "A-Z" of course matches her initials. I keep finding it difficult as a writer to know when to leave a phrase of hers alone like a common noun, when to put it in quotes as a quirky expression all her own, and when to italicize it as the title of art.

Like the Rauschenberg combines, her gambit has roots in performance art. It resembles, too, Rirkrit Tiravanija's projects of cooking for visitors or reconstructing his home in a gallery, also in the 1990s. However, Zittel need not actually perform, at least in public. William Butler Yeats once wrote that an artist must choose perfection of the life or of the work. Zittel's art is embracing the imperfection of her life and her life the imperfection of art.

Raugh and ready

Zittel's art comes with its share of paradoxes. It aims to be simple, even downright simplistic, but all-embracing. It effaces the artist in the name of a corporate entity and its clients, but it becomes the story of her life. In fact, she keeps disappearing before one's eyes. The videos may look like confessions, but one can wait a long time hoping to catch a glimpse of her. She appears on her Web site—although not as prominently as her dog, Poppy—but her face remains just as elusive.

Perhaps the paradoxes arise naturally from her ambition. As philosophers since Hegel have said, the more one tries to include in one's explanation of the world, the more the excluded comes back to haunt one. The paradoxes also come down to a moment in time, with art these days still trying to make sense of its relationship to modernity or postmodernity. Zittel's self-contained environments recall any number of utopian movements in Modernism. Her modular units rely on the familiar grid of geometric abstraction since Piet Mondrian. To watch her video at the New Museum, one sits on a couch of foam rubber—the same material she uses for bedding—and I found it not uncomfortable, but not exactly luxuriant either.

Postmodernists have often criticized utopias even as, like Zaha Hadid, they have proposed new ones. They have asked to save the fabric of city streets from the perfection of glass towers. However, anyone will recognize America's love-hate relationship with consumer goods. One can see Zittel's units as enjoying or satirizing a world of trailer parks, exurbia, "little boxes," and prefabricated luxury. No wonder her exhibitions can seem so empty. One can see her as reveling in or savaging the commercialization of art itself, like a subtle improvement on beat-up hulks by Rob Fischer at the Whitney at Altria just weeks before.

Conversely, her units reflect a nostalgia for the hand-made, just as her move west evokes America's nostalgia for untouched spaces. Wagon Stations pun on station wagons, but also on covered wagons. She does not make her products herself, but she insists that she could. She calls the carpets and dresses "raugh" materials, a word that literally looks rough and sounds raw. She carves that foam sofa in the shape of a desert rock formation.

The paradoxical combination of corporate and timeworn—of rough and ready-made—has its precedents, too. Robert Smithson used entropy to describe faceless skyscrapers, natural decay, and his own rock piles within a gallery. Zittel echoes him when she designs her breeding experiments to produce not the tallest or fattest, but the average. She appeals to entropy, too, in an aphorism by the entrance to her retrospective. Use dull, gray, she advises, not "self-cleaning" surfaces, because then one hardly needs to clean.

Her aphorisms keep returning to another idea as well: she speaks of attaining freedom by relinquishing control. It could pass for surrender to 1984 or the corporate environment. Equally, it could pass for Zen. Perhaps one could repeat it in her hot tub. The uncertainty may explain why I get tired of peering through her tiny portholes—and why I keep imagining life inside.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Andrea Zittel: Critical Space" ran at the New Museum of Contemporary Art through May 27, 2006, and her "Wagon Stations" at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria through May 7.