Andrea Zittel

What’s not to like about Andrea Zittel? That’s a tricky and loaded question that suggests she’s the full package, and if nationality and gender were added to the mix, she would be the full package American girl/artist. You know what I’m talking about? With Andrea Zittel you have to start with independence and positive attitude, something she’s got lots of, and with that human touch, as Bruce Springsteen or Patti Smith might say.

Zittel has been getting a lot of press lately, based on her mid-career survey exhibition “Andrea Zittel: Critical Space.” The exhibition is jointly organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, and co-curated by Paola Morsiani and Trevor Smith, respectively. It premiered in Houston, and opened in New York in late January 2006. The travel itinerary includes the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Vancouver Art Gallery in the summer of 2007.

Andrea Zittel was among a number of artists in the early ’90s who broke with the old adage that artists should maintain a signature style, be identified with a particular “ism,” or align themselves to a reigning theoretical position. These artists, being neither modernist nor postmodernist in the eyes of the critical public, created a vacuum in the label department, which Dan Cameron judiciously resolved by calling them “postmovement,” a term that aptly collectivized their idiosyncratic practices. Among their common identifying characteristics was/ is a heterogeneous approach to style and production, a cross-disciplinary practice and, for some, a desire to conceptually and physically site their work outside conventional arenas of art and the art marketplace. Zittel, in her relatively short career, has occupied all this malleable terrain in a conceptual art practice heavily influenced by ideas surrounding design, identity and lifestyle. Call hers a DIY social sculpture without the gothic mysticism of Joseph Beuys. The implied association is not made flippantly, for, although the specifics are quite different, the young artist who divides her time between NYC (“A-Z East”) and Joshua Tree, CA (“A-Z West”) has crossed many paths previously tread by the influential German and, for that matter, his American counterpart Andy Warhol.

After getting her MFA at Rhode Island School of Design in 1990, Andrea Zittel moved to New York and worked at the Pat Hearn Gallery. As she’s admitted, the complications of not having much money and having to look good at work forced her to rethink her own relationship to the prevailing cultural and social codes of fashion. The result was a decision to design her own garments, starting with one for each season, and collectively called the “A-Z Personal Uniform.” She realized that if she had some structure upon which to base decisions, it didn’t matter what she wore, or what fashion rules she followed, she could make it work. So she became her own designer and with that came a rationale that “provided a builtin equal status” with those who traditionally write the fashionculture codes. In 1991 the “A-Z” label was born, which was later expanded to the “A-Z Administrative Services” label to unify her entire art production. Necessity was the mother of the invention of the “A-Z Personal Uniform,” which is now an ongoing “line” numbering some 45 unique designs in various fabrics. The “Uniforms” series includes subsets such as the A-Z Fiber Form Uniform, A-Z Raugh Uniform (pronounced “raw”), A-Z Personal Panel Uniform and others, which are amply illustrated and discussed in the show’s excellent catalogue publication.

Although the “Critical Space” installation at the New Museum’s temporary quarters at the Chelsea Museum felt crowded and disoriented, it did so in a challenging way. The non-linear, non-chronological layout ultimately raised the level of audience engagement, especially in light of the many label and information panels accompanying the show. There was a lot to digest in an installation that more closely resembled a trade fair, but for the art consumer who went beyond casually browsing the showroom floor, the rewards were many. Her sprawling mid-career survey reveals the complexity, concentration and consistency of her practice, yet there’s no doubt the artist’s work shows better and has greater conceptual impact when a particular project or series is more selfcontained and specifically sited.

The A-Z Cellular Compartment Units, 2001, were immediately to the right upon entering the gallery, and if you continued in that direction, you encountered the_ A-Z Raugh Furniture_, 1998, followed by the A-Z Escape Vehicles, 1996. Imagine a 100-cubic-foot RV without wheels, customized in the manner of your ideal fantasy retreat, and you have a stationary escape vehicle, or “refuge from public interaction,” as the artist describes it. For example, Andrea Rosen’s personally customized “Escape Vehicle” is upholstered in plush button-and-tuck velvet, resembling at once an up-market coffin and an 18th-century French boudoir. The idea of refuge for the mind, body and soul is what the “Escape Vehicles” are fundamentally about. The A-Z Yard Yachts and the_ A-Z Travel Trailer Units_ further the metaphor of independence and self-sufficiency. As does the A-Z Timeless Chamber, a project that examines the “concept of freedom or liberation” and the “irony of how many of our ultimate leisure experiences associated with freedom are actually created by establishing a set of limitations.”

The urge to get away affects some more frequently than others, and, while not discrediting the recent discourse on global transience, Americans, bar none, are still the wanderlust avant-garde. Andrea Zittel’s ability to articulate her personal desire for freedom within a greater social structure and identity locates her in a line of artistic libertarians from Walt Whitman to Lawrence Wiener. She’s no less subversive for having her heart and mind in the right place, and it’s that brand of down-home criticality that makes her work so poignant, thought-provoking, and so American. ■

“Andrea Zittel: Critical Space” was exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York from January 26 to May 27, 2006.

Gary Pearson is an artist and Associate Professor in the Department of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna, British Columbia.