Andrea Zittel #3

"A-Z West is an artwork located on over seventy acres in the California high desert next to Joshua Tree National Park. Since it’s inception A-Z West has functioned as an evolving testing grounds for living—a place in which spaces, objects, and acts of living all intertwine into a single ongoing investigation into what it means to exist and participate in our culture today. “How to live?” and “What gives life meaning?” are core issues in both Zittel’s personal life and artistic practice. Answering these questions has entailed exploring complex relationships between our need for freedom, security, autonomy, authority, and control—observing how structure and limitations often have the capacity to generate feelings of freedom beyond open-ended choices.

Works and projects at A-Z West include: Zittel’s home/testing grounds, the Wagon Station Encampment, Regenerating Field, shipping container compound, A-Z West studio and weaving studio, A-Z West satellite cabins, the Planar Pavilions, a ten-acre parcel for High Desert Test Sites projects, and several adjacent parcels slated for future projects."














Andrea Zittel's home.

"....
Her house looks amazing. She lives completely surrounded by her art and has designed everything herself – right down to the tiles in the kitchen, and the coat hooks on the walls (which are actually artworks titled “Vertical Accumulators”. It is beautiful and one of the most well-styled interiors I have ever seen. I don’t know where to look first, and her attention to detail blows my mind. Even the five pairs of old hiking boots in her bedroom are part of an amazing still life.

The colour palette has a lot of brown and ochre. Most of the walls are wood-panelled and one in her bedroom is papered with newspapers covered with a painting.

The interior looks very 1950s mixed with ethno but in a very chic way. Her house and the details look very much like her artwork. Everything is clean and tidy, nothing is lying around and everything seems to be arranged. There’s a bed on the terrace and the hot water bottle on the sheets implies that someone really spent the night outside.
...."


Shipping container compound.












Studio.

"....
A few signs direct you either to her studio, her guesthouses or to her home. It looks like she is used to visitors.

Her assistant, Tatiana, is expecting us at the studio. I can see three assistants working there through the glass walls. The studio is a huge workshop separated into three rooms. In the first room, there’s a computer and some desks. In the second, the three assistants are working on some plaster objects – her so-called ‘Aggregated Stacks’. It all looks very clean and organized. There are a lot of cleaned brushes and white porcelain petri dishes with lids for colour tests, each labelled properly with its respective colour. I am immediately inspired and would love to start creating something on my own.

Friendly but shy, Andrea welcomes us. She shows us around before having to go off and quickly measure some of her objects that are being picked up by a museum today.
...."
(bronnen: this is tomorrow, I Love You, The Joshua Tree House en A-Z)

> Andrea Zittel