Abstract
Andrea Zittel’s multi-disciplinary art practice has consistently revolved around designing and building prototypes answering to her longstanding fascination with the social construction of human needs and personal liberties. Her aesthetic and functional investigations have resulted in the production and exhibition of portable homesteads, campers, clothing, modular home furniture, human waste disposal units, carpets, weavings, animal breeding units, paintings on paper and wooden panels and drawings. Zittel has established an ecologically sensitive and technologically innovative site responsive place to live and work. Like the actions of the back-to-the-land communards of the 1970s, she has chosen to inhabit the margins, in this instance, the area where the garden (high-desert wilderness) sits at the edge of the machine (the extremely large-scale suburban sprawl of Los Angeles). Despite her apparent longing for the romantic solitude of the desert, Zittel has set-up her desert outpost as a busy social configuration built around her internationally acclaimed artistic practice. Her unique conflation of art and life pulls other artists out of their urban environments inviting them to collaborate and learn about her experimental ways of living. This paper will discuss Zittel’s unique new century artists’ commune and examine why it might be perceived as neo-countercultural, and a social contract particularly attuned to contemporary times. The paper will illuminate how for contemporary artists across the globe Zittel represents a new breed of pioneer and the opportunity to spend time at her A-Z West property is a lived utopian art and architectural experiment for the world-weary arts worker.
Highlights
In March of 2017, I accepted a full-time position at La Trobe University in Mildura, a remote regional town in far North-Western Victoria, Australia
After several years researching and writing about American artist Andrea Zittel not until now has her decision to establish a life and fulltime studio practice in high desert country, hours from a major city centre shared a correlation with my own situation
I propose an examination that highlights the points of intersection between A-Z West and the early back-tothe-land communards who established the first wave of North American communes
Summary
In March of 2017, I accepted a full-time position at La Trobe University in Mildura, a remote regional town in far North-Western Victoria, Australia. Zittel’s community has formed organically over a period of time in response to the demands of her artistic practice and has grown through the achievements of a single persona to develop into an economy requiring she employ a small workforce For this reason, I propose an examination that highlights the points of intersection between A-Z West and the early back-tothe-land communards who established the first wave of North American communes. At the core of this shared pioneering spirit is what Guattari deemed a desire for the reinvention of the ways we live, to allow for new modalities of group being In this way, I propose A-Z West might represent another layer within an expanded understanding of the existing models that have come to define communitarian practice, given the way her community has evolved from a highly individualistic project in its early life into the multi-faceted social experiment it is today. This paper will not summarise Zittel’s long list of artistic achievements, instead it offers a specific account of aspects of her artistic practice and self-proclaimed “somewhat experimental life”.2 The paper focuses on what Zittel’s art and life has come to represent amongst other contemporary artists living and working within the international community
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