Artist talk: Andrea Zittel

The artist talks about her work and how she uses her home and studio A–Z West in Joshua Tree, California to explore ideas about what humans need for survival.

Since the early 1990s, I have used the arena of my day to day life to develop and test prototypes for living structures and situations. By using myself as a guinea pig I often use my own experiences to try to construct an understanding of the world at large. The experiments have at times been extreme – such as wearing a uniform for months on end, exploring limitations of living space, living without measured time. However one of the most important goals of this work is to illuminate how we attribute significance to chosen structures or ways of life, and how arbitrary any choice of structure can be. I do not mean to deny the personal significance of these decisions, instead, I use my work in order to try to comprehend values such as “freedom,” “security,” “authorship,” and “expertise.” I am interested in how qualities, which we feel are totally concrete and rational, are often subjective, arbitrary or invented.

/Andrea Zittel