All alone, creating a world

Andrea Zittel is a shy, private person whose art invites, even demands, an almost voyeuristic attention to her life. As a young artist in New York in the early ‘90s, she was surrounded by eccentrics with daring lifestyles, but the art they produced was often ordinary.

“I just realized, over and over, that I was more interested in people’s lives than I was in their work,” says the tall, rail-thin Zittel, 37, naming several now-forgotten artists whose lives still compel her attention. “It’s all of those weird human idiosyncrasies.”

Zittel has taken her own idiosyncrasies, and her angst over isolation and community, individualism and escape, and built a lively career in contemporary art. She lives her art to a nearly literal degree.

Her latest chapter is outside Joshua Tree -- a homesteader’s cabin from the 1930s remade into a kind of high-desert Case Study House, the post-World War II homes built for middle-class futuristic living. She’s surrounded it with metal plates, mounted on posts and filled with reconstituted paper she has pulped and dried in the sun. The refried paper, improbably, resembles travertine marble. Spilling in eerie geometric intervals down the desert floor outside the house, the drying racks look as if they were left by a benign alien visitor. And she’s just completed the latest phase of her Uniforms project, in which she makes her own clothing from felt and, in an exaggerated back-to-the-land gesture, wears a single “uniform” for six months at a time.

Zittel calls the whole setup a High Desert Test Site. There’s a lot of terminology to Zittel: The Joshua Tree house, which is down the street from one of the town’s many bail bonds shops, is called A-Z West, to distinguish it from her Brooklyn apartment-studio known as A-Z East. Even the initials have a hidden meaning: She broke up with a serious boyfriend, she says, because she couldn’t “A to Z,” or organize, this big, messy guy. In the late ‘90s, she made everything she lived in, from her kitchen to her couch; she called the project “Raugh,” which is pronounced “raw.” The 25 scorched acres Zittel lives on, and her clothes and desk and conflicted feelings, are her artwork. A new show at Regen Projects -- which includes felt dresses and metal panels of pulped paper -- illuminates some of it, as do the weekend open houses she’s holding in the desert in lieu of an art opening.

Although most desert art is about the beauty of nature, Zittel’s work is about the strangeness, and the possibilities, of culture. A utopian from the suburbs -- Le Corbusier with a Valley Girl accent -- she’s creating what the Swiss architect called a “machine for living” on the high desert. She’s like the lonely, dreamy kid who makes up an imaginary world. But this world is real.

Fear of growth

When Zittel was a child, the daughter of schoolteachers, her chaparral-lined street in Escondido was empty except for one other house. By high school, she was surrounded by tract housing, a supermarket and bulldozers. “Pretty weird,” she says, looking back. “Growing up in a community that’s growing so rapidly really instilled a fear of growth. You have no control over it at all. I think I wanted a place small enough that I could have some control over the way the entire community developed.”

Even early on, she was fascinated by isolation, and some of her best childhood memories involve being left alone, with food in the freezer, when her family went away for weeks at a time on a 31-foot houseboat. She describes her childhood as alienated, a situation made no better by four aimless, intellectually barren years at San Diego State -- one long frat party, she calls it, which she had no interest in attending.

Then one day a college field trip took her to MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary, for a show by Al Ruppersberg. “He had these photographs of people sitting on couches,” she says, her eyes widening as she remembers realizing that something so commonplace could be art. Bitten by the art bug, she headed after graduation to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, where she majored in sculpture.

Though it expanded her sense of possibility, art school also left her, upon graduation in 1990, completely dazed. “I went to New York not knowing what art was,” she says. Whatever it was, she wanted to stretch its boundaries.

Her first major project was breeding animals. “I was trying to design my own breed of chickens, after discovering that domestic breeds were invented over the last 100 years; I just wanted to show what constructions they were,” she says with a laugh. “I jokingly referred to it as the designer pet of the ‘90s -- like pot-bellied pigs in the ‘80s or miniature horses in the ‘70s.”

Her bantam chickens, a less spectacular batch than she’d hoped because of recessive genes, never caught on. But one of the breeding units she made, to give the animals some privacy in a Manhattan gallery, ended up in the collection of MOCA. “I gave another one to the bodega next door,” she says, “and they used it as a microwave stand.”

Her interest in living things, and the way their lives can be shaped -- through Darwinian or utopian principals -- fed into her later work with human environments. The breeding units became living units.

In the mid-’90s, she used a grant from the Danish government to construct and live on a 54-ton cement island in a Scandinavian sea. “It was like a prototype for a way somebody could live in the future,” she says. “Your land, your dwelling and your vehicle all in one unit.”

During the two years of construction, she looked forward to the isolation of island living. “And then what happened was that every Danish guy who has access to a boat bought a six-pack and circled the island -- drank their beer and waved. I felt like a circus freak.” Finally, the structure sprang a leak that acted like a blowhole, spurting cold water high into the air.

Zittel also spent two yearlong stints on fellowship in Berlin, where she was fired by the ideas of European Modernists such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, and the way they worked themselves out in suburban California culture.

“Like Price Club and tract housing,” Zittel says. “Bauhaus was about quality goods available for all at an affordable price. Well, Price Club’s kind of like that.” She began to build travel trailers as a statement about the suburbanization of the Bauhaus vision, and then two years ago, she rented out her Brooklyn apartment and moved to the desert edge of her suburban past, a place, she says, where she could get away from it all.

Furniture as art

When Zittel walks through A-Z West, she’s one part affectless homeowner -- complete with a dog named Poppy -- and one part dead-serious art theorist. She’s proud of her place, but each time she points out a desk, the kitchen, it launches her into another whimsical idea. Much of her furniture “cycles through,” as she puts it, starting as a concept, becoming a piece she lives with, and ending up in a gallery or museum; this pays her bills and lets her make more work. Walking outside through the kitchen, she pets Poppy and meanders through a collision of boulders, yucca plants, creosote bushes and hard desert floor parched by an 18-month drought.

She chose Joshua Tree, not far from the home of longtime desert assemblage artist Noah Purifoy, in part because “I’m sort of inspired by his whole project,” she says of his open-air studio-cum-gallery nearby. “He said no museum would collect his work, so he made his own museum.”

Here, in her frontyard, the rectangles of paper stare sunward. “No one would understand how much, like, drama went into making these,” she says with a laugh as she describes the combinations of cement, water and wheat paste she had to go through to make the panels look right.

Surveying the rows, she riffs on her vision of farming for art: “Mulching my garbage every day, packing it in these huge trays; it would take about six weeks to dry and then I could just read lots of books and harvest it afterward.”

“I think of Andrea as the quintessential Californian,” says New York artist Allan McCollum, who was born in L.A. “Andrea isn’t trying to deconstruct Hollywood or Disneyland, she’s actually capturing some of the truly wonderful things about California -- the honest, historical optimism, the utopianism and the progressiveness of the state. Andrea embraces this California spirit so arduously, even as she laughs at it and caricatures its excesses.”

Now she’s putting the ideas of the European avant-garde through their paces at her desert retreat, inviting the world to peek in. She’s becoming famous, oddly, for being private. But her open houses, the last of which is this weekend, are pretty conventional. “Just everybody comes in,” she laughs, “and hangs out, and we drink beer.”