Introduction

Introduction

Andrea Zittel was born in 1965. She has been described as a relational artist, American Sculpter, and installation artist.Her pieces intermingle real life and art and can be seen through her home and her clothing. In the early 1990s, Andrea Zittel began making art in response to her own surroundings and daily routines, creating functional objects that fulfilled the artist’s needs relating to shelter, food, furniture, and clothing. Blurring the lines between life and art, Zittel’s projects extend to her own home and wardrobe. While some of her modernist-inspired products were designed with the intention of making daily routines easy and efficient, others, such as the pod-like “Escape Vehicles,” appealed to fantasies of isolating oneself from the outside world. I choose her because of her wide variety of mediums and artwork. She has created everything from Mobile homes to clothing. Andrea lives and works in Joshua Tree, CA. Zittel teaches at Columbia University in New York and the University of Southern California. Andrea Zittel began thinking about sustainable, economical living well before there were dozens of magazines and publications dedicated to recycling the cardboard from toilet paper rolls and harvesting organic fruit.

In the early '90s, the California-born Zittel was a young artist living in typically small digs for a cash-strapped New Yorker -- 200 square feet. How could any financially challenged artist maximize such a small space, but also, Zittel thought, everything else that human beings need for daily living, including clothes, food and furniture? The American artist (who could also be described as an inventor, clothes and product designer, architect and life coach) has spent the past two decades developing solutions for an overcrowded, time-conscious, debilitating world. Since she set up her lifestyle solutions company-come-artistic identity, A-Z Administration in 1992, her custom-made designs have included everything from the A-Z Dishless Dining Table, doing away with washing up worries, to the A-Z Chamber Pot, relieving users of the trouble of plumbing. Building on the artist-as-designer model established by Bauhaus, Zittel takes an individualistic approach to utopian design. Rather than rolling out utilitarian products for the masses, she's gone about revolutionising lives with a view to independence and individualism. Her efforts to improve the world always begin with herself. For instance, her A-Z Personal Uniforms from 1992, an evolving clothes range largely consisting of pinafore dresses crafted in everything from crochet to wool-felt, were originally a response to the demands of looking presentable for a gallery job in New York's East Village, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. Zittel first established A-Z in a Brooklyn store, using a corporate identity to forge a non-conformist path through the 1990s. In 1999, she moved back to her native California to create A-Z West, her current HQ in the Mojave Desert, a wilderness punctuated by eccentric, ramshackle dwellings. The first project she realised here in 2001 was her Homestead Unit, an example of the various shelters and structures for which she is best known. This simple geometric construction of steel and birchwood seems ideal for the hippies, drop-outs and freewheelers who've congregated in the area. Intended to exist off-radar, it's too small to require planning permission and easily packed up to suit the traveller life. Similarly resourceful, her sleeping module, the 2003 Wagon Station, a futuristic curved pod of steel and MDF, collapses the safety of the family station wagon with the frontiers spirit.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/24/artist-andrea-zittel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Zittel

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/andrea-zittel

http://www.zittel.org