Relational Art: Andrea Zittel

One artist who I found interesting was Andrea Zittel. In class today we discussed how artists do not have a distinctive style, rather their work seems to blend together. Nicolas Bourriaud feels that we are living in a Relational Art world today. Artists are not working with the mindset of producing one piece of art. Rather, they are interested in utilizing a different space and connecting with society. Artists are blending with the world and not working independently which is causing artists to not develop a distinctive style like years ago when one could notice a Van Gogh or other famous artist work just by looking at it. Relational Art is defined as a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole human relations and their social context, rather than an independent private space. Nicolas Bourriaud feels that those of us who are ongoing and more creative are really creating things for the twenty-first century art.

One example of a Relational Artist is Andrea Zittel. Zittel was born in 1965 and can be best described as a sculptor and installation artist. Her art dealt with many issues such as her past as a child, special connectedness, making a comment on society and human values. She feels that her art is affected by her growing up in South California, a place that is so normal compared to her new apartment in Brooklyn, New York. In the early 1990’s she began making art in response to her own surroundings and daily routines. She created her first “Living Unit” which was an experimental structure that intended to reduce everything necessary for living into a simple, compact system; as a means of facilitating basic activities in her 200 square foot Brooklyn apartment. This Living Unit, included the basics and when she completed it she was depressed and desponded. She had a revelation that no one really wants perfection, which I can relate to. It is important to have something to aspire and try to obtain but once you obtain this goal, what else do you have to work for?

Influenced by modernist design and architecture from early twentieth century, Zittel’s one-woman mock organization, “A–Z Administrative Services,” develops furniture, homes, and vehicles for contemporary consumers with a similar simplicity and attention to order. She commented that all of her work traces back to what she dealt with as a child and most of her work is about being alone. She used this Living Unit in a sense to isolate herself from the outside world which what her work is mostly about. Zittel also created a 44-ton floating concrete island anchored off the coast of Denmark. She lived on the “fantasy island” for one month as an experiment that allowed her to escape and isolated her from the rest of the world. Zittel moved to a 25-acre dessert in the California desert to isolate herself once again. Her goal was to explore how perceptions of freedom have been readapted for contemporary living. It was her theory that personal liberation "is now achieved through individual attempts to slip between the cracks". Andrea Zittel now lives in both New York and California constantly altering and examining aspects of life that are taken for granted and responding to day to day events and her surroundings.