CK: Your work uses that line
between escape, as a voluntary removal from society, and exile, as a
removal that terminates communal participation.
Pocket Property, a 44-ton floating island off the coast of Denmark
commissioned by the Danish government, fused an extreme escape with an
exile.
AZ: With
Pocket Property, I was thinking about suburbia. There's always a
tropical yard and an Alpine yard. You want a house with a big lawn and you
have this illusion that you don't have neighbors, but you do. We crave our
own isolated kingdom.
CK: Escape offers pleasure. Exile is
quite the opposite. Are your Units prototypes for an ideal city
that's neither urban nor suburban?
AZ: They're markers or
indicators of a condition. I wonder what would happen if we lived in Van
Capsules and traveled everywhere; if you wanted to live with somebody you
could dock together. That's a viable extension of the Unit idea,
but I'm not sure that would be healthy, either.
Andrea Zittel: A-Z Homestead Units #2, 2001,
Deutsche Bank Collection, © Andrea Zittel
CK: The edge between function, restraint, and
pleasure is part of your work, especially as it relates to social order.
Is restraint an urban or an anti-urban trait?
AZ: It's a
capitalist trait, which makes it urban. When you're working within a large
population, you need parameters for everything to function. In an
anti-urban environment, you don't need everyone to clock-work. There's
room for deviation.
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CK: Social order is a
self-policing mechanism. That also applies to your original
breeding units, when you lived in 200 square feet with 200 or so
chickens and other animals in the early 90s.
AZ: The rules
fall apart all the time as much as they work.
Andrea Zittel: A-Z Breeding Unit for Averaging Eight Breeds, 1993,
Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery New York, © Andrea Zittel, Photo:
Paula Goldman
CK:
In what way does the choreography between movement and settlement provide
the organizing architecture for your work in all its forms?
AZ:
I feel pulled through two dynamics. One is freedom and movement, the other is
security and comfort. There's a tension where one wins out, but sometimes
it's the other that wins for a while, then the other takes over out of
necessity. One goes too far being mobile or exposed for too long, and then
you react by getting a house in the desert.
CK: Even Jack
Kerouac might have settled down eventually.
AZ: I imagine
one of these values is the correct one, I just can't figure out which one.
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