For the artist and native Californian Andrea Zittel, every aspect of her life is an opportunity for discovery and creation.
The artist, who has lived in Joshua Tree’s desert landscape east of Los Angeles for more than 15 years, has fully integrated her art practice with her daily life, incorporating design as a way to bridge conceptual experiments with practical and functional needs.
“Every space that I’ve lived in, I’ve turned into an art project,” Zittel says in an exclusive interview as part of Art21’s “Extended Play” series. She adds that everything in her home “has really evolved with my life.”
Zittel does, however, make a distinction between art and design, noting that “design has power, because it actually touches people in a more concrete way,” while, with art, “there’s more wiggle room and flexibility.”
Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Andrea Zittel: Art & Design.” © Art21, Inc. 2015.
In the video, Zittel discusses a series of cardboard boxes that influenced her (2010), modular structures that can become shelving units or discrete art objects, depending on what a person wants or needs.
Right now, at Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, a survey of new and old art and design objects by Zittel are on display in a show appropriately called “An Institute of Investigative Living.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
