From the Archive: Andrea Zittel’s Tiny, Prophetic Joshua Tree Laboratory

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s December 2002 issue.

Andrea Zittel is a homebody. The artist, who finds herself globetrotting from Berlin to Brooklyn or from the California high desert to Stockholm, maintains two residences that double as laboratories for her artwork. A-Z East is in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and A-Z West is two hours outside of Los Angeles, in the town of Joshua Tree.

Perched in the bone-dry Mojave Desert, Joshua Tree is not the most likely place in which you would expect an artist to explore the comforts of home, but then again, Zittel once lived on her own “A-Z Pocket Property,” a manmade desert island installed off the coast of Denmark, for a month. Her western outpost sits in the shadow of a mountain of boulders. The land is hot, harsh, and majestic, with a view out to the horizon: Zittel owns 20 acres of it and for the last two years, the tiny house she’s built here has been both a repository and testing ground for her work.

Zittel’s most recent experiment in mobile living, her “A-Z Homestead Unit” (2001), brings together the westward-ho spirit of the frontier with modern design. The design draws on the history of Zittel’s own house, a homesteader’s cabin that references the shacklike dwellings built on five-acre parcels by settlers in the 1940s and ’50s. The 63-square-foot Homestead Unit is, like the buildings it references, the absolute minimum required for shelter. Temporary, portable, and made out of aluminum-framed fiberglass panels, it can be assembled by two people in a short time and doesn’t require building permits. 

Zittel hopes to make Joshua Tree a destination for the Los Angeles art crowd. “The way that the art system works right now is that artists get exported. We travel around and redo installations different places,” she explains. “But what if an artist were to choose the context that was right for their work and do the work there? Then everybody else would be mobile.” This past summer, Zittel began collaborating with Regen Projects in Los Angeles to bring gallery-goers out to the desert in the fall. The A-Z West kitchen and the workstation in the living room are artworks that were first conceived for the house and then sent out into the galleries as prototypes. Now they’ve come home to roost.

That kitchen, otherwise known as “A-Z Food Prep Station” (2001), is more a plywood sculpture questioning the emblematic domestic kitchen than a functioning commissary. There is no oven, stove, or Joy of Cooking. “I never use that stuff anyway,” Zittel says in defense. “I wanted to make it for how I live. I never really cook. In New York, I always eat takeout. I have to cook a little bit more here because [Crossroads, the local coffee shop,] closes early on weeknights.” On those evenings, veggie burgers are prepared on a small grill built into the tabletop. The table’s surface is carved into a landscape with two kidney-shaped hollows, which serve as dinner plates, provided things don’t get too messy.

Under the guise of A-Z Enterprises, Zittel’s own life is inspiration for many of her projects. From clothing to furniture to entire rooms, she is constantly questioning and reinventing her domestic space. Each project is a wry commentary on the slogan “Better Living Through Design.” She finds liberty in what most people would consider restrictions. “Everything that I’ve made has been unique to my own unique needs, but then I put it out in the public like a mass-producible object. I do that knowingly,” she says. “I choose my own limitations, and that’s a form of freedom.”

A-Z West is located just off Highway 62. Looking out over the frontier at the expanse of yucca trees, it is evident that the vastness of the place offers Zittel both the physical and mental freedom to experiment. “One of the nice things about being here is that no one really knows anything about the contemporary art world,” she says, in response to the seeming isolation. “I’m just another desert kook.”

Zittel’s autonomy works only in conjunction with her eastern alter ego. “I think that if I were to stay here for more than two months at a time, my brain would start to atrophy,” she jokes. “I really need the intellectual stimulation.” A-Z East provides just that rigor. The three-story building in Brooklyn is an artwork in itself, and has served as the offices of A-Z Enterprises since 1994, meticulously tracking the business end of the artist’s life. This analytic precision plays out in the design of the house—in the A-Z East bathroom, of all places. Zittel has organized her toiletries into categorical cabinets that read “subtraction,” “addition,” “tools and implements,” and “correction.” Each references a part of the ablution process.