"When I first started doing furniture or what later
became the living units, I didn't really consider it part
of my artwork. It was simply a solution for these circumstances
that I had to live in."
"...There's a continual theme in my life and in my
work. It's about taking something that seems like it's one
way and flipping it over so it becomes the other."
"I grew up in very suburban Southern California. I
think my parents had this fantasy about building a country
home in the middle of nowhere. "
I think that my work's always
been really influenced by the places that I've lived in. In
fact, if you look at every body of work, you can trace it
back to particular circumstances that I've had to deal with.
For instance, I moved to New York in 1990, and the first place
I lived in was this really tiny storefront in Brooklyn. It
was, what? 200 square feet? So it had 100 square feet in the
front, a 10 foot by 10 foot room that I decided was my public
space. And a 10 foot by 10 foot room in the back that was
my personal space. And at that time I was doing really different
work. I was working with animals and breeding them. But part
of that was making these structures, these breeding units
for them, that they would live in. I had sort of developed
a particular aesthetic
and technology for building these with these welded steel
structures, and then these wooden inserts that were pretty
flexible. So, for instance, a breeding unit not only would
influence the way that the animal would develop, but also
it would have everything built into it that the animal would
need for living.
So,after doing this work and living in this tiny space for
a while, I think that it started to make perfect sense to
try to create structures like that for myself to live in.
When I first started doing furniture or what later became
the living units, I didn't really consider it part of my artwork.
It was simply a solution for these circumstances that I had
to live in. At almost exactly the same time, I started thinking
a lot about moderndesign,
which is something that people always associate with my work.
I think it's funny because, in reality, I'm very drawn to
antiques and older things. I think that I like things that
have colors and are decorative. I could never really understand
modern houses in my neighborhood when I was growing up. I
come from like a very lower middle class background where
that seemed just completely inaccessible to me.
But what became really interesting about that was modern design.
For instance, before this period in art history or design
history, value or what they represented to people were completely
determined by how expensive the materials were that went into
it, how much handcraft. These were these very physical, material
codes. And what happened then was mass production, and the
Industrial Revolution happened, and all of a sudden it seemed
like everyone would have the same goods. What really appealed
to me about it was that it was before things, like white walls,
functionalism, things that could be mass produced, all these
things represented poverty. And all of a sudden,they were
reinterpreted. It was like an ideological
code that said: all these things that meant you were poor,
all of a sudden became the moral elite. And I decided that
just by the nature of my existence, I didn't have that many
things. I had to move a lot. I couldn't afford these sort
of really like high-end materials.
ART:21:
What's interesting is that your
work seems to embrace that sort of austerity, of not having
a lot of things or expensive materials.
ZITTEL:
Well, there's a continual theme
in my life and in my work. It's about taking something that
seems like it's one way and flipping it over so it becomes
the other. So I like to take things that are maybe limitations
in my life and try to somehow recontextualize
them, glamorize them, make them more interesting, and vice
versa. So I took my simple living situation and used this
certain aesthetic
code of modern design, and made it, in my mind, very glamorous.
Since I couldn't afford to live like everyone else, I wanted
everyone else to wish that they could live like I did. Like
I said in the beginning, I didn't really consider that to
be my artwork. I had something else that I was doing as my
work. But what happened is so many issues kept coming up and
I felt like these were ideas that were complex and evolving.
They were things that I felt like other people could identify
with. I was using myself as a guinea pig, using myself to
understand society at large. So it became far more interesting
for me to continue to follow that direction and to research
that as my artwork.
ART:21:
Was there a certain moment that
marked this turn for you?
ZITTEL:
Well, I think that the most
telling moment came when I started to do studio
visits. People would come over to my studio and we would sit
in this living unit and discuss the work. I would say that
three-quarters of the conversation will be based on this structure
that we were sitting in. It was really interesting that when
people would come over, they would end up reflecting on their
own desires and philosophies about the way that the world
worked, and the way that they wanted their environments to
be, and how environments would influence them as well as how
they would influence their environments.
ART:21:
How big was the first "Living
Unit?" How was it put together?
ZITTEL:
It was actually a welded steel
framework. I think the whole structure was about eight feet
long, and about five feet wide, and seven feet high. We actually
welded this structure that almost looked like a Mondrian,
this sort of very geometric painting, and then made these
wooden inserts. The reason I did that was because things were
continually shifting. I hadn't quite figured out exactly how
much space I needed for each function, so with this I could
change the wooden parts that went in it. I could build cabinets
in some places, and shelves in others, and shift those around
until I had it just right.
ART:21:
Do you see this sort of work
as being influenced by growing up in Southern California?
ZITTEL:
I think that so much of my work
has been completely influenced by the culture
that I grew up in. I grew up in very suburban Southern California.
I think my parents had this fantasy about building a country
home in the middle of nowhere. So my dad built our home on
the edge of a mountain. And then, by the time I was in high
school, it was completely built up. It was suburbia. Our house
looked exactly the same as everyone else's. There was a shopping
mall. The final coup is they put a shopping mall in on our
street, which put our whole neighborhood on the map. My mother
used to go jogging in T-shirts that said, "Stop the malling
of the park." I went to art school and I was very embarrassed
about coming from there, and I tried to change my accent,
which is very much Southern California mall girl. It always
shocks people when they meet me. I tried to make work that
was serious, that was more international.
It was only after I moved to New York that I realized what
a gift it was to come from some place so normal. I'm basically
this specimen of what I think 95 percent of our population
is. And it's really important for me to bring all of those
issues in to my work. People talk about my work a lot as having
to do with these European modernist ideals, but in reality,
what I'm interested in is how I grew up in this very generic,
very capitalist culture, and how the values that are instilled
in me relate to these very utopian
thoughts at the beginning of the century. And how some of
those ideas, some of the things that people wished for society,
actually manifested themselves in that way. Very twisted manifestations
of that.
