Out of Los Angeles on Interstate 10, through two hours of inner-city, suburbs, exurbs, and past an Indian casino, beyond the turn-off for Palm Springs, past wind-power-generating turbines twirling in the wind, past a curiously punctuated sign that says “Buds Tires,” past the convenience store where you can buy a poker-chip money clip for $5.95 and a “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbon magnet for a dollar less. Then up Highway 62—a four-lane highway on which SUVs go 70 mph in the left lane and ATVs go 15 mph in the right; past a mobile home that has blown across the desert and come to a stop up against the raised road; through Morogno Valley, where a radio ad explains how to use a pawn shop; past the “Dig Your Own Cactus 39 Cents” store; and finally to a steep, rocky hillside across the highway from a strip mall which features the county heath department, a cardiologist, and a bail bondsman.
I’m here.
Here is about three hours east of L.A., and four hours west of Phoenix—in the middle of the Mojave Desert, in Joshua Tree, California.
Here is A-Z West, the 30-acre desert headquarters of Andrea Zittel, one of the hottest artists in America. A-Z West is what Zittel calls what she does, and where she does it. Her home is here, along with her studio and a desert open-air display-space, a kind of cross between an RV park and a sculpture garden. With the first major Zittel survey exhibition working its way from Houston to New York, Buffalo, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, BC, A-Z West has become a must-see stop on the contemporary art circuit. Barely five years old, it has worked its way up toward earth art monuments such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in Quemado, New Mexico. The difference between those installations and A-Z West is that Zittel lives here and her decision to do so is as much a part of her art is the work on her property.
As an artist, Zittel is equal parts sculptor, architect, designer, developer, and performer. She works with fabricators, welders, and such to produce objects like the ones I see around me. A-Z Wagon Stations, for example, are 15 pastry-case-sized aluminum hutches mounted on poles about three feet off the ground. When Zittel’s friends visit A-Z West, they can sleep in their own, personalized A-Z Wagon Station. Like much of Zittel’s art, the A-Z Wagon Stations are functional sculptures that address a range of contemporary issues such as how we use land, how we live, and what constitutes an art object.
To my left as I drive up the hill between the highway and Zittel’s home is a beat-up white van, parked—or randomly abandoned—on a patch of desert. It obviously doesn’t belong there, but then again what here does? Just as the pebbly dust of the road turns to sofa-sized pink granite boulders I park and walk the last hundred feet up to A-Z West. There’s a note on the door: Zittel is having lunch a little way down the highway and she’ll be back in a few minutes.
I find a hunk of rock on which to sit down and look. In the middle of A-Z West is Zittel’s home, a white cabin tucked into the middle of the hill, and about the size of three Hummers parked next to each other. The only tree I can see on the hill—and one of only two trees I can see in what must be a 200-square-mile panorama—is planted right in front of the house. I recognize a lot of the stuff strewn around Zittel’s acreage: A-Z Wagon Stations, an A-Z Work Station, an A-Z Travel Trailer Customized by Miriam and Gordon Zittel, an A-Z Homestead Unit, an A-Z Yard Yacht, and The Regenerating Field. I’m only slightly disappointed not to see Zittel’s most humorous product, A-Z Thundering Prairie Dogs, in the desert. (Of course, prairie dogs live on prairies, not in deserts, I think.)
And why the A-Z Everything? Zittel gave herself a brand name because when she called industrial suppliers, no one took seriously a high-pitch-voiced girl named Andrea. When she told them that she was calling on behalf of A-Z West, they assumed she was legit. A-Z West has even joined the Joshua Tree Chamber of Commerce.
Zittel drives up in her Subaru. She is tall, skinny, and is wearing an A-Z Fiber Form Uniform (Fall) made out of grayish-brown merino wool. She has big eyes, straight blonde hair, and a jaw line that seems made for life in a windy desert. She welcomes me into the cabin as if we’ve known each other for years. “I wanted a house without other homes around it,” Zittel says, as we enter her living room.
“How’d you find this one?”
“It took a few trips,” she says. “It’s an original homestead cabin from the 1930s. There’s nothing more fun than driving around looking for cabins in the desert.”
We stared out at the desert a bit. The valley floor is cut into a grid by a series of dirt roads. Like her cabin, the grid dates from the 1930s, when the federal government passed the Small Tract Act—better-known locally as the Baby Homestead Act—to give a five-acre parcel of land to anyone willing to ‘improve’ the land by building on it. Most people couldn’t make a life in the desert and left. In recent years many of the abandoned cabins I see below have been used as methamphetamine labs.
Zittel told me the names of some of the dirt roads. Then she sees the white van parked on or around the northern edge of her property. “I wonder what that is,” she says. “It’s a strange place to be parked.”
It is, perhaps, a strange place to live, situated ten miles from Yucca Valley, a town that seems to consist mostly of fast-food joints and big-box stores. Fifteen miles in the other direction you come to Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, more commonly known as Twentynine Palms. It’s where Marines go to get better at blowing things up. Explosions from the Marine base occasionally rock Zittel’s cabin. (You know you’ve left Joshua Tree and entered Twentynine Palms when you see a large, inexplicable billboard advertising breast implants.) And while Zittel has electricity, she has to have water trucked in once a month, more often in the summer.
None of the desert’s hardships have deterred Zittel’s admirers, for whom driving out here has become a popular excursion. About 250 people visit A-Z West each year. “A while back a couple of artists, kids, from Oregon just showed up,” Zittel said. “They bought a car in Portland for $1,200 and wanted to see how far they could get before the car died. They ended up at A-Z West, so I showed them around. Near the end of the day I asked them where they were staying. They looked at each other and kind of grinned. ‘Uh, can we spend the night?’”
Most of the visitors turn up for A-Z West’s annual High Desert Test Sites weekend, when artists from around America come to put up art installations on Zittel’s property. Last year one artist made a sauna that was activated by the desert’s dramatic nighttime temperature drop. Most of the works are temporary, but a few have a longer life. A broken Leo Villareal light sculpture made out of white LEDs was broken when I visited, desert art-trash. Zittel often ends up maintaining HDTS installations for months after the artists have departed.
Life and art are inseparable. Versions of the A-Z Fiber Form Uniform Zittel is wearing are in museum collections in the United States and Europe. Virtually everything on Zittel’s property and in her cabin is a work of art.
“Yeah, sometimes I worry about going too far and making my child the A-Z Baby,” she says. “I realized that the whole point of making work in the context in which it’s created was to make it more real. But when your work-life is not separated from your art and from your daily life, it makes it hard for life to seem real.”
She pauses and points down toward the abandoned cabins and back toward the big-box stores in Yucca Valley. “Seriously, it’s important for me to be out here in the desert, inhabiting it and experiencing it, and trying to interpret it some way. The desert is changing and we can’t be in denial about that anymore. It’s not the raw, open west. It’s the frontier, and the frontier is being colonized.”
We had been walking, and were now close to the white van. We stared at it, unsure if we wanted to provoke it, or whomever might be inside.
Before arriving at A-Z West I thought that some of Zittel’s work was a little kitschy, a cute idea that flirted with becoming an anti-McMansion polemic. After walking around A-Z West with Zittel, I see I was wrong. Land use, lifestyle, and the intersection of art and design are all prominent contemporary issues. In the post-war era Americans have excelled at proclaiming a love for the land – particularly Western land — while subdividing it into oblivion. Zittel’s work and life challenge the way we ‘improve’ the West.
“I foresee A-Z becoming an entity of some sort, and I want it to be acquired by a foundation that would turn it into something,” Zittel says. Suddenly Zittel’s dog ran right up to the van and started sniffing. We braced ourselves for a methed-up, bearded man to come jumping out of the driver’s side door. Instead: nothing.
Zittel’s dog came bounding back.
“I guess it’s just parked there,” Zittel said. We both shrugged and walked back up toward the house.
I’m in Albuquerque to give one of several keynote talks at the annual meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. (If you’re like me — or Blake Gopnik — and if you prefer art itself to shopping for it or building shopping lists, don’t miss the AIC’s 2012 abstract book. Some fascinating teases about Gauguin, Diebenkorn, Still, public art wiki-projects, modernist photography and more.)
My love of art comes from my mom. I know that’s not very specific, but it’s the best I can do. Mom painted watercolors. My grandmother’s house is full of them: Paintings of colorful, twisted trees on the California coast and brushy abstractions of the cats next door, especially the fat one, Big Bertha. But the paintings I like best are mom’s Sierra Nevada landscapes.
