Andrea Zittel

Published on the occasion of the artist’s first institutional solo show in Italy, Between Art and Life documents Andrea Zittel’s visionary experiments with the structures and design of everyday life. For the past two decades, Zittel has relentlessly advanced the role of art in streamlining our habitats and reclaiming civic agency through her handmade clothing, designed environments, recycling systems and breeding projects, Zittel wears her work, inhabits her work, eats her work and lives her work, and in the catalogue’s essay, Francesco Bonami describes Zittel as “one of the last utopian artists around. Utopia is a dying attitude. We are so wired in the now that it is almost impossible to free ourselves from our dystopian reality.” This book documents “A-Z West,” Zittel’s “Institute of Investigative Living,” launched by the artist in 1999 in the Joshua Tree Desert.

The pieces of artist Andrea Zittel--who has received increasing worldwide attention since her participation in Documenta X--can be read variously as art objects, utopian visions, or consumer goods. Zittel invents living spaces, styling every detail from clothing to architecture. Visitors to these spaces are automatically confronted with questions about their own lifestyle, and the needs and wishes associated with it: Could our living conditions be improved? Couldn't we do without a lot of the commodities populating both our professional life and our leisure time? What criteria do we use in deciding what kind of environment is right for us? In what ways do our private and public lives differ, and where do we find freedom, where do we find obligation? Andrea Zittel: Personal Programs deftly illustrates the holistic creative concepts of this rising star with a selection of works from A-Z Living Units to her newest work, the Raugh series.