Sufficient Self

Synopsis

Andrea Zittel’s “systems for living” explore the friction between the prescriptive nature of externally enforced rules and the liberating potential of internally imposed parameters. Her current project, A–Z West, is a culmination of ten years of creating these experimental domestic and external structures. The community, sited in the desert environment of Joshua Tree, California, was conceived as a sustainable space within yet separate from our increasingly regulated culture. This exhibition presents several Wagon Stations—small mobile units customized by invited individuals—from the settlement. Transplanted to an urban landscape, they reveal at once the individuality of their creators and the simple clarity of the system as a whole. - Whitney Museum of Art Exhibition 2004