Dozie Kanu: The Worldbuilding Tools

 
 

text by Oliver Kupper
portraits by Parker Woods 


Dozie Kanu’s practice is a conceptual exploration of colonial and hegemonic politics, architecture, spatial narratives, and so much more. Born in Houston, Texas in 1993, and now based in Santarém, Portugal, Kanu’s investigation of cultural artifacts belies an America still grappling with not only its troubled past, but also its troubled present. Razor-sharp, anti-climb, raptor spikes, a visual and physical deterrent for vandals and undesirables, find their way onto one of his sculptures modeled as a baby crib, an emblematic nod to the countless divisions that are psychologically embedded at birth. There is something alchemical about Kanu’s reimagined objects of our urban visual landscape, like an ATM blasted with a thick layer of black epoxy sculpting clay, or a poured concrete chair in “crack rock beige” that sits on a spoked tire rim, that gives Kanu’s work a kind of authentic reclamation of power in a grief-stricken zeitgeist. We caught up with Kanu on a rare visit to Los Angeles, before the opening of his exhibition, to prop and ignore, at Manual Arts, to discuss tools for building a more socially equitable world. 

OLIVER KUPPER A lot of this issue that we’re doing is about biodiversity, but it’s also about offering new tools for existing in the world, which can be utilitarian, but also conceptual. Can you describe the tools you think can be used to navigate our post-pandemic future? 

DOZIE KANU Anything that can be used to contribute towards getting to a desired end result or sense of understanding is what I would consider a tool. When I think about the world post-pandemic, or what post-pandemic even means, I’m thinking about the issues that were already present, but just became more apparent to a wider audience. We all learned during this pandemic, how fragile and skewed the economic structure of society is and also how the system of objects that we interact with every day have made it difficult for people to differentiate between what’s necessary and what’s desired in their lives. It was disappointing to see how our government handled the distribution of stimulus, but it was also disappointing to feel the desperation from people who needed it. Particularly when I think about Black people, the idea of relying on aid in times of crisis from a government that failed to acknowledge you as being human from its inception—it just felt like being in the same boat. So, when I think about what tools I’m using to continue life post-pandemic, I’m thinking about self-governance a lot, and I’m thinking about a scaled back way of living that prioritizes stability and sustainability. 

 

Healthy Minds Must Grow, Watch From The Bleachers, 2020
found ox-drawn plough, pine wood, steel, found Dries van Noten hoodie and colour pencil
Courtesy the artist and Project Native Informant, London

 

KUPPER Like community governance. 

KANU Yeah, but that community can actually exist online. I’m talking more about trying to have much more control of your own living situation—stripping things down. I’m thinking about Andrea Zittel’s set up in Joshua Tree. Or like my warehouse situation in Portugal. Everything’s local. The market where I get food comes from farmers in the area, and it’s fairly low cost. Everything feels homegrown. I’m learning a little about agriculture. We got solar panels. I know it’s not true, but it often feels as though I live separate from any kind of government intervention. I guess I was chasing that feeling. That’s not to say people should give up trying to save the burning empire, but I just think maybe they should prioritize restructuring their relationship to that empire. The famous Samuel Johnson quote that always comes back to me: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”, which has been interpreted in many ways, but I take it as a refusal to expect your government to represent you better than you can represent yourself. Like, people really be pledging allegiance to a flag. 

KUPPER Your work often exists in this realm between functional object and sculpture. And that’s really changed and evolved in the last few years. How would you describe the evolution of your work? 

KANU When I first started making objects, I was definitely more apprehensive to thinking about them in a sculptural sense. I guess I didn’t have the language to fully see it that way. My parents are also immigrants, so there was always this kind of practicality in everything that we did that was instilled in me. I was making design objects essentially, but a lot of the ideas that I was trying to infuse into these works were being pulled from far outside of just the simple function of the object. 

Mainly chairs, tables, stools, shelves—things like that, but with a heavy poetic and conceptual discipline about them. Sometimes the gallery that I was working with would come to me and ask me if I could make a custom edition of one of my works for a client—make this in a different color or make this in a different size to fit in this client’s foyer. It was feeling like people weren’t looking at the work. As time went on, I stopped being a little bitch about it and was just like, Nah—I understand that in order for this work to be seen in its entirety, it needs to exist within the context of art in some way. I had to give myself permission to create a different context. My recent work has become even less preoccupied with designating a specific function but I think even with my more “design object” type work, I feel it still requires the same lens or sensibilities that are applied when looking at sculpture—trying to obscure the hierarchies but not just for the sake of obscuring hierarchies, which is what I see a lot in contemporary design right now. 

KUPPER Can you talk about the deeper significance in regard to race and class when sourcing found material and the histories of the materials that you use in your work? 

KANU I would say that the found elements in my work give each piece a sense of place for me. The country, the city, the region—it brings a sense of geography to the work. It implements the stories of the people from that geography. It’s a way to elevate the labor of others and point to specific industries. I naturally gravitate toward symbols of past memories or ways of communicating something that maybe I don’t have the words for. Whether it be the composition of the object, or the shapes that are present on it, it’s trying to get closer to the complexity of where I’m at. 

Bhad (Their Newborn’s Crib), 2019
steel pipes, anti-climb scaling spikes
114 × 58 × 99 cm
Courtesy the artist and 180 The Strand, London

KUPPER Sort of like an untranslatable language. 

KANU Yes, I would say so. Soul spillage. A lot just comes very intuitively. It’s like second nature to reference things that I saw and experienced growing up. In Houston, when you would see 84s or 83s on a slab, there was an understanding that whoever was driving that car was expressing a kind of push back against the authorities and trying to assert value in themselves. It wasn’t always the case, but I usually assume most of them wasn’t working 9 to 5 jobs. As a kid it definitely influences you to want to live freely like that. The Bench on 84s work from 2017 is emblematic of that energy. And I sort of pushed back against the grain in a different way—in a way that was even further outside of what was expected of me. 

 

Chair [ iii ] (Crack Rock Beige), 2018
poured concrete, steel, rims
94 × 48 × 42 cm
Courtesy the artist

 

KUPPER It seems like that piece set a template. 

KANU Yes. For me it was communicating correctly. It could exist in a lot of different conversations, which I still feel strongly about. 

KUPPER I read that you spent most of your childhood trying to ignore your Nigerian roots. And you finally visited. What did you learn about your practice after you visited Nigeria? 

KANU I learned that I'm an Igbo soul through and through. As much as I tried to bury it, it’s fully in there. When I look at the work that I’m making now, then I think about what I was seeing in Nigeria, the culture has definitely influenced me. It’s the way I was raised—finding resources and trying to maximize everything that you have readily available to you. I feel more connected to my parents, my roots, and I want to continue pulling from that, making that a richer aspect of who I am. 

KUPPER Your parents never took you to Nigeria growing up? 

KANU Nah, I had never been. I guess it just never aligned with their work schedule, or they didn’t have the financial means to take me and my brothers home. They called it ‘home’, which I found kind of funny when I was younger. In my mind I’m like, I’m already home! But to them Nigeria was home and they wanted me to see it that way too. But I started making a little money a couple years ago and I just took the initiative to go ahead and see what it’s like. I took my mom with me. 

KUPPER That must’ve been amazing. 

KANU Yes, and it was necessary. It was great timing also because I had just moved to Portugal and I was about to really embrace the idea of living in isolation. I needed to visit Nigeria to give myself that extra layer of understanding my background. I needed to see my people up close. I needed to walk those streets. 

 
 

KUPPER Did you see family? 

KANU Yeah, it was weird. Relatives that I had never met before recognized me. My parents both grew up in small villages and it’s not very common for people to migrate to America. My mom made it out of her village and my dad made it out of his village and so they’re kind of seen and talked about as the blessed ones that were able to find a way out. That’s what most people in these villages aspire towards. So, people recognized who I was just based on them knowing everything about the ones that found a way out. 

KUPPER You were talking before about how the pandemic has really cracked open these sorts of divides in the wealth gap and made the economic disparity a lot more visible. How do you think your current work or the work you’ve been making during the pandemic is reflecting this need for change? 

KANU I don’t think it’s affected my work so much. I have always tried to keep a democratic spirit in the work—understanding that the art world is inherently elitist. But during the pandemic I settled on the idea that I was addressing myself with each work. I’m speaking directly to myself—past, present and future—with heavy emphasis on my adolescent self. Moving forward, I think knowing this will keep me grounded so I don’t stray too far away from the emancipatory qualities that I hope can be located in the work. I’m basically just trying to have more potent, more complicated, more authentic conversations with myself in hopes that it resonates elsewhere and contributes to a much larger conversation. 

 

At The Moment, 2021
Found ATM machine, epoxy sculpting clay, steel, MDF
56 x 46 x 22 inches
Courtesy the artist and Manual Arts

 

KUPPER I think your commitment to authenticity demonstrates a certain level of hope. 

KANU Word, I think hope is one of the most important elements of what artists provide. You’re supposed to provide pathways for others to walk towards being more honest with themselves. All of my favorite artists are people that create the tools for me to truly be myself and to see myself. 

 

Originally published as a cover story in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021

 

FOOD For Thought: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Restaurant For Artists Changed the Culinary Discourse

In 1971, artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard opened FOOD, a landmark New York restaurant on the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets in SoHo. In the urban wilds of a not-yet-fully developed or gentrified Lower Manhattan of the early ‘70s, FOOD was a revolutionary laboratory for fresh sustainable cooking and unusual culinary collaborations. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage created meals at FOOD. Although never realized, Mark di Suvero had plans to serve dishes through the windows via a crane—he would then instruct diners to eat with tools such as hammers and screwdrivers. As a hub for young artists in the nascency of their careers, the menu was affordable and simple, which created a unique atmosphere of camaraderie and community. Although FOOD, in its original incarnation, only lasted three years, the restaurant became a fabled institution and paradigmatic lesson for the possibility of food at the intersection of art.

Originally published in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021

Dan Colen's Sky High Farms: The Avoidance of Perfection

 
 


interview by Gideon Jacobs 
photographs by David Brandon Geeting  

 

Many urbanites dream about farm life. They sit in front of their screens, filling out expense reports or arguing with coworkers on Slack, the blue light slowly irradiating whatever constitutes their unique human spirit, and they imagine that digging their hands into soil and pulling out some kind of root vegetable might cure what ails them. That wasn’t Dan Colen. Colen, an artist who is very much a product of New York City, with a name synonymous with the downtown Manhattan art scene of the aughts, didn’t end up owning and operating Sky High Farm out of manifested romantic notions about the rural, agrarian lifestyle. In fact, as I learned over the course of this interview, when he purchased the forty-acre chunk of Hudson Valley land, farming wasn’t even part of the plan. Like much of his art, he allowed form to develop on its own, following some combination of instinct and medium until he ended up with his biggest project yet. Since its first growing season, Sky High has donated 90,000 pounds of produce and 20,000 pounds of protein to help fight food insecurity in New York State, and they are currently working on developing an agricultural training program to support self-empowerment among those affected by the carceral system. The farm is a nonprofit, a complex machine that straddles the complex ecosystems of upstate New York agriculture, food justice, the art world, and more. That Colen ended up here at this stage in his career, devoting his life to this mission, might come as a surprise to many, maybe even to Colen himself. But in a way, that’s what makes the whole endeavor somehow unsurprising. That’s what makes it make sense.   

 
 

GIDEON JACOBS My first question is, what would be the ideal outcome for you from something like this? When a magazine approaches you and is like, “Can we talk to you.” What do you hope to get out of that sort of thing? 

DAN COLEN Well, it's a layered question in the context of the farm. I try to keep the mission of the farm first; it comes before my general art practice. Because the interviews can sometimes feel redundant. The mission here is to act as a representative of the organization. The farm grows produce and raises pasture-based livestock exclusively for donation. We work in marginalized communities within New York City and New York State. More and more people have a pretty clear understanding that food insecurity is a big issue now—more so than ever. But, the way we are trying to address food insecurity is really unique: through sustainable agriculture, and by producing the highest quality food for distribution. When we think of people going hungry, we think of food drives and a certain type of food that is really second rate. Even if it's fresh, it's usually banged up, or past the expiration date, or it's packaged, processed, and generally not that nutritionally dense, and that's really not a solution to food insecurity. I came to doing this work without that much intention, honestly, it was part of a pretty natural process. My only reference point to this process is my creative practice. And there's certain interviews that only like one way of talking about this project, and others that open up a dialogue that's more exploratory. I know that this would have never come to be without my creative practice, so it's tethered to that and all the best artworks I've made come out of that reluctance to call the thing that I'm doing art. Some of the best art is hard to get behind and offers something unfamiliar or maybe that even directly pushes against the preconceptions we have of what an artwork is. That's why I can naturally see this as a part of my creative process, but I do think it's important to talk about that side of the project. I really do think it's a very unique mission and one that's vital. What's important to me in the context of this interview—and it's really changed since the farm has become a part of my life—is being able to save some space to speak very plainly about the work the farm does, but at the same time, totally throw a wrench in it by considering the ways in which it's a part of my art practice. 

 
 

 JACOBS So, the ideal interview for you is one that would give exposure to the mission of the farm and call attention to it, but also, incorporate the wrench of getting it into the context of your overall career as a contemporary artist.   

COLEN Yeah, and on top of that, speaking to the unique type of organization that Sky High is as a product of a creative practice, even though it takes the structure of a 501c3. So, there's many other organizations that do what we do and this one came to be through this searching process. And most public benefit organizations don't come out of that kind of searching. They're set up in a very deliberate and structured way. 

 JACOBS Before I ask about the specifics of the farm and how it fits within the context of your career, I want to ask you if you enjoy talking about your work and the farm? Do you feel like you learn something in interviews or are they sort of like a perfunctory means to an end at this point? 

COLEN Depending on the day, I feel really differently, but I see a lot of artists having a very different kind of relationship to it. Interviews are a very natural part of their process. And then you see artists that just refuse to do them, or other artists that are really meticulous about how they do them, or are very formal. I have a lot of ambivalence about it and I have a lot of skepticism around it, but I can enjoy doing it. I think we have less and less time to kind of sit down and have meaningful conversations, you know? But at the same time, I think with art, there's this basic idea of the work speaking for itself, the process speaking for itself, and I do believe deeply in that. Interviews really put the focus on the things that are easier to unpack. The most powerful are the things that are impossible to talk about. I love artists that really refuse to do it. I have great admiration for them. For some reason I kinda just like to be more chill and have a conversation. I try to operate without a kind of preciousness around my own being and around my own ideas. I try to keep them accessible and inclusive. 

 
 

JACOBS I think talking about work makes it more accessible, generally. So, let's talk about the farm a little bit, because the theme of this issue is biodiversity. In order for this to be the perfect Dan Colen interview for both of us, we have to approach the farm. I've read a little bit about what prompted the purchase of the land, but can you explain the shift that occurred in your mind, and the desires and goals that led to what is not only a big artistic or business decision, but also an enormous lifestyle change? 

COLEN When I imagined moving upstate, I imagined the Catskills as a kind of stand in for all of upstate. I did start looking there, but couldn't find what I was looking for. So, I slowly drifted east. I ended up on the other side of the river and really connected to the landscape, but didn't acknowledge the major difference. Instead of the mountains and the forest, it’s all really farmland and pasture. And so, without being too conscious of this, I was imagining I would be communing with the mountains, but I ended up on a farm, and the way to connect with a farm is to cultivate it. 

JACOBS But you didn't know you were gonna run the farm when you purchased the land? 

COLEN I had no clue. I had no intention of that. I've never even had any vague, passing desire to have any relationship to agriculture prior to this thing that developed inside of me in a very unconscious way. I just moved in and I was like, it's not hitting how I want it to hit. It was just very clear that I was on a property, which had already been altered in order to be cultivated. 

JACOBS Would you say you’ve had a relationship with nature throughout your life? 

COLEN I think I was so obsessed, and in love with the city. I had some very distant romance about nature, and the reason I moved upstate is I had two experiences that came out of these moments where I was struggling to finish a body of work for a show. One time was in 2003 for my first show. And then, another time in 2010 for my first big show with Gagosian. I ended up leaving the city and going to an old friend’s house in the Catskills both times to finish these shows. And the first time, I really needed to leave the city because it was both something which fueled me, but also something which shackled me, or I can have a self-destructive relationship to it. I distinctly remember feeling like I needed to get out of the studio and walking through the forest and just being like, “This is bullshit. What is this? This is supposed to heal me?” I remember being disgruntled that it didn't work like an injection, or a pill. But, the second time, when I went back up. I ended up really interacting with the landscape in a very direct way, and I created a body of work using the landscape. But I didn't go up there with too much intention to do that. In my twenties, I did a lot of driving around America and Mexico, and landscape painting became very important for me. The Hudson River School in particular, but also French, Italian, Dutch, and German—all sorts of  landscape artists. I looked at a lot of that at a time when I wasn't looking to connect to the landscape itself, per se, I was looking to go on a road trip and meet people. But my relationship to it, since I've been up here, has really evolved and it's really important to me at this point. 

 
 

JACOBS How has working on the farm—having your hands and feet in nature—affected your everyday psychology? 

COLEN Being in the mountains and the forest is something that's become very important to me. The experience that is helping me to evolve in a way is a mix between the time that I spend in the mountains and the time that I spend on the farm. To build a farm and help it operate and flourish is an amazing and radical experience. Farmers are some of the wildest people, the strangest people—definitely different than the people that I have been able to meet in the art world and in downtown New York. I really have gotten so much out of those relationships and, to cultivate the land, to grow food is unique because growing this food for other people is just profound. As I became more aware of how important it was to grow highly nutritious food for communities that don’t have access to it, it really brought me back to my creative practice, which is all about creating things for other people to experience. And the art world has a lot of great experiences to offer, but it's flawed in so many ways too. These things that artists create can get obscured by the industry and institutions of art, and it's hard for it to hold its initial intention as it goes through the layers of the art world. So it’s about coming back to a different type of production, which is based on the act of sharing. I grew up thinking that art offered a sustenance or some sort of vital human experience. I think that potential exists, but do all good artworks do that in the world? 

JACOBS I think the answer's no. 

COLEN No, they're not, but just seeing these things that were being produced on the farm in relation to artwork, not as the same, but as a foil to think about what it means to create, and what it means to share. I see that is a very important part of how my practice is developing currently with both of those experiences in mind, and trying to move them forward in a way that they can both have greater impact. 

JACOBS I was just doing a quick Google of how many New Yorkers are currently experiencing food insecurity through the pandemic, and the numbers have skyrocketed. I'm wondering if you are able to feel proud of doing your part, or if you ever get into the zone of feeling like it's a drop in the bucket. 

COLEN The work is very fulfilling, and in a way that is comparable to my studio practice. I can get lost on either side of that, because the art is meant to have no purpose. Its radicality is in the fact that prior to its making, nobody needed it and nobody was asking for it. Sometimes, as an artist, I feel like doing something as basic as growing food to feed people in need is almost not what I'm meant to be doing. But other times, I ask myself the opposite, like why can't art serve a function? Who's to say it can't be more radical actually serving a function and offering people something that they desperately need? I never think about it like a drop in the bucket, but I get that mentality. When I was initially creating the farm, wondering whether or not there was a point, I had this glimmer of optimism that I hadn't had previously, which really allowed me to see that. I can only do what I can do, and all of us on our own can more or less do an equal amount of things. 

JACOBS That's beautiful. Do you identify as an optimist? Do you have hope for this pandemic-ridden, quickly heating, dysfunctional world of ours? 

COLEN  Listen, I'm just trying to be in the moment. I'm an optimist only in the Zen, like, I'm going to try to make the most of this moment. I don't know if it's going to get better or worse. I’m just trying to be sensitive to my surroundings, which is really what the farm is all about. With the better art that I've made, there's no intentionality also—it's just being sensitive to my surroundings and letting things develop and being in the process. And so I can be optimistic that I'm about to discover the next thing and I'm surrounded by things that will allow me to move forward. 

JACOBS I want to ask you whether you believe in perfection.  

COLEN Of course, I can catch myself in a struggle towards it sometimes. But, when I can step back in a moment like this, I have no faith in perfection as a point on the continuum, or the destination, but I also have no interest in it and no appreciation for it. I mean, it's not real, but if it were, I would try to avoid it at all costs. 

A Forsaken Place

Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West Is A Laboratory For The Future 

Andrea Zittel
A-Z Wagon Station customized by Giovanni Jance
2003
Powder-coated steel, MDF, aluminum, Lexan, cushions, iPod Nano, headphones, solar iPod chargers
91 x 82 x 57 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

 

text by Oliver Kupper 

The desert is an unforgiving, but magnetic landscape. Agnes Pelton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and many more artists have all been drawn to the desert of the American West. Its barrenness, its potential, its raw heat, its solitude, and liquid mirages all provide a contemplative and hot combination of all the right ecosystemic ingredients for artists to experiment and conceive of cosmic ideas. Even the word desert is alluring: it comes from the ecclesiastical Latin root desertum, which means a “forsaken” or “abandoned” place. Lately, though, the desert has become less a quirk of America’s multifold topography and more a frightening, but beautiful prelude to an arid, lifeless future on Earth. 

Andrea Zittel fits into the historical canon of artists lured to these forsaken and abandoned landscapes—abandoned by time and most botanic nature—but she isn’t so much a land artist as she is an artist of the land. Like the late artist and sculptor Noah Purifoy before her, Zittel is not a visitor—she is a guardian of the desert’s inexplicable potential as a testing ground for future civilizations who might live in a world that is going through a rapid process of what geologists call desertification.  According to scientists, over a third of the world is going through this process, and every year 120,000 square kilometers of land turns into an actual desert. Studies show that if global carbon emissions aren’t curbed, much of the Earth will become a desert by 2050. 

Andrea Zittel
Prototype for A-Z Warm Chamber & Prototype for A-Z Cooling Chamber
1993
Wood, steel, paint, heater and light
Each 84 x 32 x 50 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Since the year 2000, Zittel’s A-Z West—an artwork and testing site spanning seventy acres in the California high desert on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park—has become a template for day-to-day life on a scorched planet. Tucked into the alluvial floodplains of an ancient shallow sea that is now the dust-colored panorama of the Mojave Desert, A-Z West is a new frontier—a homestead—and an “Institute of Investigative Living.” Textiles, home furniture, clothing, food and art-making materials are all made on site. A regenerating field, consisting of numerous steel panels “harvest” recycled paper to pulp to be used for fabrication techniques in the harsh climate. Zittel also lives and works on A-Z.   

Tucked against the rocky bajadas and billion-year-old metamorphic boulders dotted with creosote bush and greasewood, Zittel’s instantly recognizable and portable A-Z Wagon Stations become architecture for future moveable lifestyles. In thirty years, climate refugees (people displaced by natural disasters, droughts, and water shortages) could reach into the billions. These wagons could be the answer to overcrowded refugee camps and allow for more dignified and aesthetically amplified transient domesticity. Plus, their compact size allows these structures to bypass building codes, and they are easy to collapse and transport to the next impermanent residence. 

 The architecture feels utopian, but practical and reminiscent of Jean Prouvé's famous 1944 demountable houses, which were a direct response to Europe’s bomb-battered cities during the Second World War. The need to move quickly, efficiently, and affordably was tantamount to survival. In our human-altered, anthropogenic age, the bomb can come from anywhere and without even a warning or a whistle. Packing up and heading to higher ground may be our only chance. While sequestering yourself in the desert may seem counterintuitive in a warming world, it is in this counterintuitive thinking that makes A-Z West such a brilliant experiment in living off the grid. In the high desert, there are no rising tides or swollen tributaries. In fact, an interesting geomorphic idiosyncrasy of this part of this desert is that the basins have no outlets, so any rainfall collected quickly evaporates in a symbolic disappearing act. 

In some ways, the ground beneath A-Z Test Sites could be called a thirty-million-year-old experiment in extreme topography as a result of intensifying fluctuations in global climates, volcanic activity, and tectonic shifting within what is called The Basin and Range Province. This physiographic region covers much of the inland Western United States, and explains the strange landscapes of these high desert terrains. And deep within the subterrestial geography of the Mojave Desert is a foreshadowing of what may happen to our own living world. Fossils of prehistoric Paleozoic sea life are still trapped in the dolomite and limestone buried beneath the dust. When the oceans receded and eventually vanished completely, elements like manganese and iron were oxidized by bacteria over thousands of years and created something called desert varnish, which coats many of the rocks and boulders in brilliant hues of brown and black.  

Andrea Zittel
A-Z Regenerating Field
2002
Galvanized steel frame, galvanized steel post, vacuum formed styrene trays
Dimensions variable
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

The desert is unforgiving, but Zittel has learned that it is not so much a physical place, as it is a psychological place—a philosophic place. Her Planar Pavilions are an ode and monument to place-based thinking: ten black-painted bricks in various formations, like dancer’s poses, become metaphysical meeting points of the mind. Evocative of the late-aughts housing crash, these planar creations appear upon first impression almost like unfinished foundations to some forgotten suburban housing development lost in late-capitalism’s rapacious daydreams. No stranger than the landscape, these sculptures do not interrupt, nor do they hamper the beauty of the vistas—they serve as friendly borders to A-Z’s experimental community. 

Andrea Zittel
How to live?
2013
Polyacrylic on marine grade plywood panel with steel frame
93 1/4 x 180 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

 One of Zittel’s oft-asked questions, “How To Live?,” is answered with A-Z West, especially if we’re imagining a world past the ecological thresholds that scientists have put in place for our natural world. A species that created fire who is now burning the world to the ground must now live with its self-made consequences, and Andrea Zittel has created a radical reimagining of how to live, work, play, regenerate—and repeat—in our collapsing biosphere. This is the beauty of human originality, modernism, and innovation. If you can survive here, you can survive anywhere.