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


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. Read more. Originally published in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021

Lorraine Nicholson's Tribeca-Nominated Life Boat Is Now Available Online

A group of students are brought together to play a real-life game called “Life Boat.” After the customary “get to know each other” exercise, their counselor Mr. Drexler (Stephen Dorff) poses a difficult question: if this classroom were a sinking ship, who in the group deserves to be saved?

Mr. Drexler’s tactics are far from textbook, which immediately becomes clear to our protagonist, Elsa (Elizabeth Gilpin). Mr. Drexler, a survivor of a similar program, gets caught up in the emotions of his exercise. As the game and stakes heighten, he successfully demonstrates his apathetic students’ real desire to save their lives. But at what cost? 

 

Walead Beshty Presents Equivalents @ Regen Projects

Photographs, sculptures, and collages populate the expansive space at Regen Projects, incorporating the traces of bodies, circulation, and labor within the surface of the artwork. In this highly charged, pithy and multi-dimensional body of work created roughly over the course of a year, Beshty drills through computers, a television, and an oversized, outdated printer. He slices flat screen televisions in half lengthwise and displays these brutalized devices with their power still connected to the electrical grid, leaving them in a desperate anthropomorphized state of survival - endlessly powering on and off again, their inner machinations on full display. Copper plates made from the artist's own pharmaceutical receipts and x-rays of the artist's own knee document the expected outcomes of his prescribed medications and are left to oxidize slowly over time. Positive and negative transparency film is left exposed in Beshty's checked baggage, the resulting works made during idol modes in transit. The dualities are endless; layered ad infinitum. Equivalents opens tonight and will be on view through April 7 at Regen Projects 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard.

"Fall Out Shelter" Maya Jeffereis Gives An Artist Talk and Facilitates Hypothetical Dooms-Day Scenarios at Overnight Projects In Burlington, Vermont

New York based Maya Jeffereis invites participants to engage in a conversation about politics of identity and morality by participating in a military training exercise. The exercise is taken from a US military training document to test officers’ values and decision-making processes. In a hypothetical end of the world scenario, ten people of diverse backgrounds occupy a fall-out shelter. However, the shelter can guarantee survival for only six people. Participants must decide which four are to be excluded from the group in order that the remaining six may live to rebuild society. In this exercise, participants must argue in favor of and against each of the occupants until the group reaches a full consensus. "Fall Out Shelter" will be held at Overnight Projects on January 16, 2016 in Burlington, Vermont.