Acquisition: Andrea Zittel at LACMA

The most important American artist of the present is Andrea Zittel. Right now America is involved in a war that has everything to do with how we live our lives, our insatiable, mostly unaddressed need for oil to fuel our sprawl, our agriculture, and our industry. The world's greatest challenge is climate change, a catastrophe toward which we are racing because for decades we've been unwilling to reconcile how we live with how future generations might live. Andrea Zittel's work addresses these issues in a way no other artist does: She examines how we live, how we use the land, whether we must use it the way we do, whether we must live our lives with such disregard for whomever comes next. She offers clever alternatives that are functional, and, well, beautiful.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has recently acquired one of Zittel's A-Z Homestead Units (2001-2005). Expect it to be on view when LACMA opens its new Broad Contemporary Art Museum in 2008.

I tend to think of Zittel as the latest in a very specific line of post-Vietnam artists: There is Robert Smithson, who revealed to us how we use the land, the impact we have on it, and started us thinking about placing human events, sites, objects in geologic time. William Garnett, Robert Adams, Joe Deal and other 'New Topographics' photographers came along and showed us -- in a much more personal way -- what suburban expansion was doing to the landscape. Now Zittel. This is from a piece I did about her for Black Book magazine:

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."

Related: Zittel's survey show is on view (barely) at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Stranger's Jen Graves on the show there.