Andrea Zittel

"Chew The Fat" (Informal) - To have a long friendly conversation with someone. In the film project 'Chew The Fat', the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, living in New York portraits a group of 12 artists (Douglas Gordon, Angela Bulloch, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez - Foerster, Elizabeth Peyton, Tobias Rehberger, Carsten Hoeller, Liam Gillick, Jorge Pardo, Andrea Zittel, Maurizio Cattelan). The artists, all chosen by Tiravanija, belong to the same generation as himself and, like him, have advanced during the nineties to achieve international success. Most importantly, all are good friends of Tiravanija. This creates a particularly relaxed situation in which conversation can flow naturally between the two with personal issues coming up as easily and often as those to do with work or career.

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