WEBVTT 00:00:07.440 --> 00:00:12.380 [Andrea Zittel: Art & Design] 00:00:22.840 --> 00:00:24.490 Joshua Tree is sort of unique; 00:00:24.490 --> 00:00:27.250 it's two and a half hours from Los Angeles, 00:00:27.250 --> 00:00:29.760 but on the edge of open desert. 00:00:29.760 --> 00:00:31.680 So if you continue driving to the East, 00:00:31.680 --> 00:00:34.090 it just completely opens up. 00:00:34.090 --> 00:00:38.530 And everyone here kind of comes from somewhere else. 00:00:39.519 --> 00:00:42.679 I've been at Joshua Tree for fourteen years. 00:00:44.480 --> 00:00:48.820 I wanted to live in a community that was outside of the art world. 00:00:54.569 --> 00:00:58.989 I really think that design should talk about life and living. 00:00:59.960 --> 00:01:04.099 It's really sort of interesting talking about design, but through art. 00:01:05.440 --> 00:01:08.740 Every space that I've lived in, I've turned into an art project. 00:01:08.750 --> 00:01:15.330 And, I think that everything in the house has really evolved with my life. 00:01:16.110 --> 00:01:18.280 The original part of the house is the kitchen. 00:01:18.280 --> 00:01:21.500 And then on the back side of the kitchen, there's a bedroom. 00:01:21.500 --> 00:01:26.160 And then when I bought it, I ended up adding the room that we're standing in-- 00:01:26.160 --> 00:01:27.710 this used to be the driveway-- 00:01:27.710 --> 00:01:31.750 and a bedroom for my son. 00:01:34.780 --> 00:01:38.080 There's like this other question that I ask myself that comes up a lot too, 00:01:38.080 --> 00:01:43.140 and it's like that question of why to be an artist and not a designer. 00:01:43.600 --> 00:01:47.560 I remember thinking that if an art historian, like, a hundred years from now 00:01:47.560 --> 00:01:49.560 had to talk about my generation, 00:01:49.560 --> 00:01:52.760 that it would be almost impossible to talk about it 00:01:52.770 --> 00:01:55.130 in, sort of, a significant cultural sense 00:01:55.130 --> 00:01:59.650 without touching on what was going on in design at the same time. 00:02:00.540 --> 00:02:03.460 There's this, kind of, privileged position of being an artist 00:02:03.460 --> 00:02:07.230 where you can do things on a more experimental nature 00:02:07.230 --> 00:02:10.310 simply to see what happens. 00:02:23.040 --> 00:02:25.500 You know, we have to order so many materials out here-- 00:02:25.510 --> 00:02:27.360 we can't just go out and buy them. 00:02:27.360 --> 00:02:29.110 And all these cardboard boxes would come in. 00:02:29.110 --> 00:02:32.860 And for a while, I just stacking the cardboard boxes on the wall 00:02:32.860 --> 00:02:34.730 and putting things in them, 00:02:34.730 --> 00:02:37.250 and thinking about how I could actually turn them into, 00:02:37.250 --> 00:02:41.310 like, some sort of more permanent structure. 00:02:45.340 --> 00:02:50.760 I think that the ambiguity of how things are meant to be used is deliberate, 00:02:50.760 --> 00:02:56.100 and I think it becomes one of the more interesting parts of the work. 00:02:59.560 --> 00:03:03.840 I think it's really interesting if somebody has one of these in their house, 00:03:03.840 --> 00:03:06.459 they're going to decide if they want to keep it pristine, 00:03:06.459 --> 00:03:08.450 sort of like a Donald Judd sculpture; 00:03:08.450 --> 00:03:11.550 or, if they want to start piling it up with books 00:03:11.550 --> 00:03:15.330 and stones that they find on trips and stuff like that. 00:03:16.380 --> 00:03:19.300 These are some of my favorite works and, I mean, 00:03:19.310 --> 00:03:20.910 it comes back to the grid. 00:03:20.910 --> 00:03:25.500 And, I think that the grid is representative of human aspirations. 00:03:28.360 --> 00:03:29.800 I mean, everything is based on the grid-- 00:03:29.810 --> 00:03:32.130 the calendar, our schedules. 00:03:32.680 --> 00:03:35.940 You know, it's about human perfection. 00:03:35.940 --> 00:03:39.060 I love the tension where, like, this is trying to be perfect-- 00:03:39.060 --> 00:03:41.599 and when we make them, we try and make them really perfect, 00:03:41.599 --> 00:03:44.279 but they just don't want to be. 00:04:00.240 --> 00:04:04.160 I did two really big exhibitions of weaving. 00:04:04.170 --> 00:04:06.770 Weaving, I had always thought about conceptually 00:04:06.770 --> 00:04:08.770 because it's the grid. 00:04:11.629 --> 00:04:13.760 They really seem like they have a lot of imperfections, 00:04:13.760 --> 00:04:17.519 which is part of the reason that they're so interesting. 00:04:19.209 --> 00:04:22.280 We decided to do a really really big weaving. 00:04:22.280 --> 00:04:25.770 We did a bunch of smaller ones and got really confident. 00:04:25.770 --> 00:04:27.250 [LAUGHS] 00:04:27.250 --> 00:04:28.510 Maybe artificially confident. 00:04:28.510 --> 00:04:32.670 But, like, in the process, we're having a lot of problems with the warp. 00:04:32.670 --> 00:04:34.690 [ZITTEL, OFF SCREEN] I hope somebody will be watching this, who will, like... 00:04:34.690 --> 00:04:35.810 "Yeah, oh those idiots, they shouldn't have done..." 00:04:35.810 --> 00:04:37.060 [WOMAN] "I can't believe they're doing that!" 00:04:37.060 --> 00:04:37.560 [ZITTEL] Yeah. 00:04:37.560 --> 00:04:38.800 [WOMAN] Maybe they'll write in. 00:04:38.800 --> 00:04:39.960 [ZITTEL] They'll tell us what to do. 00:04:39.960 --> 00:04:40.640 [WOMAN] Exactly! 00:04:40.640 --> 00:04:41.420 [ZITTEL] It'll be awesome. 00:04:41.420 --> 00:04:42.420 [WOMAN] Email us! 00:04:42.430 --> 00:04:45.270 [ZITTEL] The warp is getting really uneven and stretched out, 00:04:45.270 --> 00:04:47.270 and so that's why we have all these blocks of wood 00:04:47.270 --> 00:04:50.150 and pieces of rocks hanging from it. 00:04:51.960 --> 00:04:55.260 For the last few years, I've been working with the idea of a panel, 00:04:55.260 --> 00:04:57.540 and trying to find the intersection between 00:04:57.540 --> 00:05:03.460 a very subtle, minimal object that's both fine art and design. 00:05:16.360 --> 00:05:18.040 You could say that design has power, 00:05:18.050 --> 00:05:21.590 because it actually touches people in a much more concrete way; 00:05:21.590 --> 00:05:25.280 but, I think that art has more wiggle room 00:05:25.280 --> 00:05:27.630 and more flexibility. 00:05:29.060 --> 00:05:33.980 And maybe I am as interested in failure as I am in success.