Town vs. Commune: Further Study in the Invitation as an Essential Component of Private Space
At five pm on Saturday, June 22, I pulled into the lot at the High Desert Test Sites Headquarters off Highway 29 in Joshua Tree, California. I had managed to arrive on time for one of the four annually scheduled tours of Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West compound, described on the HDTS website as “the site of ongoing ‘investigations in living.’” The website also notes, “because this is a personal residence, please respect the private drive signs and do not visit the site at other times.”
A dozen of us walked the property for two hours, poking into Zittel’s studio structures, living quarters, and outdoor experiments, never far from the looming profile of Joshua Tree’s boulder hills.
We encountered few other people, although evidence of the presence of many thinkers and doers is in every aspect of the neatly handled property. This evidence takes the shape of projects – some done and some started – but also of a multiplicity of dwellings that make it possible for people to stay and do their work in this 35-acre outpost in the desert.
I parked at the shipping container studio building, which is used partly for storage, partly for art production,
partly for food production,
Looking through some wire at what appeared to be chickens and quails, our guide answered someone’s question: “She’s not a vegetarian, but I don’t think she means to slaughter these guys.” He described how at the beginning of her career she had been working with chickens and their living environments, and then inverted that practice onto herself, becoming the guinea pig for experiments in living and living well. “But the chickens are back,” he said, expressing an interest in what kind of work they would influence. That cycle, he said, is “how everything works around here.”
From 1938-1976, under the Small Tract Act, the federal government granted free homesteads to anyone willing to improve the land in the Mojave Desert. Five-acre parcels could be claimed by those building a structure with dimensions not less than 12 x 16 feet, and no water or power were required. Many of the structures that resulted were makeshift and unadorned: just enough to claim the land. After WWII, many veterans moved out to the desert for its respiratory benefits, and by the time the Act was repealed, 36% of the desert was privately owned, shacks scattered about the sand.
Zittel’s house at A-Z West was originally a 400 square foot cabin, the product of one of these homesteads. Its second owner had added a kind of living room, and Andrea added a portion with a sloped roof; her addition is 499 square feet, to avoid having to bring the whole structure up to code, which one has to do if one builds at 500 square feet or above. This practice of clustering additions onto homesteads is common in the desert, both because of building code issues and because heating and cooling small spaces makes sense in parts in an environment like Joshua Tree’s.
The kitchen, tiled with custom ceramics, includes an island designed so that two people can cook for each other, reducing the amount of “performance anxiety” one cook might have when producing for an audience of an other.
Platforms are being built throughout the home, staggering the surface of the floor. The walls of Zittel’s bedroom are being painted, and underneath the paint is a layer of newspaper she produced, the text of which is rendered in the fictitious language of graphic designers. Our guide mentioned to us that in prior years, when Zittel was using wallpaper glue to adhere the newspaper to the walls, she had said that she looked forward to painting over the newspaper one day, as the glue had created an interesting topography for the wall. Now, as a slate gray monochrome takes over the papered surface, that topography is indeed showing up.
In other rooms in the house, Zittel’s predilection for unfinished painted edges crops up. Our guide mentioned that she does not like neutral white gallery spaces, and so oftentimes will paint such places with rollers only as high as is naturally reachable for the painter, leaving an organic top edge such as the one in this bathroom.
Zittel’s practice includes the making of “raugh objects” – wherein “raugh” is pronounced “raw” and suggests “the way that something becomes "undone" over time and as the result of repeated lived experience.” Per a press release written by Zittel from Andrea Rosen Gallery in 1998:
“The ‘Rules of RAUGH’ include:
Absorbs dirt rather than reveals it
Doesn't require an ‘expert’ to make it
Not as tame as ‘Natural"’
Not as complicated as ‘Minimal’
…makes something fabulous out of almost nothing at all
Inside Zittel’s home and another of the homestead cabins on the property, we looked at raugh objects such as a couch made of foam, which had been carved away a bit by cat scratches and hungry baby mouths.
There were dried tea bags saved from multiple moments of consumption festooned like chili peppers in the Southwest, hanging from hooks on the walls. Apparently Zittel often saves the bags from tea drunk during installations and then shows these during the exhibitions alongside work produced when drinking the tea.
The hooks themselves are called “vertical accumulators” and “draw life to them”, said our guide.
Clipboards elevate Zittel’s son’s work to the level of her own, equalizing a playing field of learning and practice.
And books indicate something of what she thinks about as she handles some of these projects.
Outside the house is a “pain pad” and a “pleasure pad”: names for a place where one works to fabricate in the hot desert sun and where one takes a dip in a small pool to cool off.
Also outside the house is a bed, in case one wants to sleep under the Supermoon tonight. (And yes, one wants to.)
A water tank supplies the property and stairs lead to nowhere.
We walk through the property. The road itself is evidence of the property’s population, but of course the evidence does not end there.
Shrubs are encircled by chicken wire to protect them from rabbits.
We look at “wagon stations”, which have inspired another blog post, but which are, briefly, the smallest unit of living quarters available on the property: built out of painted steel and mdf and housing a bed and enough room to store one’s things.
A “host” lives in the A-Z West Work Station trailer, whose function is to oversee the wagon stations nearby, to facilitate meals for guests in them, and to interface with Zittel.
The current host said, “I knew you were coming! I cleaned,” as we walked up.
Inside, it smelled like sprouting foods.
Outside, a steel structure had been built but not yet covered in cloth. The host, chatting with one of my group, mentioned that next time we saw Zittel around, we should “pick her brain about shade structures. I think she’s thought a lot about them.”
There is an outdoor eating area with a lovely outdoor shower.
A vast studio complex, with:
...an enviable woodshop, where all woodwork – both for living and for art/design for living – is produced.
...a space wherein clothing, bowls, and billboards are being produced.
“She is trying to make the perfect bowl,” said our guide, who also explained that she is interested in creating a line of design objects not to be sold in galleries.
The studio is not just a studio, however; Zittel homeschools her own son and other children here, and their work mingles with her own.
Below this studio is a view of the valley and the highway that runs through it.
Apparently a casino is still being planned for this area.
Our guide showed us one last homestead cabin. Hotter inside than the other structures on the property and more clearly a guesthouse, it was still very homey, and actually housed a real sense of from where Zittel’s inspiration for living at A-Z West derives.
The walls are peppered with paintings her grandmother made of the desert and indicate her family’s history, ranching this kind of land.
Up the hill from this cabin are two derelict homestead structures, clearly fabricated purely to claim the land upon which they stand. This land is next to be annexed to the A-Z property. Zittel is also interested in buying the property at the very corner of Highway 29 from which begins the road up to A-Z West. At this time, it is a bailbondsman and is for sale for quite a lot of money; it would serve Zittel well, though, as a stakeholder at ground level, and would probably make for a good storefront for her design objects, even if many of these were sold virtually, online.
The property functions, then, like an intentional community. Its 35 acres are always changing, and, if driven by Zittel’s interests, aesthetics, and goals, still powered by many people, and by the place itself – its plants, animals, topography, and climate. It exists in concert with its larger community, both artistic and desert-provincial. Our guide mentions that locals in Joshua Tree are well aware of this vast project and that the communities mingle well. (Tell that to the cop who gave me a seatbelt ticket moments after I left the property, who thought I was drunk as I tried to describe where I was coming from; she had no idea who Andrea Zittel was, despite the fact that my tourguide thought of Zittel as a second mayor of JT.)
At one point on the tour, our guide mentioned that the artist had long been considering buying the unincorporated town of Amboy, sixty miles northeast of Twentynine Palms. The guide mentioned this after describing how the A-Z West property may at some future moment become an educational center and a foundation, with residencies; I made the parallel to Marfa, and the guide brought up the issue of buying Amboy, which he said, as an act, certainly seems to reference Donald Judd’s town in Texas.
This was when it clicked for me that what I had been walking through was Not a Town. It was in fact a home – a large home and a home I had paid to visit, a home others worked on, a home every piece of which was a plan for another product, which would - in process, material, and outcome - inspire another turn of production. What these things indicate is the power of private place: the power to turn every nook and cranny, every guest and resident into a cell that perpetuates the organism. It is not a selfish phenomenon, but it is a private phenomenon; there's a difference.
Amboy has only ten surviving buildings and a population of something like eight people. Zittel posted on her wordpress blog in 2010 that she thought she saw the town for sale on Zillow, but that it had disappeared again. “Bummer,” she wrote. But why would she have been interested in this town, given the number of acres she already has?
She continued on her blog: “My former photo professor and friend Walter Cotten introduced me to Amboy about 25 years ago, and I’ve been making the pilgrimage back ever since. There are so many rumors associated with this place – from ones of a witches coven that used to occupy the church to another that might be true about the town not having any water (or the water being salty) which would explain why a Cafe, Motel, Post Office, Church etc were offered for sale on Ebay in 2005 and eventually sold to for $425,000 in cash. In any case if anyone wants to buy or give me this town I promise to love turn it into the most amazing High Desert Test Site compound ever.”
If A-Z West is, as the HDTS website describes it, “an ongoing endeavor to better understand human nature and the social construction of needs and desires” it does follow that at some point it has to find a location other than its private one – this exaggerated homestead in Joshua Tree – and other than its public one – its abbreviated lifespan in the halls of art commerce and exhibition. It has to find one like a town in order to fully play itself out. You buy a cafe, a motel, a post office - for god's sake, a post office - and a church, and you really do begin to understand the dynamics of human nature and the social construction of needs and desires. You need to give up control - throw private space to the wind - in order to understand how it occurs when given its own chance to thrive.
Joshua Tree itself will never be that town; it has too much of a life of its own. Zittel observes on her own website, “I’ve been living in the desert for almost thirteen years – and every so often there is a real shift. Right seems to be one of those times. Several years ago the recession put a damper on investors snapping up desert properties to make a quick buck – and now those of us who are left on the ones who truly love this lifestyle and couldn’t live anywhere else. And being added to this mix is a younger generation of desert explorers bringing a new depth and thoughtfulness to our community.”
What happens, then, when A-Z West takes over a town? What is the difference between a town and a large property on which many people live and function? Would Amboy become privatized if purchased or would it become an even more ambitious experiment, functioning economically and politically on the same level with other towns, even as Zittel’s children function productively on the same level with artists and fabricators in her current studio? The life of this project grows outward, like a kid taking off when she hits 18. With a town, you cannot ask of visitors that they respect the site’s privacy nor that they not visit the site at any particuar time. A town is always open, no invites necessary, And as such, it is the ultimate experiment.
