About 100 miles east of Los Angeles, look for the “Able 2 Help Bail Bonds” sign. Go about a thousand feet more and take a right off the freeway onto a poorly marked unpaved road. Drive slowly – it’s bound to be a bumpy ride.
At the end of the road and just short of government land you will find the AZ West Works Compound, which currently serves as headquarters for the High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California. Located in the Morongo Basin on the border of the Mojave and Colorado deserts, the high desert has become a melting pot of former Angelenos, artists, longtime desert dwellers, and marines (nearby Twentynine Palms is home to a military base). The desert also hosts a seemingly endless flurry of visitors year-round to the now infamous Joshua Tree National Park.
AZ West (2000) began as the California version of AZ East (1994), a famous work of art by contemporary artist Andrea Zittel. Located in a three-story townhouse on Wythe Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, AZ East was Zittel’s residence as well as an art laboratory for his “living prototypes”. Long interested in the relationship between freedom and restriction, autonomy and authority, many of the fundamental questions in Zittel’s practice revolve around the concept of how we live our daily lives and what gives meaning to our lives.
In her ongoing series of “AZ Personal Uniforms” (since 1991), for example, Zittel designs different uniforms that serve as a source of freedom from what she sees as the “tyranny of constant variety”. Like many of her projects, it has morphed over the years as the need for change inevitably arises, and she has come up with a number of different uniforms and series, such as “AZ Personal Panel Uniforms(1995) and “AZ Hand Made Stranded Uniforms” (2001), over time. The philosophy of these works also extends to other works of art. In “Planar configuration one(2016), Zittel has applied the same mood she applied to her uniforms to a series of furniture-like panels that can be arranged in multiple ways, making these abstract objects the literal basis of life. where you can sleep, sit, and dine.
Zittel purchased what would become the nearly 80-acre sprawl for much smaller periods in the desert. Tired of living in New York and yearning for her native California, Zittel returned west around the turn of the century and purchased what is now the AZ West House and surrounding five acres for a small fraction of its current value. .
“At the time, there was hardly anyone here, I felt at home in the vastness,” said Zittel, who grew up in Escondido, a vast desert plain near the California-Mexico border. . Hyperallergic in an interview.
Over time, she purchased surrounding parcels of land at county auctions, eventually expanding the property to its current size. Her home, originally 400 square feet, doubled in size, and many other buildings, including two small houses, a serviced RV, and a large studio with a ceramics station, weaving room, and weaving workshop. carpentry, have arisen over the past 20 years. years or more. A shipping container complex also sits across from the original house. Once serving as Zittel’s personal studio, the compound is now home to a number of chickens and doves, fed daily by the various artists-in-residence that AZ West hosts throughout the year. This is how I became intimately familiar with the speaker and its multiple functions when I was artist-in-residence in February and March of this year.
This residency, unlike many others that require the production of exhibitions, presentations, studio visits or a combination of the three, is, like many of Zittel’s projects, extremely specific while being infinite in its possibilities, offering its residents a truly unlimited amount of personal freedom to do what they want to do at their own pace – or do nothing at all – while expecting them to live fairly structured lives by the restrictions of the environment. For example, the bathroom and kitchen available to residents are entirely outdoors, which means that during the winter months, dinner preparation starts early, before sunset. While there, residents are grounded in Zittel’s highly individual overarching aesthetic, a synthesis of elegance and necessity, and have access to the gargantuan landscape that surrounds them, including the aforementioned and nearby Joshua Tree National Park.
Having been stuck in an artistic rut and wondering if I wanted to focus more on creating art or writing art, the extreme freedom and lack of pressure the residency offers appealed to me. I used my time in the desert largely to purify myself from my daily life steeped in the art world and the various roles I occupy in it. Essentially, reconnecting with what I want from my artistic practice on a deeper, more intuitive level, rather than a level derived from personal habits or social expectations.
While the desert is widely associated with oppressive heat, extreme weather conditions can extend throughout the year. During my stay, the resort experienced a historic wind and snowstorm that blew off large sections of the current studio’s roof, downed a nearby power line, and blew out the rear windshield of another resident’s car. The desert is not for the faint of heart or the uninsured. Fortunately, we all were. And Zittel, having developed longstanding relationships with other desert dwellers over the years, wasted no time in bringing in a host of handymen, roofers and friends of AZ West to help restore the complex.
If this all sounds hugely ambitious in terms of scope, that’s because it is. In addition to all of these projects, and in addition to maintaining her own artistic practice, Zittel is a co-founding member and current artistic director of the non-profit organization High Desert Test Sites (HDTS). Founded in 2002 and currently operating out of AZ West, HDTS began as an extremely informal way to bring artists and friends to the wilderness. Although happy to be in her native California, Zittel missed the conversation and company of people in the art world after moving to Joshua Tree, saying that in the desert she and her artist friends who came here “Could have had conversations that you would never have in town.” She found that the paradoxical sense of freedom and closeness in the harsh desert landscape more easily lends itself to day-to-day conversations and the potential for art and creativity outside of the art market.
Over the years, and as is usually the case with organizations that want longevity, High Desert Test Sites has become more and more structured. Although it initially had no official status as an organization, it eventually became a non-profit organization and adopted a board of directors, granting HDTS the ability to apply for grants, lobby to obtain funding and to provide artists with things like travel allowances and project budgets. For many years, HDTS operated without a physical location, existing largely as an email chain between members. Coincidentally, just as Zittel craved more privacy (life gets hectic in a complex constantly frequented by residents, staff, and curious members of the artistic public), High Desert Test Sites sought a formal operating site. Zittel left the property and HDTS moved in.
Currently, the operation runs a variety of on-site programs, including tours of AZ West and the aforementioned residency program. HDTS remains committed to its core mission of sponsoring artists in the development of desert artwork and to date, has “hosted the work of over 460 artists, 12 extensive site-specific programs and 25 solo projects”, as mentioned on the HDTS Website. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the desert, by all accounts, and probably partly thanks to the presence of Zittel and HDTS here, has become a destination hotspot for the contemporary art community.
In addition to the plethora of artists who have moved to the desert or live between the desert and Los Angeles, there are also a number of recurring artistic events, such as Desert X Or Crossing Palm Springs, which occur across the Mojave. A particularly popular attraction is the Noé Purifoy Desert Art Museum assembly Art. Considered by many to be a testament to making art for art’s sake, the museum grew out of the practice of Noah Purifoy, who moved his practice to the desert in the 1980s when he person of the art world was there. A quote from Purifoy that reflects a sentiment similar, if not quite identical, to the philosophy of Zittel and HDTS: “I don’t wish to be an artist, I only wish that art would allow me to be.”
When I asked Zittel if it was difficult for her to leave AZ West, after devoting so much of her life to it, she said that, surprisingly, it was not. What excited her most about AZ West’s transition from a work of hers to the home of High Desert Test Sites was the ability to provide opportunities for other artists, for this to be the legacy. Artwork.
“I want it to become something bigger, something beyond me,” she says.
During my stay in the desert, I did nothing and put absolutely no pressure on myself to create. But while I was in residence, questioning the future of my own artistic practice, I kept coming back to why I got involved in art in the first place: a revolving door of a story tied to my own troubled adolescence in an equally rural hometown. Since returning to Los Angeles, I have returned to Joshua Tree twice to shoot a video essay and create a series of paintings inspired by that memory, and most importantly, I did so out of a genuine desire, and not of a constraint to perform. Sometimes opening yourself up to the possibility of generating nothing produces the most interesting results.
This article was made possible through the support of the Sam Francis Foundation in honor of the 100th birthday of Sam Francis.
