3rd of May

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Andrea Zittel. A survey of Zittel’s work, titled “Lay of the Land,” is on view now at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England. The show was organized by Stockholm’s Magasin 3, where it opened late last year. In 2005, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York organized a traveling American survey of her work.

Zittel lives and works at A-Z West outside Joshua Tree, Calif., an enterprise that encompasses “all aspects of day to day living, [in which] home furniture, clothing, food all become the sites of investigation in an ongoing endeavor to better understand human nature and the social construction of needs.” Zittel also operates High Desert Test Sites, a series of experimental art sites in the California desert.

Zittel and I discuss:

How she discovered the open West — and bombs in it — as a child;

The relationship between Zittel’s work and artists’ examination of the Western landscape;

The origin of the idea that led to Indy Island (2010) and the similarities between living on a lake and living in the desert; and

Her long-term plans for the future of A-Z West.

For the show’s second segment, Katherine Ball, who lived on Zittel’s Indy Island, joins me to discuss her residency at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. As part of her residency deployed organic mycobooms around the lake to control pollution and installed a greywater system on the Island. [This week’s banner features Indy Island (2010), fiberglass, foam, mixed media. Commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.]

Ball chronicled her time in Indianapolis here. The website is full of photos, videos and stories. Who knew greywater, mycobooms and living on a Zittel could be so interesting? (Some of the pictures and links to specific videos are in the jump, so please click through.)

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The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. It is released under this Creative Commons license. For images of the works discussed on this week’s show, click through to the jump.