IN the 1960s, when Andy Warhol said, "I want to be a machine," he meant that he wanted his work as an artist to be as efficient as an assembly line. He called his studio "The Factory," brought mechanical reproduction into painting and treated bodies of work like lines of consumer products.
Since the early 1990s, Andrea Zittel has been bringing Warhol's celebration of working-class industriousness into the age of upscale niche marketing.
She has embraced the language of managerial professionalism, using her initials to name her office-style organization: "A-Z Administrative Services."
She works in series, designing compact kitchens ("A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit, Model 003"), kitchen-bathroom combinations ("A-Z Body Processing Unit"), houses ("A-Z Cellular Compartment Units") and plastic islands ("A-Z Deserted Islands"), as well as customized pods ("A-Z Escape Vehicles"), outhouse-size libraries ("Prototype for A-Z Cool Chamber") and stylish toolsheds ("A-Z Homestead Units"). Dresses ("A-Z Personal Uniforms"), blankets ("A-Z Covers"), bedpans ("A-Z Chamber Pots"), light fixtures ("A-Z Wallens") and poster-style pictures, some with anodyne, New Age-style captions, fill out Zittel's impressive inventory of domestic goods.
She has also published a newsletter, keeping clients abreast of developments at A-Z East, her Brooklyn studio that, in Zittel-ese, is "a showroom testing grounds." If Zittel were to paraphrase Warhol, it isn't difficult to imagine her saying, "I want to be the CEO of a designer boutique -- one that brings Russian Constructivism to the L.L. Bean set."
At the Museum of Contemporary Art, "Andrea Zittel: Critical Space" looks more like a trade show than an art exhibition. Handsomely installed in the Geffen Contemporary, the survey of works from 1991 to 2005, organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, is unpretentious, user-friendly, informative and enjoyable.
The amusement factor is high, as is the sense of bemused curiosity that accompanies presentations of innovative products displayed as prototypes, experiments, trial runs. Zittel's series benefit tremendously by being seen en masse rather than individually. Among their best features is the capacity to get pragmatic consumers to suspend disbelief -- to get past the skepticism of product evaluation and wonder, momentarily, about a world that is different from the real one. That has been one of art's jobs, at least since Romanticism.
