Almost every artist at some point in their career stops and asks themselves: What am I doing? Existential questions can be daunting, but for those who endure the discomfort, they can also be the first step toward a major breakthrough.
Few artists are better equipped to confront this question than Andrea Zittel, whose work has long explored the meaning of life, transforming the routines of everyday life into art. She is perhaps best known for arizona westa massive land art project in the Mojave Desert. Covering an area of 80 acres, arizona west Serving as a testing ground for new lifestyles, it features experimental sleeping pods and a communal kitchen. All food, textiles and furniture are produced on site.
Zittel’s AZ uniform series Reimagine everyday life in a more personal way. In 1991, she handmade an outfit that she wore every day for six months—a process she’s repeated ever since, changing outfits according to the California seasons.
Her work is grounded in intentionality, sustainability, and art that slows down, potentially working against the growing dynamics of the art world. So a few years ago, Zittel decided to take a step back — taking time away from exhibitions to think about what it means to maintain a creative life during a career. Now she reappears with a new perspective and a new body of work, making her debut at Sprüth Magers in Berlin.
Below, she discusses her time of reflection and the new rules she has developed to guide her return.
Landscape from Andrea Zittel’s exhibition “Public Performances of the Self” at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2025.
Timo Oler
I’ve always been curious about how people deal with burnout in the art world. Rest may be good for creativity, but it’s hard to come by! Was there anything in particular that prompted you to take time away from public life?
Yes, absolutely. i love my life arizona westbut as the project grew and became larger and more complex, it became unsustainable for me as an individual artist to support it. I was exhausted…I remember telling my friends that I felt like I was running in front of a speeding freight train.
arizona west My personal art practice supported me financially, which created a situation where I felt like I couldn’t create truly experimental work. I can only take on projects that I know will generate enough revenue to support AZ West, and as we know, finances dictate art is not the way to be an artist.
Also, I’m a very introverted person, and arizona west It’s becoming more and more public and it’s just so difficult to live in the midst of it all.
Tell me about your experience in “The Hermit’s Cave,” as you call it. What did you do? What did you learn?
The past few years have actually been pretty intense. when i leave arizona westI wanted to keep all possibilities open—including the option to stop making art. I’ve done similar cleanups before, but nothing as extreme or long-term as this.
What I did most during this time was writing and reading. I spend a lot of time thinking about art and life and the relationship between the two. My mother passed away, and I thought a lot about the meaning of individual life: what we do in the world and what we leave behind. My mother also has Alzheimer’s, so I reflect a lot on “self” – who we are as individuals, or at least, what this “self” is that we spend our lives constructing. For in her case it was as if her self had disappeared before her physical body.
This all happened as I was approaching my 60th birthday, so obviously it was a time of major change in outlook on life. My early practice was about how to live, how to get through life, and how to be relatively content and well in the world. But when you live later in life in a world that’s also starting to fall apart, you start asking some big questions about the meaning of everything.
This sounds drastic, but it’s also a meaningful way to think about it. You often blend art and life. Does this feel harder to do in more difficult times?
I’ve taken breaks before, but each time I ended up realizing that art was my way of making sense of the world. Through my work I am able to explore or unpack the things that are important to me. Therefore, even in difficult times, the integration of art and life always feels natural.
But making the work public raises a bigger problem. When I realized I was going to re-enter the “art conversation,” I wanted to figure out a better, or at least different, way to express my ideas. Previous iterations of my practice often relied on prefabricated structures—experimental living structures—that I would create, use, and then ultimately transport for exhibition. But lately, I’ve been wanting to do something more direct. I essentially want the act of living or what I do in life to be the work itself.
I should add that this is partly for personal reasons. For example, if I don’t need a big studio and staff, it frees me up financially and geographically. But I’m also troubled by how wasteful the current model of making and displaying art is. I kept thinking there had to be a better way.
How do you find ways to advance your art??
I set some rules for myself and then challenged myself to come up with a body of work that fit within that framework. The rules are:
• Work that arises directly from daily life.
• Work can be done anywhere—at the kitchen table or in a hotel room.
• Efficiently produced work.
• Jobs that require little space for storage and are easy to transport.
• Works that embody what it means to be present and participate in culture today.
Andrea Zittel: Public Expressions of Self (9-20-2024, General Sherman Tree, Sequoia)2025.
Photo Timo Oler
These are great rules. I like them to be clear and broad at the same time. How do they fare on your show?
for my new work public self-expressionI think whenever I’m in a situation around other people, I’m performing myself. I have always been influenced by Allan Kaprow’s definition of performance as performing a function or task other than performing for an audience, and this new work hinges on this dual meaning.
When I’m out, I ask the people I’m with to take a few pictures with their cell phone cameras. I started writing reports after each performance, using a mixture of the dry descriptive language used in conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s, and some of the more descriptive language used in social media posts. For example, I wrote that I perform myself in a personal uniform (an ongoing project since the early 1990s). In that paragraph, I described the uniform, my hair, my lip gloss, and my shoes. And then I’ll talk about what I’m doing… They end up having a dry humor, which I think is great.
Later, when I decided to show the works in a gallery, I chose a format that was also a homage to early conceptual performance work. The text and images are mounted on a black mat, with a black frame forming a geometric structure.
When I was studying art, I actually started in photography, when everything was analog. Now back to the medium, the efficiency and fluidity of digital photography continues to be astonishing. All work is saved in a file on my computer and can be printed from anywhere.
Can you tell me about one of those performances?
The performances were all from everyday life, so they described grocery shopping with my partner or son, visiting a national park or a museum, and in one of the performances, I visited Spiral Pier first.
It’s hard to pick a show to talk about, but there’s one where my partner Katie, my son Emmett, and I took a trolley ride from Palm Springs to Idyllwild to escape the summer heat. There were so many people at the top that we had to take turns looking at the view – while my son kept looking at his phone, even though there was no signal. But even so, the views were incredible and there was something otherworldly about the experience, which I think you can glimpse in the images.
