Artist on the Move

Andrea Zittel's Design-Based Works Earn Smithsonian's $25,000 Lucelia Award

Visualize a fleet of stainless-steel RVs, each one not much bigger than a small U-Haul but with a finish worthy of Louis Vuitton. Then customize the inside of these "Escape Vehicles" to the specifications of art-world bigwigs, keen to get away from it all in the smallest of spaces.

Andrea Rosen, the powerful New York dealer, would ask for an interior entirely upholstered in sky-blue velvet; mega-collector Robert Shiffler would want a flotation tank that minimizes sensory stimuli.

These deluxe escape pods exist.

Andrea Zittel designed custom "Escape Vehicles" for mini-getaways. This 1996 version was for artist Dean Valentine.

In the mid-1990s, they won a helping of fame for Andrea Zittel, who is based in Joshua Tree, Calif. Today, thanks to them and to all the work that she's made since, Zittel, 39, will be named the winner of one of the art world's biggest prizes. She is the fifth recipient of the $25,000 Lucelia Artist Award, given annually by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to a leading American artist under the age of 50.

Zittel has said that the mission of her "Escape Vehicles," which condense a patron's tastes and interests into a miniature dwelling, was "to learn more about our values, our needs, and how we choose the roles we play." Almost everything else she's made has had similar goals.

In 1999, Zittel constructed a hollow concrete island off the coast of Denmark, with a house built into it that she lived in for a month. Titled "A-Z Pocket Property," it was a kind of "Escape Vehicle" writ very large.

Zittel's contribution to last year's Whitney Biennial in New York consisted of a small room decked out with her own furniture designs -- which fall somewhere between sculpture and practical objects -- and a video monitor that provided documentation of the experimental housing compound she's assembled at her home in Joshua Tree.

The integration of art and normal life -- with a witty twist -- is a hallmark of Zittel's work. It's often hard to draw a clean line between the art objects that she makes and objects that could as easily qualify as high-concept design. Zittel seems happy keeping that line as blurred as possible.

"Sometimes when I project forward to a hundred years from now I imagine an art historian trying to talk about our times and I think that they will look back more at changes in design than at developments in art," Zittel once said. Her art seems to take design's involvement in the everyday and give it the kind of aggressive creativity that's more usually found in art.

Zittel's design-based art doesn't simply represent the world, or comment on it, as older art forms do. Like the utopian modernism of the early 20th century, it attempts to "extend the artist's activity to all levels of social production," in the words of the catalogue for the 1997 Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, where Zittel made her biggest early splash. You could say that Zittel's art charges right into the thick of how we live, and suggests ways that it might change -- while keeping a certain ironic distance from it, too.

That puts Zittel in line with other winners of the Lucelia award, who have all steered clear of art that hints at the traditional. Previous Lucelias have gone to artists who have served food to museum visitors, tiled the walls of a museum bookshop and photographed the growth of mold. The prize, and the artists so far chosen to receive it, suggest a renewed commitment on the part of the American Art Museum to the experimental end of art. The museum, which has been closed for renovations since 2000, reopens its renovated building July 4, 2006.