'Andrea Zittel: Critical Space' at the New Museum

Embracing the realm of marketing and manufacturing, the better to critique and undermine it: Zittel's "A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit, Model 003." (By Christopher Dawson)

Andrea Zittel crossbreeds design and marketing and art like almost no one else. That's what has made her name over the past decade or so. Last year, when she won the Smithsonian American Art Museum's $25,000 Lucelia Artist Award, the art world was hardly surprised. Ditto this year, when the New Museum, one of the country's most important centers for contemporary art, launched a full-scale retrospective for the 40-year-old artist.

The show provides a fine overview of Zittel's art to date -- almost all produced under the banner of "A-Z Administrative Services," the corporate identity that the Californian assumed in 1991, soon after moving to New York.

The A-Z "brand" has been on clothing: In the early 1990s, Zittel went months at a time wearing a single "uniform," before replacing it with a new one, also of her own design and manufacture. This show features a slew of her outfits.

It has been on interior decor: A little later in the 1990s, she made a series of "A-Z Living Units," like room-size steamer trunks that fold out to reveal all the necessities of modern urban life: cot, hot plate, tea set, wardrobe, filing cabinet. Several are in this show.

And the brand has been on a series of luxury "A-Z Escape Vehicles," works that first brought Zittel widespread attention. They look vaguely like U-Haul trailers, and are handcrafted from stainless steel by a camper company in California. The 100-cubic-foot interior of each pod is customized by Zittel to the specifications of its art-world owner: Los Angeles collector Dean Valentine had his done up in vintage wood, like some old cabin in the forest; Andrea Rosen, Zittel's powerful New York dealer, had her interior entirely upholstered in tufted velvet, with detailing in mirror and glass -- like a cross between a coffin and an art deco cocktail lounge; another collector turned his into a tiny spa, with water-blue floor, heater and pump.

More recently, Zittel has moved into a compound that she has built in the California desert near Joshua Tree National Park -- "A-Z West," this venture's called -- where she has been experimenting with a whole new A-Z lifestyle, from housing to refuse recycling to artful new ways of serving food.

For a century and more, artists have wanted to set themselves apart from the corrupt and corrupting world of marketing and manufacturing. Zittel instead embraces that central aspect of our modern lives, to critique and undermine it from within. A work called "A-Z Breeding Unit," for instance, is a high-design chicken coop and hatchery, in blond wood and steel. Zittel used it to house eight birds that had been carefully bred by the poultry industry for very different traits, which the artist blended once again to a generic chicken-ness. She used agro-business means to undo the work of agro-business.

If there's a problem with Zittel's work, however, it's that constant contact with the world of slick commerce may have made it too slickly commercial. Zittel's "uniforms" have as much tasteful style as rebellion in them; her living units are irresistibly elegant and well-designed, and owe as much to Ikea as to dada and Duchamp; her escape vehicles are so witty and good-looking, they fit right in with all the other stylish objects her well-heeled collectors own.