I accept apprenticed west to see her from the “Experimental Living Cabins,” set on 15 acreage a 40-minute drive abroad in Wonder Valley, a desolate, unincorporated bend of the Mojave Desert, abreast the atramentous drape of Twentynine Palms, home to one of the better aggressive training areas in the country. Zittel started affairs up acreage to add to her backing several years ago, admiring by the site’s absorption and the several broken-down “jackrabbit homesteads” on the acreage (really, little added than a arenaceous application of desert), charcoal of the Small Tract Act of 1938, which absorbed antecedents to “prove up” bristles acres. (The breadth is so brusque that few absolutely stayed.) She now owns three of the cabins, admitting abandoned two are renovated: simple board-and-batten structures, corrective gray with white trim, that angle abandoned amidst the abrade brush, 600 anxiety afar in the wide, collapsed basin belted in the ambit by purpled mountains. She originally advised to use them for herself — ironically, amid casual afternoon visitors and the association who appear for best stays in barter for advice with armpit maintenance, A-Z West is such a accumulate these canicule that Zittel rarely has the abandoned time she craves — but like best elements in her life, the cabins accept become allotment of her work, conceivably alike the ultimate announcement of it.
When she bought the acreage in Wonder Valley, she was in the bosom of authoritative a alternation of sculptures alleged “Planar Configurations,” based on her longstanding allure with the “planar panel” — basically, annihilation that is rectangular, whether a 4-by-8 allotment of plywood, a 8½-by-11 breadth of printer cardboard or a table top. Anniversary sculpture, fabricated of wood, red fiberglass and black-matte aluminum or steel, is a set of commutual rectangles, like a 3D Mondrian, that action as a table, bed, adverse and allowance divider. Last year, Zittel, consistently balked by how few bodies absolutely get to collaborate with her work, and anytime on the anchor for means to accounts her abounding projects, had a revelation: She could put a “Planar Configuration” central anniversary of the cabins, and acquiesce bodies to break in them, for ante commensurable to a adjacent Airbnb. It would be the aboriginal time that a drifter could abide in Zittel’s cosmos abounding time, in absolute privacy, in adverse to the “Wagon Station Encampment” with its common appearance and accumulation activities.
The “Experimental Living Cabins,” at which I am one of the aboriginal guests, are advised for abandoned visitors who break anywhere from two canicule to three weeks, and admitting a scattering of boxlike one-story houses dot the area, they are so low, and so distant, that it’s accessible to balloon they abide at all. One can go for canicule after animal interaction, or one can hop in the car and drive bottomward the clay alley to the Palms Restaurant for a beer. The point of the cabins isn’t to achieve the now-clichéd off-the-grid adventure, but to abide aloof a few accomplish alfresco absolute life, in a stripped-down but absolutely anatomic ambiance — to re-examine, alike relearn, accustomed activities. A acceptable disorientation, alike an epiphany or two, ability appear from accomplishing after accepted touchstones like, say, a mirror, or a refrigerator. (Visitors are accustomed a accumulation of bottled water, but accompany in their own aliment and ice to banal the cooler.)
And there is affluence of appliance in the accurate sense, aloof not annihilation that reads calmly as such. “I do accept in a assertive bulk of comfort,” Zittel says. “I accept in accepting a acceptable atom to position your anatomy so you can relax and do things. But I appetite bodies to acquisition their own abundance after actuality catered to. It’s not aloof cat-and-mouse there for you.”
She is carefully accustomed with the comfortable-uncomfortable awareness that the cabins can evoke; it characterized her aboriginal years in the desert. Aback Zittel larboard Brooklyn in 2000, abounding in the art apple beheld it as a hasty curtailment or alike the end of her career. She had spent about a decade represented by the acclaimed Andrea Rosen Gallery, assuming such allegedly urban-inflected works as the 1994 “A-Z Living Units,” a forerunner to the “Planar Configurations” — carriageable pods that seemed aggressive by awkward studios: Barbie’s-Dreamhouse-by-way-of-Bauhaus.
Although she had developed up arctic of San Diego and spent time at her grandparents’ agronomical in California’s Imperial Valley, she didn’t ache for the wilderness in her 10 years in New York. There were no signs in her assignment of the amoebic monumentalism alike with the sculptors and conceptualists who aboriginal decamped for the desert, and she didn’t accept the blazon to arrect a abiding building of her art, as did the aggregation artisan Noah Purifoy, a avant-garde aback he larboard L.A. for Joshua Tree in the 1980s. Nor did she accord break of absent to actualize a accepted home and couch into a aloof accord with two-dimensional work, as had the changeable artists who abundantly forsook New York City for the Southwest, Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin. She was social, hosting account cocktail parties in her Williamsburg townhouse.
But as others began advertent Brooklyn, she began activity a cull against the sun-blasted, abandoned breadth of her childhood. Zittel sees herself as allotment of the 20th-century attitude of American artists abrogation cities for the accessible spaces of the Southwest, but she is acquainted of her deviations. O’Keeffe and Martin chose the arid as a anatomy of retreat, but Zittel saw it as liberation. As for the parallels generally fatigued amid her and the abundantly blowing artists who came to accomplish their massive, blowing marks on the desert, she acclaim addendum that she is not absorbed in “grand interventions,” abandoned in award acceptation in intimate, accustomed gestures. “The act of inhabiting and accepting an evolving accord with a amplitude or abode is inherently altered from the act of installing works like ‘Spiral Jetty’ or ‘Double Negative,’ ” she says.
During my break in the cabin, I accustomed a accepted bent by the movements of the sun: After aurora nudged me alive about five, I rose from the bed allocation of the “Planar Configuration” and apart both doors to let in the aboriginal cross-breeze. Again I biconcave ant corpses from the ice acknowledgment and retrieved my sack of arena coffee. I arrested my shoes for scorpions/tarantulas, and stepped alfresco to the composting toilet. I’d save the alfresco battery — a baptize catchbasin adapted with a duke pump — for after in the day, aback the calefaction was unbearable. Again it was off to appraise the abbreviating freshwater assets and to conduct frugal ablutions over a animate bore that drained through a atramentous corrupt into a brazier below. I abounding the kettle. Ignited the propane stove. Set out French press, basin and spoon. (In befitting with Zittel’s catechism, there are abandoned bowls, never glasses or plates, which she deems unnecessarily use-specific.) Carried two atramentous board best stools out to the patio, one for sitting, the added for my breakfast and books. Every time a bean of damp formed bottomward my leg, I’d accept it was an ant and approved to flick it off, never learning.
In the afternoon, the hot wind in my face like a draft dryer on high, I collection to the air-conditioned bounded library, with Zittel’s blessing; the berth break is meant to be arduous but not life-threatening. Aback home about 6:00 p.m., I adapted a meal of spiced beans, avocado and tortillas and done up in the final sliver of sun. After lighting the oil lanterns, I watched their ablaze patterns, again sat alfresco to read. By 9:30 p.m. I was asleep, aloft white sheets, belted in ceaseless darkness.
Before my trip, I’d been cerebration about Zittel in affiliation to the social-utopia-makers of the 19th century, the “material feminists” who approved liberation by transforming the calm sphere. In 1868, Melusina Fay Peirce, an organizer and author, spearheaded the “cooperative housekeeping movement,” proposing that wives allegation their husbands for their calm labor. The biographer and advocate Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued for demography the kitchen out of the house, authoritative it common and hiring cooks to abate the accountability of “women’s work.” Could Zittel’s exciting innovations be postmodern birth of these ideas?
But perched on a stool with the oil lamp and a book, the night astonishingly bashful save for a abandoned coyote in the distance, I accomplished that Zittel isn’t absorbed in alteration association or accomplishing political or amusing perfection, but is instead gluttonous liberation of a added clandestine sort. Because here’s the aberrant thing: I never did get bored, or lonely, or active during my assignment in Zittel’s world. For all my concrete ache throughout the week, I acquainted deeply, chiefly calm. Existing abandoned in an alien amplitude in which every detail has been advised and acid to its ultimate action was accompanying abatement and stimulating. Engaged so carefully with my actual surroundings, I was able to asphyxiate out my abiding anxieties. Bowls were no best aloof bowls: They were the sole all-important vessel. After a armchair back, I sat up taller and lay bottomward on the arena to watch the stars. I began to see the cabins as achievement art, but with the artisan herself absent — or, maybe, with the eyewitness demography the artist’s role. There was a affectionate of generosity, or trust, in that gesture.
Among the abstracts Zittel had larboard me — an appropriate mix that included Viktor E. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” aback issues of “Lapham’s Quarterly” and bounded biking guides — was an age-old paperback, “Flatland: A Romance of Abounding Dimensions.” Aboriginal appear in 1884 by Edwin A. Abbott, an English theologian who wrote the atypical beneath the pseudonym A. Square, it is an Euclidean sci-fi fantasy about a acculturation of polygons who abide an alternating two-dimensional absoluteness — not my accepted genre, but during the continued nights, I gave myself over to the almost sublimated banter of Victorian values.
