On Signifying Practice

Andrea Zittel's Raugh Furniture

“The object of consumption quite precisely is that in which the project is re-signed.” - Baudrillard

Zittel deconstructs the signs that compose everyday existence, manipulates precedents for designed social contexts, etc.

Beyond their functional endpoint or manifestation as installation pieces, Zittel is also deconstructing the entire chain of commercial production. She doesn’t hesitate to refer to her work as a “product” and functions as a kind of vertically integrated one-woman cottage industry, handling the entire production process from design to advertising to assembly.

Despite the fact that her independence turns the notion of a “market” on its ear by embodying a system that would normally rely on a network of independently self-interested individuals, her work is still aware that it exists as a micro-market nested in the larger context of the art market. Between these markets, she constructs objects that explain the world and make it livable – in a way that’s simultaneously sincere and absurd.

Zittels’s socially oriented work could be thought of as documenting the shift from old materialism (and civil society) to new materialism (social humanity) – bringing historically unprecedented practicality to daily life by re-engineering social contexts and the material of living and social interaction in a way that sheds the impracticalities accumulated by social systems of the traditional infrastructure of material existence.