Customer Reviews

Andrea Zittel Critical Space

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This is a high quality print art book, is well edited, with the artist's career and thoughts organized into chapters, somewhat chronologically. Zittel is only in her late 30s and is super prolific so this book is really like an early mid life summary and not a true retrospective.

Zittel's lists of ideas are handy. When I am feeling down about the messiness, the lack of space, urban decay, and my relative poverty, I just need to look at one of her lists to get cheered up (e.g., matte surfaces hide dirt, how much space does one need, anyway?) She has such a sense of humor about stuff that most people get too serious about (today, everyone wants more space, more clothes, more variety.... Zittel makes you laugh and question, why? And to recognize that too much choice, too much stuff becomes oppressive).

I predict that Zittel will be as recognized one day as a Knoll, a Perriand, a Schindler-type epoch-maker, a messiah, a visionary for modernist design. Under the terms of our mass consumer culture, she cannot become really popular, but she has the right critical outsider attitude, and with such a happy, cheerful twist. I wish Target or some mass market producer would adopt some of her ideas and sell them to the masses (the bowl-in-the-table, the carpets made to look like furniture, the "uniform" outfit, the A-Z living unit, etc.).

Zittel has the vision to improve the average person's life through simple changes, and even allow people to spend less money for fewer, but better designed, "re-thought" products.

Andrea Zittel is a remarkable artist and this book is proof of it. It looks effortless, the way she explores her world and turns reality into art and art into reality. Her art combines the abstract with the concrete, the uniform with unique, the wise with the simple truth. It is not critical space, it is critical living (where a living is a space too).

RADICAL DESIGN -from the Modern Design Dictionary
This movement emerged in Italy in the 1960s and, like its close counterpart Anti-Design, was firmly opposed to the tenets of `Good Design' and style as marketing tools divorced from the social and cultural possibilities inherent in the design process. Centred around avant-garde design groups such as Archizoom, Superstudio, Global Tools, and 9999, the movement expressed its ideas through the publication of manifestos, reviews, and articles, participation in national and international competitions and exhibitions, expository films, research, and teaching. Although ideologically aligned to the broader aims of Anti-Design, those associated with Radical Design were more politically motivated, devoting considerable energy to research into urban architecture, innovation, and the environment. Strongly opposed to the constraints of capitalism, the role of the consumer-user was central to their thinking and reflected their attraction to sociocultural possibilities such as those proposed by alternative lifestyle models like those of the Beat poets and subsequent hippy movement. Many aspects of the Radical Design agenda were displayed at the 1968 Venice Biennale and subsequently at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in its Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition of 1972, supported by the accompanying publication edited by Emilio Ambasz, the show's curator. Rather like those of the Italian Futurists 60 years earlier, the ideas of the Radical Designers remained largely in the form of paper projects and printed manifestos rather than fully realized designs, buildings, and environments. Nonetheless, like Futurism before it, Radical Design exerted a significant influence on subsequent avant-garde design activity and outlook.