Andrea Zittel:
A - Z Deserted Islands

The idea of the deserted island represents both our biggest fear and our biggest fantasy.

For the past six years my work has almost exclusively dealt with aspects of private space and personal experience. When I begin to think about translating these interests to public space I found myself drawn to issues of territory; the need for personal identity or autonomy; and then our simultaneous and often conflicting desire for the security and intimacy of "community".

My ideas about individuality and community as they relate to territory are distinctly American in the sense that Americans are more specifically sensitized to physical, rather than cultural, boundaries. The American pioneering spirit has created within us a real drive towards the possession and protection of a definable territory. This territory may be identified by a green lawn and a chain link fence, by our desire to ride to work within the isolation of our own private vehicles, or by our reluctance to share a restaurant table with strangers.

Perhaps this is why I respond to the physicality of the early European moated city – which I can’t help but view as an island and a ship. I find these images comforting a self-contained entities (much like a familiar planet floating in an unknown universe). And yet, at the same time, this entities contain an intimacy and sense of community that is not necessarily found in contemporary urban life.

When I think about a popular icon that reminds me both of the European moated city and the American desire for isolationism, the image of the deserted island comes to mind. I love the way that the "deserted island" is used to represent both our biggest fear and our greatest fantasy. This attraction/repulsion plays itself out in popular culture vis-a-vis in representations such as the cartoon of the overworked insurance salesman marooned on a deserted island with two beautiful bikini-clad women, or the story of the Robinson Crusoe destined to struggle alone on his island against the odds of nature.

In Münster, I am placing several "A–Z Deserted Islands" in a little body of water - a recollected fragment of the old city moat. The structure reference a cross between an artficial land formation and a recreational fiberglass boat. The "A–Z Deserted Islands" can work as a prototype for a mass-reproducible recreational vehicle that could conceivably be marketed for the purpose of "an individualized experience of isolation within a safe and comfortable environment." I find it rather ironic that most often it is the mass-reproduced product that best mediates our (often contradictiory) desires of craving individual experience, with the accompanying need to maintain oneself within a safe and predictable environment.