A to Z Breeding Unit: For Averaging Eight Breeds, 1993

Zittel’s A-Z Enterprise is a series of experimental, reflective—even quasi-utopian—efforts to assess and reconsider the basics of human existence, from housing to food and social interaction. In these investigations of the biologic imperatives, ingrained habits, and social conditions of daily life, the artist attempts a fuller understanding of the spectrum of human needs and wants. In the 1990s, Zittel became fascinated by the practice and artifice of breeding—the design of living creatures. As part of this work, she identified the signature traits of selectively bred Bantam chickens and set a goal to reverse their domestication and return their genetic structure to its originary, pre-interference state, thereby presumably restoring the animals’ intrinsic traits. Successive crossbreeding demonstrated that the “signature” traits of the Bantams were the result of selective breeding, which had rendered their recessive traits dominant; these recessive traits then vanished as Zittel’s breeding process approached an “average” chicken.