You might think that anyone who moves to the boondocks is trying to get away from the daily grind and its battery of routines. But when Andrea Zittel left New York in 2000 for a new home in the Mojave Desert—"23 miles past the sign that says 'Last Service for 100 Miles,'" as she's put it—she'd continue to make more rules for herself. Indeed, Zittel is an artist obsessed with her own self-imposed regimens. And it's her control-freak impulses that are the subject of two shows now at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum at Altria.

While providing a portrait of life at Zittel's desert compound, which she calls A-Z West (her "company" is named A-Z Administrative Services), the exhibitions present a decade of work in which Zittel has married objects with processes—creating art from design while designing life through art. At the New Museum, her A-Z Food Group installation is a kitchen setup that allows one to prepare meals from 18 mix-and-match ingredients—no less, no more. Meanwhile, her A-Z Body Processing Unit is outfitted like a kitchen on top and a bathroom on the bottom; what goes in must come out, and it may as well be done with efficiency.

Zittel's work speaks of the same seemingly self-defeating neuroses with which people diligently schedule free time or depend on therapists to liberate themselves from their dependencies. With her A-Z Uniforms, for example, she made a series of dresses—wearing each one every day for six months before moving on to the next—to break the routine of daily outfits by prescribing yet another routine. For Zittel, independence seems to come not from rejecting parameters, but by creating one's own. In 1999, when she spent a week sealed off from daylight, noise and all other indications of time, she found the experience both "exhilarating" and "a little stressful." Complete freedom can be just as unnerving as its opposite.

Accordingly, it's especially intriguing that Zittel uses the language of modernism to enforce her sense of autonomy. Dominating the New Museum are architectural contraptions ranging from her A-Z Living Units—portable sleeping, eating and storage fixtures that fold into steamer trunks—to the modular pavilions of her A-Z Homestead and Cellular Compartment Units. Zittel leaves the impression of an unrepentant modernist, embracing the strictures of rigorous standardization while being simultaneously captivated by their open possibilities. Yet her expressions are also more introspective. At the Whitney show, she presents her Wagon Stations—customized habitation units designed for a single person—while the New Museum includes her similarly pod-like A-Z Escape Vehicles. Looking mass-produced from the outside, the latter form individualized, contemplative environments within: one imitates a grotto, for example, while another acts as a flotation tank. One can't be free, after all, without first being confined.

George Maciunas may not be the art world's most widely-recognized (or pronounceable) name, but that's probably the way he would have wanted it. From the early 1960s to his death in 1978, the Lithuanian-born, New York-based maverick led the Fluxus group, which revived the irreverent, anti-art spirit of Dada and ran with it. With the participation of artists including Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys and others, what resulted was a subversive, multi-disciplinary movement that upturned hierarchies and questioned authorship. And much of that is brilliantly captured in an exhibition currently on view at Maya Stendhal gallery. Drawn from the collection of Jonas Mekas, the avant-garde filmmaker, Anthology Film Archives founder and Maciunas friend, the show includes everything from a portfolio of images faxed in by Fluxus artists to films and objects, like a box of matches that instructs the user to set all art on fire—saving the last match for the box itself.