The orangewood experiment

The Orangewood Experiment: Reclaiming Power through Art and Design

(excerpt  from paper presented at PCA/ACA conference by Gina Optdycke Terry, PhD on April 18, 2019)

Five black binders, impressive in the meticulous documentation of events transpiring well over a decade ago, arrive on my doorstep. A table of contents in each instructs me on how to read the binders, provides a cast of characters, and directs me to the tabs and labels throughout. The overreaching narrative of the content involves Orangewood, a New Urban design project in Sarasota, FL designed to help a Florida citrus family recover losses due to pre-NAFTA trade agreements. Connected to the story are over 80 large, colorful paintings, whose creation stems from the struggle to see Orangewood realized. Herbert Simon remarks of the design process that it allows the creator to “devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Orangewood should have been the grove’s economic salvation, but instead it became a part of a complicated legal fight over the ownership of land and ideas. Throughout it all artist Jean Charlotte McLean sought to document her experiences, both in text and in images. McLean admits that she was “very verbal” about using art as a form of documentation, and as in standard legalese “a document” is any “written or graphic matter or other means of presenting thought or expression,” the paintings are also a viable and valuable testimony.  The process of documenting through writing and painting provided a means for McLean to symbolically control the narrative in a time when she had little legal or economic control. Orangewood lies at the center of the visual and textual narratives, demonstrating that the way we tell our stories, here through land, design, text, and image, often works as a reclamation of power – even if that power is only symbolic or intensely personal. In this way, the Orangewood Experiment demonstrates the performativity of text, image, and environment, and serves as a warning about the legal precariousness of ideas, design, and ownership.

Gina Opdycke Terry is an Adjunct Associate Professor of English and Humanities and an independent scholar whose work focuses on the interaction of text and image in a variety of media.

CALL FOR PAPERS: 

Art and Design Culture

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline for Submissions: October 1, 2018

The Art and Design Culture area examines and engages the realms of the visual world as constructed by visual artists and designers as they interact with the popular and professional domains in which they live and work. We welcome proposals from art and design historians, cultural critics, practicing artists and designers, and others for whom the aesthetic and cultural implications of art and design play an important role. This area asks the question that W.J.T. Mitchell poses as the title of his 2005 volume: “What do Pictures Want?” which interrogates “The Lives and Loves of Images,” because, as Gerhard Richter notes “Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense.” (Mitchell 1, xv) and as Herbert Simon remarked “to design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”.

The Art and Design Culture area serves as a forum for theoretically informed approaches to the visual at PCA/ACA. The area focuses on the exploration of the interaction and exchange between self-consciously created art and design and the popular, and on the interrogation of the resulting visual objects and situations as cultural constructs.

As the name suggests this area is larger than a consideration of works or art or design as discrete objects, and seeks to examine the networks of culture in which these objects play a part. This reflects the influence of Material Culture Studies and Visual and Cultural Studies on Art and Design History. Engagement with the idea of design culture, as proposed by Guy Julier in The Culture of Design, opens up areas beyond the visual for examination: “design culture requires its observers to move beyond visual and material attributes to consider the multivarious and multilocational networks of its creation and manifestation.” This area serves as a forum for sharing research that reaches out beyond the traditional bounds of art and design history to examine works of art and design in various contexts, from galleries and museums to the pages of magazines and living rooms, through various forms of sensory perception, and through the lenses of various methodological and cultural frameworks.

We are soliciting papers for the upcoming PCA/ACA conference next April in Washington D.C. that may consider but are not limited to:

• Art broadly defined: painting, sculpture, installation, sound, photography, film, video, digital media, etc.
• Design broadly defined: interior decoration, graphic design, industrial/product design, digital design, the built environment, landscape architecture, etc.
• The meaning of looking and being looked at
• Spectacle and surveillance
• Networks of vision
• Visual transcultures
• Networks through which design and art are circulated
• Art and design as networks of cultural exchange
• The politics of display and exhibition
• Theoretical issues related to art and design
• Spectacle
• Identity
• Cultural Hybridity or Syncretism

 Please submit an abstract by October 1, 2018 of no more than 250 words of your proposed paper and a short 50-word bio with contact information at http://ncp.pcaaca.org. Instructions for logging in and submitting proposals appear on the home screen of the site. Instructions are available also here: http://www.pcaaca.org/conference/instructions.php