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With JJ Higgins and Jeremy Mikolajczak

Versionfest, Chicago, IL, 2010

Making Meaning and Context: a Radical Reconsideration of Art’s Work, Goddard, College, Plainfield, VT, 2011

Project Statement

Orange juice is the ubiquitous morning drink of North America. Orange juice has the power to turn B&W video to color, make the sun rise, and spare a person from drinking calcium-rich cocktails of pureed sardines, turnips and other cruciferous vegetables. Employing relational art strategies as a portals to civic engagement, Agent Orangerie explores our collective unexamined relationship towards orange juice inviting people to play with the materiality of what constitutes commercial orange juice as a metaphor for the dislocation between our received notion of an agriculture based on place and season rather than protocols and processes of factory farming.

Orange juice is the ubiquitous morning drink of North America. We give little thought the actual substance poured from boxes and plastic bottles labeled “Simply Orange”, “Pure Premium”, or “Florida Natural”. Orange juice has the power to turn black and white video to color, make the sun rise, and spare a person from drinking calcium-rich cocktails of pureed sardines, turnips and other cruciferous vegetables. Farmers hand cartons of juice straight from the grove through refrigerated portals to unsuspecting women at the supermarket. Decades of consumer marketing have positioned the fantasy as an accepted reality. Employing relational art strategies as a portals to civic engagement, Agent Orangerie explores our collective unexamined relationship towards orange juice inviting people to play with the materiality of what constitutes commercial orange juice as a metaphor for the dislocation between our received notion of an agriculture based on place and season rather than protocols and processes of factory farming.

As past and current residents of Florida, our experience of the pervasiveness of oranges and their signifiers reveals disconnects between tasty beverage, billboard luring tourists, mono-cultured commercial groves, suburban landscaping plants, and abandoned groves festooned with land developer’s signs promising retirees a better life. We propose to employ the structure of the orangerie, a citrus greenhouse built by well-to-do Europeans in the 18th century, as a platform/laboratory for discussing the “nature” of orange juice questioning the authenticity of both its material substance and our received notion of the origin/process of this ubiquitous and pervasive aspect of an American morning ritual. Early orangeries were exotic, coming from another place and time—evidencing extreme social and economic disparity. In the mid 1600’s (and beyond), having an orangerie was only for the wealthy. The openness of the orangerie resembles an arcade. In their French origin, the arcades became the habitat of the flâneur—whom, according to Baudelaire, was a person who walks the city in order to experience it. These walking explorations of the city became experiences that altered perceptions of social, economic, cultural and literary boundaries, an experience of urban phenomena in the modern world. In the spirit of the flâneur, this Agent Orangerie encourages the audience to become a part of the experience, taking the ideas of ‘location’ and experience to another level. In the experiment, as well as the experience, the audience is the controller of the mechanism, allowing itself to cross over freely into an experience that becomes both personal and collaborative.