Twenty
years ago, the conceptual artist Mel Chin cold-called the offices of
“Melrose Place,” Aaron Spelling’s wildly popular prime-time soap opera,
with a proposition. What if a task force of artists supplied free
artworks and props for the show’s apartment-complex set, with coded
cultural messages on pressing topics like reproductive rights, American
foreign policy, alcoholism and sexual politics?
Deborah
Siegel, the show’s set decorator, listened to this absurd offer and had
an instant reaction. “I thought it sounded really interesting,” she
said in a recent interview. “So I met with him.”
This
was the beginning of a conceptual artist’s dream, an ongoing
intervention into the very heart of American mass culture. In late 1995,
Mr. Chin and a team of 100 mostly unknown artists, called the Gala
Committee, began a two-year experiment, placing objects on the set of “Melrose Place.”
They took their cues from scripts provided in advance and in some
instances worked with the writers to modify plot lines and develop
characters.
On Friday, at the Red Bull Studios New York in Chelsea, 100 objects from the committee’s work go on display in the exhibition “Total Proof: The Gala Committee 1995-1997.”
The
exhibition, through Nov. 20, will be, appropriately enough, a rerun.
Viewers of “Melrose Place” saw a version of it in April 1997, in a
television episode featuring an actual exhibition at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, “Uncommon Sense,” which included many
of the works produced for the set.
In
it, Heather Locklear, as the hard-charging advertising executive Amanda
Woodward, has just taken on the museum as a client and brings her love
interest, Kyle McBride (Rob Estes), to the opening for a stimulating
evening of art talk.
Much
of it takes place in front of a Ross Bleckner-like painting that
alludes to the American bombing of Baghdad. That work was ordered by
Carol Mendelsohn, the show’s head writer. This fictional opening, filmed
two weeks before the museum’s opening, was one of the great meta
moments in television history.
Mr.
Chin is by now a well-known figure, a skilled organizer of socially
provocative works that can last for years. In a recent project typical
of his approach, “The Tie That Binds,”
he used native plants to create eight drought-resistant gardens along
the Los Angeles River. Visitors were invited to take away a blueprint
for one of the gardens and replicate it at home, furthering the cause of
water conservation.
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The
“Melrose Place” idea began when Mr. Chin was shuttling back and forth
between the University of Georgia, where he held a temporary
professorship, and the California Institute of the Arts, where he was
conducting a workshop. “We discussed pop culture and Hollywood,” said
Valerie Tevere, one of his Cal Arts students and now an associate
professor of art at the College of Staten Island. “How might artists
work with TV. What sort of things could happen?”
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Mr.
Chin had never heard of “Melrose Place.” “I was not watching much
television at the time,” he said in a recent interview at Red Bull
Studios.
But
if he was not watching, he was thinking, prompted by Julie Lazar, the
director of experimental programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and
Tom Finkelpearl, a guest curator and now New York’s commissioner of
cultural affairs, who approached him to take part in “Uncommon Sense.”
Mr.
Chin recalled that while on a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, he
looked out the window and thought “Los Angeles is in the air.” The city
existed in the trillions of electronic impulses its residents sent
through the atmosphere and around the world, transmitting social content
and cultural symbols. “Our world is transformed by covert information,
political messages,” Mr. Chin said. “How would that work if it was art?”
Back
home, Mr. Chin watched as his wife, Helen Nagge, flipped the remote and
stopped on an arresting image. “I saw this large blond face filling the
screen, with blue eyes,” he said. It was Ms. Locklear. “When she moved,
there was a painting behind her, and I said, ‘That’s the gallery.’”
Mr.
Chin began assembling his troops. The name GALA fused the abbreviations
for Georgia and Los Angeles, but eventually the committee absorbed
dozens of artists around the country.
The
team included students; professional artists; a media scholar
(Constance Penley of the University of California, Santa Barbara); and
an actual fan of the show, Mark Flood, an old friend of Mr. Chin’s from
his native Houston.
Mr.
Flood wondered aloud whether the project amounted to a sellout. Mr.
Chin told him, “We’re not selling anything, we’re getting in.”
Frank
South, an executive producer for the show, and Ms. Mendelsohn decided
not to mention the project to Mr. Spelling or the network brass.
Eventually, word leaked out. In 1997, The New Yorker ran a Talk of the
Town article, “Agitprop,” timed to the opening of “Uncommon Sense.” Mr.
South said, “I was busted.”
Mr.
Spelling, tickled at the idea of seeing “Melrose Place” in the museum
world, took the news well. “Just don’t do anything to hurt the show,” he
told his charges.
In
early 1996, with the series in its fourth season, the artwork began to
arrive, first in a trickle, then in a flood. As a safe-sex message,
committee members designed “Safety Sheets” for the manipulative,
womanizing Dr. Peter Burns: bedsheets in an all-over pattern of
cylindrical shapes that, on close inspection, turned out to be unrolled
condoms.
When
Alison Parker (Courtney Thorne-Smith) became pregnant, the GALA
Committee made her a quilt appliquéd with the chemical symbol for the
morning-after pill RU-486. “One of the things we wanted to do was to
respond to the fact that in network TV, no matter how strong you are,
you cannot have an abortion,” Ms. Penley said. “You either have the
baby, or you fall down the stairs. We wanted to put reproductive choice
back on network TV.”
One
of the sneakier placements — the committee referred to them as “product
insertion manifestations” — came from the Cal Arts workshop. When
Michael Mancini, a character played by Thomas Calabro, visits a
hot-sheet motel, he sees the clerk reading “Libidinal Economy,” a work
by the French poststructuralist Jean-François Lyotard.
“Total Proof,” organized by Max Wolf with Candice Strongwater, takes its title from an altered photograph of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City
in April 1995, with the damage reworked by the artists to mimic the
shape of an Absolut vodka bottle. The work was initially deemed too
disturbing to appear on the show, but somehow it ended up, in plain
sight, on a wall at D&D Advertising, Amanda’s company.
As
the television project gathered steam, the producers turned to the
committee to help invent the character of Samantha Reilly, an artist
who, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, heads out
to Los Angeles and moves into the Melrose Place complex. Ms. Mendelsohn
was flown out to Kansas City to brainstorm with 10 women on the
committee who became known as the Sisters of Sam.
“We
thought, she could be a Cindy Sherman, or a Kiki Smith, or a Barbara
Kruger,” said Ms. Penley, who envisioned a feminist conceptualist. But
the producers demanded paintings in the David Hockney mode, with bright
pastels.
“They said, “‘Because the camera loves those colors,’” Mr. Chin recalled.
Hijacking
the concept, the Gala Committee turned out a series of cheery-toned
paintings on the theme of violence and death in Los Angeles.
The
Gala Committee called it a day after the museum episode, but the series
continued until May 1999. In a half-serious statement for a sale of
many of the artworks at Sotheby’s, Mr. Chin summed up the great
intervention as the catalyst for “a profoundly radical transformation of
worldwide art, entertainment, communication and government.”
The
reality was somewhat less dramatic. “We were exhausted, basically,” Mr.
Chin said. “It was very stressful, producing on deadline. The
potentiality and the pictorial reality had been enlarged, so we decided
to stop there. It was time to release it to the world. And think of the
reruns.”
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