Mel Chin and Helen Nagge | Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place

Mel Chin and Helen Nagge

Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place

New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2023

40 pp., 8.5 x 11”, softcover

Edition size unknown

When first visiting Los Angeles, the thing that struck me most about the city is how many of the street names were already familiar to me. Rodeo Drive, Wilshire Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard, Fairfax Avenue, and countless others I had heard mentioned in cinema or on television. Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive both have films named after them (by Billy Wilder and David Lynch, respectively). 

And of course Melrose Avenue is known for Melrose Place, itself a spin-off from Beverely Hills 90210. I’ve only seen a single episode of the latter (I recall every scene ending with one of the two male leads storming out of the room indignantly) and I’ve never seen the former, but obviously it’s impact on the culture was not insubstantial. 

Mel Chin told Slate magazine a story about flying from L.A. to Georgia and looking down at the landscape below and being unable to shake the place he had just left.  “I started to think, L.A. is in the air,” he said, "It’s through microwave transmission, through the television that’s on down there. Television is the modern cathode ray etching products into our brains.”

Chin formed a group called the GALA Committee in 1995 and began a two-year, covert, viral, public art project using Melrose Place as his medium. 

Like a heist in reverse, "In the Name of the Place” involved members of the GALA Committee  (“GA” for the University of Georgia and “LA” for the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles) infiltrating the series with artworks they created specifically for it, a kind of ‘anti-product placement’. 

They tracked down Deborah Siegel, the Set Decorator for the series, and proposed to her that GALA would produce artworks for Melrose Place, at no cost. The show agreed. 

The group produced over a hundred pieces across two seasons of the series. These works covertly addressed subjects such as reproductive rights, AIDS, the Gulf War, domestic terrorism, drug and alcohol abuse, and corporate malfeasance. 

In one scene (involving unprotected sex) GALA dressed the character’s room with bedsheets adorned with images of hundreds of unrolled condoms. In another, an Absolute Vodka ad features an image of the Oklahoma city bombing. A bag of Chinese take-out is emblazoned the Chinese characters for  "Human Rights" and "Turmoil"; terms used by the Chinese government to justify the Tiananmen Square massacre.

I’ve read about other instances of covert props, but none to this extant, or with this wide reach. A queer production designer for A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 smuggled in some objects that played up the (not so discreet) homoeroticism of the script, including the main character having a "No Chicks Allowed" sign on his bedroom door, and a board game in his closet called Probe. 

The bank robbery scene in Baby Driver was supposed to include Michael Myers masks from the Halloween series, but the studio was unable to obtain the rights. So director Edgar Wright reached out to Toronto comic Mike Myers and asked him to grant permission to use his likeness for the masks. He found the joke funny, and agreed. 

James Franco smuggled himself into a soap opera, ostensibly as some kind of art project. The film star appeared on General Hospital in 2009 and reprised the role in 2011. It later came out that the ‘intervention’ was for a forthcoming documentary, which has yet to see release. 

Similar to the General Idea AIDs “Image Virus” project, Chin characterizes the project as like a virus, symbiotic and invisible. The work was exhibited at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, in Los Angeles, in 1997, as part of "Uncommon Sense”, alongside The Cornerstone Theater, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ann Carlson & Mary Ellen Strom, Rick Lowe and Karen Finley. 

In an otherwise negative review of the show, Christopher Knight in the LA Times singled out the work as "a conceptually elastic, wonderfully loopy exercise in post-Pop art.” He goes on to say that Chin "scrupulously avoids placing art on a pedestal above TV; he’s not holier-than-thou. It’s great fun to see the art turn up casually and without fanfare on TV, a place notably inhospitable to the genre. It’s also disorienting. The cartoonish unreality of the show suddenly becomes tangible, while the material presence of art assumes emphatically fictional proportions. The oddly refreshing result is a subtle feeling of critical participation in the usually passive act of TV viewing."

Following the exhibition, the props were sold at an auction at Sotheby’s to support several charities. The auction catalogue served double duty as an artists’ book, documenting the works and articulating the framework of the GALA Committee. It quickly become scarce.

Primetime Contemporary Art is a facsimile reproduction released by Primary Information, the Brooklyn publisher rightly heralded for their commitment to making rare and significant publications available and affordable. Following the re-publication of this project, the Wikipedia page for Melrose Place now features a section (after "Nielsen ratings", "Spin-offs”, and “Lawsuit”) about the GALA Committee and their intervention almost thirty years ago. 

Primetime Contemporary Art is available from Primary Information, for $15.00 US, here.