Art Metropole

#15401

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

Date

2023

Publisher

Primary Information

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

9781737797975

Genre

Contemporary Art, Art History

Primetime Contemporary Art is a publication documenting In the Name of the Place, a radical, two-year intervention by Mel Chin and a group of artists known as the GALA Committee on the primetime television show Melrose Place. Originally published in a limited run in 1998, this extremely rare artist book is reproduced here for the first time as a facsimile edition.

The loose group of artists comprising the GALA Committee worked in collaboration with the producers of Melrose Place to develop a series of political works that were used as props and plot devices across two seasons of the show, providing surreptitious commentary on reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, the Gulf War, domestic terrorism, corporate malfeasance, and substance abuse, among others. Some of these topics were banned by the FCC at the time, and the group’s works allowed for the artists and the show to create political commentary that went unnoticed by censors, subverting corporate and government controls of primetime television with a progressive agenda. These works were exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998 and then sold at an auction at Sotheby’s to support several charities. Primetime Contemporary Art was created by Chin as a mock auction catalog, which he used to document the artwork produced for the show, as well as the conceptual framework of the GALA Committee.