By Phil Williams
Melrose Place-the Fox Network's weekly tribute to twenty-something angst--has for the past year harbored a secret. It isn't something unspeakable involving a character, such as artist Samantha Reilly, but instead a unique collaboration with art students on two coasts.
Working sometimes on two or three days' notice, the students have contributed paintings, brooches, posters, screen-printed sheets and pillowcases, and even decorated Chinese-food take-out cartons for the popular show. Their work is part of a project commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for the exhibition Uncommon Sense, which presents six projects exploring social interactions and art. The exhibition is on view at the museum through July 6.
"In the Name of the Place," the collaboration with Melrose Place that involves UGA students, is the brainchild of noted artist Mel Chin, who since 1994 has been the Lamar Dodd Professor in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. "Popular culture is how ideas are spread to the world now," says Chin. "Our idea is simply to recognize that fact and help do something about it."
Some 30 UGA graduate students and undergraduate art students have been involved with the project, as have a similar number of students from the California Institute for the Arts in Los Angeles and artists, writers and Melrose Place fans in New York, Boston and Houston. Known collectively as the GALA (for Georgia and Los Angeles) Committee, the group has worked closely with the directors, set designers and writers of the series to bring art works to the show each week.
The collaboration is apparently unprecedented in commercial television, Chin says. Here's how it works. Each week, producers of the show send Chin the script of an upcoming episode, and Chin and students read through it and find places where works of art can underscore the words of the characters. The effect may be subliminal, but the messages are there for those who find them. In one episode, cartons of Chinese take-out food are decorated not with traditional Chinese ideograms of good health or good fortune, but messages of human rights--words that should resound with viewers in China if the show is ever seen there. (It is already seen in some 70 foreign countries.)
"What we are doing is making works of art that are used as props, and then, with this museum show, we are turning them back into works of art," says Chin.
The process of working with the show's staff is intense. For a single prop, 15 or 20 pages of faxes may fly back and forth between Chin and the production company. On average, members of the GALA committee have no more than three days to go from concept to finished prop. When a spot in the script is found where art might be used, the committee must send explicit descriptions (visual and verbal) for a proposed prop. And even if the idea is approved and the artwork accepted for the show, it may wind up on the cutting-room floor.
Issues explored in the artworks include domestic violence, alcohol use and abuse, infectious diseases, sweatshop labor, police brutality, international tragedies, race and gender relations, humor, science and art history.
Some shows have used as many as three or four objects from the artists. One bedroom scene underscored a safe-sex message by having the sheets and pillowcases screenprinted with condoms, though the design looks almost abstract. Jon Lapointe, an assistant to Chin in the project, says that sometimes several people work on a single painting that will be placed on the wall of a set. But the collaborative nature of the work is part of the excitement.
"The objects we have created carry more weight than just props--they are beyond props," says Chin. "One of the questions this whole project has raised is this: How can artists serve the public?"
One student who has worked on the project is Melissa Conroy of Atlanta, who painted some of the "early works" of the show's resident artist, Samantha Reilly. Conroy, a painting major working on a master of fine arts degree, has enjoyed the work, despite its hectic nature.
"What I've enjoyed most is the brainstorming that comes when we are talking about ideas and doing research for a possible piece for the show," she says. "Sometimes we have seven or eight people working on a single painting at a time."
Chin stresses that the project is intended to extend ideas about art and education into the world. To that end, all the objects the group has made for Melrose Place will be auctioned to help support higher education.
The auction will take place later in 1997, following the Uncommon Sense exhibition at MOCA and a subsequent presentation of "In the Name of the Place" in Kansas City, Mo.
"It's important for people to know that this project comes out of educational institutions and extends to the public in a very new way," Chin says.
The project will continue on episodes of Melrose Place through the end of this season.
