Primetime Contemporary Art is a publication documenting In the Name of the Place, a radical, two-year intervention by 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.
Responding to an invitation to participate in Uncommon Sense, an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1995 Mel Chin initiated the loose collective of artists known as the GALA Committee and arranged with the producers of the soap opera to create objects for the show. What resulted was an extensive series of political works used as plot devices and props across two seasons of Melrose Place, 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 Uncommon Sense at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1997 and then sold at an auction at Sotheby’s to support several charities. Primetime Contemporary Art was created by Chin and Helen Nagge as a mock auction catalog, which they used to document the artwork produced for the show, as well as the conceptual framework of the GALA Committee.
40 pages, 21.6 x 28cm, softcover, Primary Information (New York).
Responding to an invitation to participate in Uncommon Sense, an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1995 Mel Chin initiated the loose collective of artists known as the GALA Committee and arranged with the producers of the soap opera to create objects for the show. What resulted was an extensive series of political works used as plot devices and props across two seasons of Melrose Place, 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 Uncommon Sense at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1997 and then sold at an auction at Sotheby’s to support several charities. Primetime Contemporary Art was created by Chin and Helen Nagge as a mock auction catalog, which they used to document the artwork produced for the show, as well as the conceptual framework of the GALA Committee.
40 pages, 21.6 x 28cm, softcover, Primary Information (New York).