From 1995 through 1997, Mel Chin and a group of pranksterish artists asked themselves, what it we put art on TV where tens of millions of people would see it? What if that art was poliitcal and left-wing? Would it have any affect on the world?
The quilt above shows the chemical formula for RU486 (aka Mifepristone), the first legal abortion drug in the US. It appeared in the episode of Melrose Place called “101 Dalmations”. The name of the two year project was In the Name of the Place.
I remember hearing about this when I first saw the big Mel Chin retrospective, Rematch, in New Orleans. It was an intriguing bit of detournment and culture jamming, but since I had never seen an episode of Melrose Place, I was only marginally interested in finding out that Chin and company had subverted it. And it was a company of people working together. Chin was teaching at the University of Georgia at the time, and he founded a comittee to handle the creation of artworks to be slotted into Melrose Place. The was called the GALA Comittee, and was composed of artists from the Univerity of Georgia and CalArts in LA (hence the name GALA), but over time included artistic contibution from artists all over (including Mark Flood).
The reason I bring this up is because I just listened to an amazing podcast on Slate about it that goes into detail about how they did it, who they worked with on Melrose Place itself, and those kind of technical details. And what they said about how much the Melrose Place producers and the general public were aware of it was shocking.
When I was a kid, there was a book called The Hidden Persuaders that tried to convince Americans that their minds were being controlled by the advertising business via something called “subliminal advertising.” In retrospect, this seems obviously baloney (whiskey advertisers were not putting barely visible skulls in the ice cubes in their ads), but it seems that Mel Chin and the Gala Committee believed the principle of subliminal influence. They packed Melrose Place with left-leaning political artworks, kind of hidden in plain sight.
There are three perspectives that are important here. If you read the Gala Comittee’s website, or Mel Chin’s webite. or the catalog for Rematch, you get the artists’ point of view. But there are two other involved groups—the people who made Melrose Place, and the viewers of the program. The big boss was Aaron Spelling, and he flipped when he learned what had been done to his program without his knowledge. But most important (in my mind) were the viewers of Melrose Place—and there were a lot of them. According to Wikipedia, they had over 10 million viewers on average for the first five seasons, dropping a little on their last two.
No one noticed. All that subliminal, highly political artwork managed to persuade no one. One of my favorite quote from Kurt Vonnegut is appropriate.
‘During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.’
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Just for your reference, I attempted to share your link on FB. The image sharing worked. but, any text I added about the chemical, its usage, and the political context was "Blocked" by "Facebook Cybersecurity" Even the following was blocked: 1997, The quilt depicts the <smip> formula <snip> the first legal <snip> in the US. .... we wrapped Alison (for two whole episodes) in this lovely homemade quilt whose pattern is the chemical <snip> widely used in Europe but until recently <snip> in the U.S."