In the Name of the Place

In the Name of the Place was a two-year, covert, collaborative, conceptual, public art project conducted on primetime television’s Melrose Place. From 1995 to 1997, two hundred props were inserted on the set of Melrose Place in collaboration with students, artists, critics, set decorator, and producers. Mel Chin initiated and formed the collective called the GALA Committee. Ryan Danger Sims worked side-by-side with Constance Penley, chair of UC Santa Barbara's Department of Film Studies, as a film editor for the project.


 


Conceived as a viral, conceptual, public artwork to be conducted on primetime television, the project found its host on television’s prime-time soap opera, Melrose Place. The GALA Committee was formed to create props and make slight script revisions and adjustments as “product placements” not in service to commercial interests but to initiate the possibility of using the medium to assist in the generational transfer of ideas.

This project of covert insertion was not intended to be subversive, but to offer a blueprint on how artists can collaborate with commercial production from the “inside.” During the last fifty years television has been routinely criticized and commented on as dedicated to consumption and control. In this project we sought to enhance content and context and to deliver art on weekly global telecasts.
 




Getting works broadcast to millions through television was not the only venue for the project. In the Name of the Place was presented in an exhibition at MOCA in Los Angeles and at an auction at Sotheby’s in Beverly Hills. The proceeds from the auction were given to educational charities in Georgia and California.