When Art Pranksters Invaded Melrose Place

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Speaker 3 Hi, I'm here with Isaac Butler, a cultural critic and historian who you may remember from the episode we did about method acting back in 2022.

Speaker 7 Hey, Willa.

Speaker 3 Isaac, I would really like you to tell us about this art exhibition that was put on in the late 1990s in Los Angeles that was full of cheeky, funny, slightly mysterious work that you wouldn't necessarily expect to see in an art museum.

Speaker 10 Sure, yeah.

Speaker 11 So let me just describe a few of the pieces for you.

Speaker 12 There was a pool float, but instead of a normal pool float, it looked like a sperm about to fertilize an egg.

Speaker 18 There was a clock where all the numbers on the clock had been replaced with images of bacteria and viruses.

Speaker 23 There was a quilt, but the pattern on the quilt was the chemical formula for the abortion pill.

Speaker 16 It was a lot of work like that.

Speaker 24 I have to confess that I find this all like cool and delightful, and I kind of covet it. Like I would put that clock in my house and I certainly wish that I could have seen the show.

Speaker 19 Yeah, but you know, the amazing thing is, is that you probably did actually see this work, and so did millions of Americans.

Speaker 26 This is a story that I learned about while I was researching the new book I'm working on, which takes place in the art world in the 80s and 90s.

Speaker 20 All of this work was masterminded by an artist named Mel Chin.

Speaker 26 And to give you a sense of what Mel's like, when I asked him where he was in his career when he started doing this, this is what he said.

Speaker 32 Well,

Speaker 13 my career, I don't think about my art making and practice as a career.

Speaker 3 Mel is being very modest here. He is a conceptual artist known for everything from traditional paintings to giant landscape art, and he has also won a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Speaker 21 And back in the early 1990s, he was commissioned to take part in that show we mentioned earlier.

Speaker 20 It was called Uncommon Sense and it was a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art where the museum commissioned artists to create work that upended the traditional relationship between artist and spectator.

Speaker 3 And Mel was thinking about this commission and how to make something that might also speak to Los Angeles when he he was on an airplane.

Speaker 39 And I remember looking out the window, it might have been over Kansas or some Midwestern state, and the lights were on.

Speaker 13 I started to think LA is in the air.

Speaker 41 It's through microwave transmission.

Speaker 40 And it's through the television that's on down there.

Speaker 25 Television made in LA was in the atmosphere and it was being beamed down to Kansas and the the rest of the country too.

Speaker 11 What if you could take those microwave transmissions, those little bits of television, those pieces of LA and harness them to introduce people to new art and ideas?

Speaker 6 He was still thinking about all of this when he got home.

Speaker 3 And when he walked in the door, his wife was watching TV.

Speaker 40 And there was a huge blonde head, a blonde-haired head in the middle of the screen.

Speaker 34 And I think think she said, That's Heather Lochler.

Speaker 46 Worry a minute.

Speaker 4 You're fired. Fire.

Speaker 6 You are a pathetic, sick excuse for a man.

Speaker 4 And if my mother wants you so badly, she can have you and all the crap that comes with you.

Speaker 34 She moved her head.

Speaker 39 And there was a painting behind it.

Speaker 39 I said, That's it.

Speaker 7 It will be Mauro's place.

Speaker 3 This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willipaskin.

Speaker 3 In the mid-1990s, a collective of roughly 100 artists would spend three years smuggling sperm floats, viral clocks, and dozens of other pieces of provocative art onto the set of the hit primetime soap opera, Melrose Place.

Speaker 3 They called themselves the Gala Committee, and they called their project in the name of the place.

Speaker 3 Today, Isaac Butler is going to tell the story of this unlikely art installation, a tremendous feat of art hijinks that hit right up against the limitations of mass media to get us to see what's right in front of our faces.

Speaker 3 So, today on Decodering, how did Melrose Place become the home of hundreds of pieces of contemporary art? And why did no one notice?

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Speaker 35 So Mel Chin had his airplane epiphany in 1994.

Speaker 50 What he wanted to do was something like an art heist, but in reverse.

Speaker 25 Instead of stealing art from a museum, he wanted to smuggle art into television.

Speaker 23 Now, in any good heist movie, the first thing you need to do is assemble your crew.

Speaker 22 You need a demolitions guy, a pickpocket, an actor, an electronics expert, and so on.

Speaker 21 Mel,

Speaker 13 well, he didn't really have any of that.

Speaker 16 What he had instead were students, a lot of students.

Speaker 28 Mel was teaching both at Cal Arts in Los Angeles and at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Speaker 23 He introduced the concept of the project in class the day after Halloween, which it turns out the Cal Arts crew took very seriously.

Speaker 39 People still had blood dripping from their mouths.

Speaker 33 It was a motley crew, and I introduced the concept

Speaker 33 and people thought I was kidding.

Speaker 13 We had just had our Halloween party, which was legendary at CalArts.

Speaker 22 John Lapointe was a student of Mel's.

Speaker 53 Then they met this crazy dude who was all very serious in photos and wearing gray suits and stuff.

Speaker 13 And he was kind of a crazy, crazy son of a bitch.

Speaker 32 Really?

Speaker 36 After Mel explained the idea, John, who was one of the first to join the project, was instantly intrigued.

Speaker 18 His mind started to whirr.

Speaker 46 How would one,

Speaker 46 you know, insert?

Speaker 45 All right, well, what would you make of the, what would you talk about?

Speaker 54 What would you do if you had access?

Speaker 53 What would you do?

Speaker 43 They started trying to figure all of this out.

Speaker 18 First, they gave themselves a name.

Speaker 36 The Gala Committee, the GA for Georgia, the LA for Los Angeles, both of the places where Mel was teaching.

Speaker 35 Second, they decided how it would be organized, non-hierarchically.

Speaker 22 It couldn't just be the Mel Chin Show.

Speaker 10 And third, they also made a decision about how the committee would operate.

Speaker 41 The heist crew will have to do it secretly. We have to keep it quiet.

Speaker 13 We have to be careful.

Speaker 22 The reason they wanted to keep it under wraps had to do with their inspirations, which also used stealth to their advantage.

Speaker 28 One was something as old as the soap operas themselves.

Speaker 59 The Guiding Light, presented by Ivory Soap, the most famous soap in the world.

Speaker 40 The television is a modern etching tool,

Speaker 32 etching into our brains products, because that's what a soap opera is.

Speaker 41 It was invented to sell product and place things appropriately in our minds.

Speaker 60 The soap opera got its name way back in the 1930s and 40s, when they were seen as vehicles for companies to sell household products to homemakers.

Speaker 8 By the time Melrose Place was on the air, product placement was a fixture of American television and movies.

Speaker 14 But instead of announcing itself the way it did in the early days of television, product placement in the 1990s relied on subtlety.

Speaker 55 Instead of saying a show was brought to you by Coca-Cola, you would just see your favorite characters drink Coca-Cola.

Speaker 50 The Gala committee wanted to use this technique, but to place art concepts instead of products.

Speaker 27 A second inspiration was an anti-capitalist art-making strategy called culture jamming.

Speaker 29 John Lapoyne.

Speaker 45 There were lots of instances of people using early mass communication tools or group communication tools to playfully screw with popular culture. And,

Speaker 53 you know, this was pre-internet days, so what else are you going to do, right?

Speaker 10 Culture jamming was a leftist practice of pranksterism that used impish humor to critique the systems of big business and social conservatism that had become intertwined during the Reagan administration.

Speaker 20 One of the most famous examples was something called the Barbie Liberation Organization, in which artists surreptitiously swapped the voice boxes on talking Barbies and G.I.

Speaker 19 Joe's.

Speaker 45 And on Christmas morning, talking Barbies are like, let's go kill them.

Speaker 42 And G.I.

Speaker 13 Joe was like, you know, I like baking.

Speaker 45 And it made national news.

Speaker 59 In press releases, the group claims to have gotten 300 altered Barbies and G.I. Joes onto store shelves in 43 states.

Speaker 20 Another inspiration was less whimsical, viruses.

Speaker 57 At the time, the idea of virality was everywhere.

Speaker 23 With the advent of the internet, hackers and computer viruses were taking over the public imagination.

Speaker 35 And the phrase internet meme was coined in 1993 to describe a new viral way that ideas were spreading.

Speaker 11 But most urgently, this was also the height of the AIDS crisis.

Speaker 41 I was making all those biological associations, medical associations as well, especially in the wake of the AIDS epidemic and the tragedy, we wanted to do a creative response.

Speaker 22 The notion was that the soap opera would be the host, the Gala Committee would be the virus, and their art was the RNA, transforming the show into a carrier for new ideas.

Speaker 23 So now the Gala Committee had its name, its concept, its team, and its approach.

Speaker 13 All they had to do was, you know, smuggle their work onto a hugely successful, closely observed TV show whose scripts were guarded like state secrets.

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Speaker 8 The very reason that the Gala committee wanted to place their art on Melrose Place was also exactly the reason doing so seemed so unlikely.

Speaker 22 Melrose Place was a huge, huge hit.

Speaker 20 Emily Nussbaum is a writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic.

Speaker 11 It was a nighttime soap opera, but it absolutely hit it big at that moment.

Speaker 38 Hitting it big also meant something different then than it does now.

Speaker 8 Back then, there were only four TV networks, and one of them was an upstart that had only launched in 1986 called Fox.

Speaker 43 Fox tried to set itself apart by being younger and more provocative than the three established networks.

Speaker 56 It aired shows like The Simpsons, Married with Children, and Beverly Hills 90210.

Speaker 59 Hey, John. Hey, Kelly.

Speaker 4 Bryn and I were just talking. Which do you think guys like best on girls, long or short hair?

Speaker 59 Hmm, that's a deep question.

Speaker 47 Personally, I prefer blondes.

Speaker 36 90210 was created by the god of the prime time soaps, Aaron Spelling.

Speaker 38 Over three decades, he had become one of the most powerful people in television, with hits like Charlie's Angels, The Love Boat, and Dynasty.

Speaker 26 And 90210 had helped put the fledgling Fox Network on the map.

Speaker 29 Mark Harris is a cultural critic and historian who covered television in the 1990s as a writer and editor for Entertainment Weekly.

Speaker 67 Even though everyone on Beverly Hills 90210 looked like they were 28 years old, it It was still set, not just in high school, but like freshman and sophomore year of high school at that point.

Speaker 67 So there was only so much they could do with the plot lines.

Speaker 67 And I think Fox and Aaron Spelling thought, why don't we do a spin-off that is focused on the lives of 20-somethings and we can be a lot more daring and a lot racier.

Speaker 57 Melrose Place was that spin-off.

Speaker 56 It premiered in 1992 and focused on the complicated lives of the very attractive and very horny residents of its titular apartment complex.

Speaker 67 I would say that the difference between Melrose Place and previous primetime subs, there were two differences, really. One was

Speaker 67 a taste for really bizarre, ludicrous plot lines. I mean, they...
They really had an appetite for somebody going out of their minds.

Speaker 47 Michael, I'm going completely

Speaker 47 and totally insane again.

Speaker 67 The other thing that Melrose Place did that was really different, they accelerated through plot in this really aggressive way. So there was this absolute mandate to tune in.

Speaker 47 I've become three different people. You see, sometimes I'm this woman, Betsy.

Speaker 47 She's a dangerous prude.

Speaker 47 But then Rita, she's the strong one. She protects us from her.
Have you ever read the book Sybil?

Speaker 56 At its peak, Melrose was watched by nearly 15 million people in real time.

Speaker 60 It was the kind of show for which there were weekly viewing parties.

Speaker 36 Everyone seemed to be watching it, from supporting characters on Seinfeld to the slackers of Reality Bites.

Speaker 7 Melrose plays a really good show.

Speaker 62 Can you list a few of your favorite zany, ludicrous plot developments on Melrose?

Speaker 67 Well, I think the one that everybody remembers, and certainly

Speaker 67 the one that I really loved, was Kimberly, the character played by Marcia Cross

Speaker 67 getting killed, which, first of all, was a big deal.

Speaker 30 Oh, God, no.

Speaker 33 Call 911.

Speaker 33 Oh, come on, where?

Speaker 67 Like, Primetime Subs didn't kill a lot of characters off, and then disappearing, I believe, for like 10 or 12 episodes, and then coming back from the dead.

Speaker 4 Of course, it's me, silly.

Speaker 47 You want to touch me to make sure I'm real?

Speaker 68 What's going on?

Speaker 66 Is that Kimberly? Why is she back? What's happening? And then she walks into the bathroom and she has this beautiful red hair and she pulls off her wig.

Speaker 37 It's very dramatic.

Speaker 66 She takes her fingers and pulls it off her and she has a shaved head and a huge, extremely dramatic scar on the side.

Speaker 67 I was at a party with other people and people just like screamed with delight.

Speaker 46 Like, you know, we laughed, but we gasped.

Speaker 67 I mean, it was, which is the kind of

Speaker 67 laughing and gasping at the same time is exactly the reaction that makes a primetime soap a hit.

Speaker 57 One thing Melrose was not, however, was especially political.

Speaker 29 The closest they got to any kind of political statement was a character named Matt, who was gay and out of the closet, and not much else.

Speaker 45 Is that guy gay? Yeah, what about it?

Speaker 54 Nothing.

Speaker 54 I'm just not used to to seeing somebody so upfront about it.

Speaker 36 Oh gosh, I'm late for surgery, man.

Speaker 23 Matt, the gay character who rarely has a boyfriend and barely has a personality, is a perfect summation of the show's point of view.

Speaker 23 Just daring enough to get attention, but not enough to actually risk turning off viewers.

Speaker 10 So Melrose was not only a gargantuan rating success overseen by a powerful name-brand producer, it was politically pretty timid.

Speaker 11 And the Gala committee's whole project was explicitly, if slyly, political.

Speaker 18 But the committee was undeterred, as in any good heist, they just needed an inside man, or, as it turned out, an inside woman.

Speaker 53 We were watching Melrose Place, and we noticed in the credits the name Deborah Siegel came up as the set decorator.

Speaker 21 John Lapointe, one of the earliest members of the Gala Committee, again.

Speaker 13 We grabbed the phone book, and lo and behold, Deborah Siegel was listed.

Speaker 13 So we called Deborah Siegel.

Speaker 1 He

Speaker 69 called me a few times, and I ignored him.

Speaker 52 Deborah Siegel now goes by Deborah Siegel Constantino. We connected on a spotty telephone line to talk about her time at Melrose.

Speaker 14 She told me that when she finally stopped ignoring Melchin's calls, it turned out the project's politics, its interest in product placement, and virality were right up her alley.

Speaker 37 Can you tell me about that?

Speaker 69 Well, I was a very leftist, active

Speaker 1 person.

Speaker 69 I felt that Melrose's place was not not in line with my belief.

Speaker 16 And so instead of saying no to this wacky project, she said, free art and I don't have to pay royalties for it and it looks interesting and it's left wing.

Speaker 52 Bring it.

Speaker 13 All right, this just got a little weird and real.

Speaker 64 It was like, oh shit.

Speaker 36 With the project to go, things had to move from theoretical to actual very fast.

Speaker 51 The committee began to get grants and started bringing in outside artists to contribute.

Speaker 70 I was sitting in my home office

Speaker 71 and the phone rang.

Speaker 38 Constance Penley is an artist and media theorist who currently teaches at UC Santa Barbara.

Speaker 70 30 seconds into telling me about the project,

Speaker 70 I said, I get it.

Speaker 71 I'm in.

Speaker 58 They would contact many artists this way.

Speaker 38 And so the Gala Committee swelled.

Speaker 26 From a dozen students to over a hundred participants. People joined from other states too.

Speaker 50 They would eventually draw a map of the United States with the Gala Committee's activities on it that looks like a swirl of arrows chasing each other around the country.

Speaker 70 We would just start brainstorming and sending sketches. to gala members at the University of Georgia where Mel was.
Get notes from them and brainstorm a piece.

Speaker 9 Because so few of them have email, all of this happened over Fax Machine.

Speaker 70 And then maybe it would go off to Grand Arts in Kansas City to be fabricated and then get sent back, you know, to Cal Arts.

Speaker 20 Cal Arts happened to be right next to where Melrose Place was shot.

Speaker 23 During this period, they designed some of the pieces we mentioned earlier.

Speaker 20 The float for Melrose's pool that looked like a sperm about to fertilize an egg.

Speaker 16 The viral clock.

Speaker 19 They also designed and fabricated a piece called Safety Sheets, created by students in the textile department at the University of Georgia.

Speaker 26 You can see it in multiple episodes of the show, but it's especially noticeable in an episode called Run, Billy, Run.

Speaker 49 Please.

Speaker 54 I thought morning was your favorite time.

Speaker 47 Any morning but this one. one.

Speaker 36 During this episode, Lothario Dr.

Speaker 55 Peter Barnes and his current lover wake up in his apartment, and if you know what you're looking for, you can see that the pattern on his sheets is unrolled condoms.

Speaker 21 At the time, the FCC wouldn't allow unrolled condoms to be shown on air.

Speaker 35 John Lapointe again.

Speaker 53 That was the moon landing, as I like to call it. That was the first like, oh my God,

Speaker 53 it actually is happening.

Speaker 38 Safety sheets was important because until then, it wasn't totally clear to the gala committee what was happening.

Speaker 9 They sent the pieces off, but they didn't know how or if they would be used until they saw them show up on television.

Speaker 46 And we would gather in a barn at a pizza joint and we watched the show.

Speaker 53 Largely, it was hit or miss. Actually, it largely was miss because you never quite knew

Speaker 45 what would end up on the cutting room floor.

Speaker 63 And lots of pieces did.

Speaker 36 Even the ones that made it onto TV, like the viral clock and the sperm pool float, were pretty hard to see.

Speaker 23 But several months into the project, this haphazard relationship got more serious.

Speaker 18 It was thanks to a piece called Total Proof.

Speaker 4 Now, I want to go all out on this. Radio and print ads the best coverage and quality.
DD is going to make sure that this is the most successful new club this year.

Speaker 56 DD.

Speaker 23 The Gala Committee often designed posters that represented DD's work.

Speaker 62 Total Proof was was one of these posters, and it was a parody of Absolute Vodka's ubiquitous 1990s print ad campaign.

Speaker 21 So you may remember these.

Speaker 38 They all show a bottle of absolute vodka, but with some variation to it that was then reflected in the ad's text.

Speaker 29 Like a bottle would be drawn by Keith Herring and say, absolute herring underneath it, or it would have a halo over it with the slogan, absolute perfection.

Speaker 17 The Gala Committee's version, well, it was an aerial photograph of the wreckage of the Oklahoma City bombing, which at that point was the largest and deadliest terrorist attack on U.S.

Speaker 21 soil.

Speaker 26 And it had happened less than a year earlier.

Speaker 22 The committee took that photograph and photoshopped it to be in the shape of a liquor bottle with the slogan, Total Proof, underneath it.

Speaker 45 This was the stealth culture jamming we're hacking basically at this point.

Speaker 53 And like tee hee hee, they don't know what we're doing.

Speaker 16 Total proof was the Gala Committee at its culture jammiest, a provocative spit take on a a popular ad campaign highlighting how capitalism can commodify anything.

Speaker 16 But unlike the other Gala Committee work to this point, Total Proof did not go unnoticed by the powers that be at Melrose Place.

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Speaker 26 Total Proof, the vodka ad with the Oklahoma City bombing on it, made its way onto set for the shooting of season four's 26th episode called Triumph of the Bill.

Speaker 26 Before filming began for the day, a crew member noticed it.

Speaker 74 The line producer at the time had seen it and objected and took it down.

Speaker 23 Frank South was a writer and executive producer on Melrose Place.

Speaker 74 Deborah came to me with that and said, well, you're going to hear about this and this is why I did it. And

Speaker 71 shoot, I was really enthusiastic.

Speaker 43 It turns out that prior to being a writer for television, Frank South was actually a performance artist who himself had been part of a collective running a gallery and performance space in downtown New York.

Speaker 18 When Deborah told him about the project, not only was he down to let the total proof poster appear on air, he was down to meet with Mel Chin.

Speaker 55 They had lunch, hit it off, and Frank decided to loop the gala committee into the production process of the show.

Speaker 62 Though not his boss, the show's mastermind, Aaron Spelling.

Speaker 74 I always intended to tell Aaron about it. You know, what I was doing, but at one point I decided not to because it was getting so

Speaker 7 integral.

Speaker 74 You know, it's like that old thing, you know, apologize, don't ask permission.

Speaker 51 Everything immediately got more collaborative.

Speaker 18 Melrose Place's production team became so intertwined with the project that they would eventually be added to the official list of Gala committee members.

Speaker 21 The project also got more daring, pointed, and ambitious.

Speaker 18 The artists knew their work would air, and they could help implement on-site installations.

Speaker 30 So, for example, the committee went to the set of shooters, the bar where the characters drink, and replaced all the labels on the alcohol bottles with text relating the history of agribusiness, alcohol, and slavery in America.

Speaker 18 They designed an ad campaign for the character Billy called Family Values that featured silhouettes of same-sex couples with children.

Speaker 8 Building off of the success of safety sheets, they created created that quilt we talked about earlier, the one with the chemical formula for the abortion pill printed on it at a time when reproductive choice was rarely discussed on TV.

Speaker 27 Gala committee member Constance Penley.

Speaker 70 For two entire episodes, we had Allison, who was confined to her home with a difficult pregnancy, just be draped in this beautiful quilt.

Speaker 31 No arguments.

Speaker 54 We're supposed to be resting and taking care of our kid.

Speaker 54 Everything else is secondary. Those are the doctors' orders, not mine.

Speaker 7 You're right.

Speaker 16 I know.

Speaker 70 So that was our way to be able to get speech about reproductive choice back onto network television.

Speaker 26 One of their most audacious pieces, food for thought, hid in the most unlikely and ubiquitous of places. And what about the Chinese takeout bags?

Speaker 36 Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 34 Because knowing of the reruns and its its worldwide syndication and distribution, it did not have to be limited to English-speaking language.

Speaker 35 And so they wrote provocative phrases in Mandarin on takeout containers.

Speaker 22 On one, they put the Chinese character for turmoil that had been used to describe the Tiananmen Square protests next to the character for human rights.

Speaker 29 On another, they wrote stolen artifacts, national treasure, a reference to colonial looting.

Speaker 34 You know, a billion people could read Chinese.

Speaker 34 The idea was having that power to speak to someone just through a casual viewing of a show and say, wait a minute, I read Chinese, and that's a message that is not even allowed.

Speaker 18 Eventually, the committee was even asked to help flesh out the character of Samantha, who's an artist on Melrose Place.

Speaker 39 Ah, it's the painting I gave Craig.

Speaker 48 You didn't steal it, did did you?

Speaker 54 Of course not.

Speaker 70 15 of the women who worked on the Gala Committee were flown to Grand Arts in Kansas City to be able to brainstorm

Speaker 70 this new character, but also to create her artwork.

Speaker 14 Samantha's brightly colored art, which was created by Gala Committee members, referenced the sunny pools and California landscapes of David Hockney, but also contained a hidden darkness, the ghostly echo of the tragic histories of Los Angeles.

Speaker 72 We made our locations be places where horrific violence had occurred.

Speaker 70 You know, locations where the Manson murders occurred,

Speaker 70 the Ambassador Hotel where Robert F.

Speaker 6 Kennedy was assassinated.

Speaker 18 Together, the production staff and the gala committee had created dozens of covert works of art and hidden them in plain sight.

Speaker 12 Other popular primetime entertainment wasn't showing unrolled condoms on television or nodding at abortion or alluding to the legacy of slavery, but a group of scrappy artists and a pop cultural phenomenon did and reached an audience of millions and millions of people.

Speaker 30 The only wrinkle was

Speaker 38 no one watching seems to have really seen it.

Speaker 68 After placing over 100 pieces of art on Melrose Place over the course of three seasons, it finally came time for the Gala Committee to show the world what they had been up to.

Speaker 38 In March of 1997, In the Name of the Place opened as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art's Uncommon Sense exhibit.

Speaker 26 They weren't the only ones with wild ideas about how to rethink the museum show.

Speaker 73 Karen Finley had

Speaker 73 live nude drawing classes going on, and Carlson and and Marilyn Strom had it rodeo with a live horse in the middle of the galleries.

Speaker 31 Tom Finkel Pearl is one of the curators of Uncommon Sense.

Speaker 73 There was a project that included 1.1 million pounds of crushed glass that was installed by the sanitation department of LA.

Speaker 60 The museum even let the gala committee recreate Shooter's Bar and allowed patrons to drink at it.

Speaker 25 Before the show opened at Mocha, the Gala Committee and the staff at Melrose had one last hurrah: filming a pivotal scene of an episode of Melrose within the exhibit of objects that had been previously seen on the television show.

Speaker 3 Sorry if I stranded you.

Speaker 7 Plants.

Speaker 75 No, no problem. I ain't digging this exhibit.
Got some phenomenal pieces.

Speaker 21 Mel is actually in this scene.

Speaker 20 He's lurking in the background, walking through the exhibit with Deborah Siegel Constantino.

Speaker 44 What do you think it means?

Speaker 75 I think it's about a man's journey through war.

Speaker 45 Memory.

Speaker 76 There was a fake director. There was a fake museum communications officer.
There was art that wasn't art, but it was art.

Speaker 12 Julie Lazar, co-curator of Uncommon Sense, loved that Melrose Place filmed at the museum.

Speaker 43 It raised all the central questions of the exhibit itself.

Speaker 76 I thought it was fantastic because it paralleled. Was the work that was on the screen and set behind the actors art?

Speaker 76 When was it art? Was it on the television show or was it when they came to the gallery and it was hanging behind them?

Speaker 22 Clearly, the gallerists, the gala committee, and the Melrose production team were having fun.

Speaker 23 But once Uncommon Sense was opened to the public, not everyone was amused.

Speaker 64 The show got like exceedingly bad reviews.

Speaker 73 Actually, there's words that are just burned into my consciousness.

Speaker 31 Those words come from the New York Times' Roberta Smith.

Speaker 20 In a review that was titled A Lot to See, but Not an Artwork in Sight, she said of Gala's work that it has the raw, discombobulated feeling of a group show of young, undeveloped artists.

Speaker 73 One of the things she said in that review, also, which is also sort of true,

Speaker 73 is that it seems like the most profound and interesting or something like that experience happened before the show opened.

Speaker 29 Asking questions about art's purpose and methods of creation doesn't always result in work that people enjoy or even notice.

Speaker 62 Did you happen to notice that with some regularity, Melrose

Speaker 62 used very, very odd props and set pieces that had actually been designed by an experimental art collective?

Speaker 67 I would love to claim that I did notice that because it's a fascinating, completely bizarre piece of Melrose Place history, but no.

Speaker 66 The answer to that question is no. I had no awareness of this whatsoever.

Speaker 27 In fact, almost anyone who heard about the experiment only learned about it after the fact, in the art reviews of the show and in an article for The New Yorker.

Speaker 26 This was even true when it came to the head honcho of Melrose Place.

Speaker 20 Frank South, the producer and writer who embraced the project, was at the office early one morning when Aaron Spelling summoned him.

Speaker 74 Walk in to his desk, you know, across this acre of shag carpet.

Speaker 71 He's saying,

Speaker 71 So,

Speaker 74 Frank, when did you know this was going on? Oh, well, you know, for the last year and a half, two years or something.

Speaker 71 And he goes, uh-huh.

Speaker 47 So, when were you going to tell me? And so, oh, Aaron,

Speaker 71 not very,

Speaker 74 I figured as late as possible, I was going to tell you.

Speaker 31 Spelling wasn't known for bursts of rage, but Frank could see he wasn't happy.

Speaker 74 It just came down to, you understand,

Speaker 74 this is my show, you know.

Speaker 74 And I said, yeah, I don't want anything that would ever harm the show.

Speaker 74 And I said, I know.

Speaker 9 One of the things he said is, who pays for all this shit?

Speaker 71 Where does it all come from? Who's paying for it? Are we paying for this? Is this in our budget?

Speaker 74 And I said, no,

Speaker 74 it's a money-saving operation.

Speaker 9 It's for free.

Speaker 74 And that mollified him a little.

Speaker 20 I asked the people I spoke to about the work's initial invisibility.

Speaker 8 And at the time, were they hoping people might notice?

Speaker 27 Of course.

Speaker 7 Sure, a little.

Speaker 43 But this is commonplace with art.

Speaker 22 Some of it connects with the public, and most of it doesn't.

Speaker 18 It's just, you don't usually get it in front of an audience of 15 million people to begin with.

Speaker 31 In the Name of the Place closed in the summer of 1997.

Speaker 26 Two years later, Melrose Place went off the air.

Speaker 60 It seemed that, like a lot of interesting art projects, In the Name of the Place was destined to be forgotten by everyone other than the Gala Committee.

Speaker 26 But then, one of the committee's original inspirations turned out to be more apt than they could have anticipated.

Speaker 40 It's about patients like a virus entering

Speaker 13 your world.

Speaker 40 It takes time for it to gestate.

Speaker 18 The project gradually took on a new life.

Speaker 26 Not on TV, not to millions of people, but a new life nonetheless.

Speaker 38 In 1998, the objects from In the Name of the Place were auctioned off by Sotheby's, with the proceeds going to charity.

Speaker 29 The project was exhibited in Korea and Kansas City and New Orleans.

Speaker 26 In the fall of 2016, Red Bull Gallery in New York, itself an experimented branded content by an energy drink, remounted in the name of the place.

Speaker 18 And this time, the reviews were good.

Speaker 26 For John Lapointe, this kind of baton passing is immensely gratifying.

Speaker 73 I mean, that's the whole tradition of art is, you know, just passing on as a conversation. It constantly builds upon itself.

Speaker 62 Melrose Place, a one-time cultural juggernaut, has less purchase than ever before, but in the name of the place, is still replicating.

Speaker 31 It didn't go viral in the sense of finding immediate widespread popularity, but it wound up being viral in the sense of slowly reaching more and more hosts and spreading itself throughout the ecosystem.

Speaker 26 First it lived in the minds of artists, and then it jumped to the people making a TV show, and then to articles in magazines and newspapers, and then to museums around the world, and then most of all to the internet, where Melrose Place and all the work it contained is just a few clicks away.

Speaker 53 Now it has infected its latest host, this show.

Speaker 37 And it continues to spread to you.

Speaker 57 Go, take a look for yourself, and then, you know,

Speaker 28 pass it on.

Speaker 53 Yeah, it's weird to just woke, Doc.

Speaker 46 There's like, like, you emailed me the other day, like, okay, here we go again.

Speaker 55 This is Decoder Ring.

Speaker 50 I'm Isaac Butler.

Speaker 3 And I'm Willip Haskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.
This episode was written and reported by Isaac Butler.

Speaker 3 Decodering is produced by Willip Haskin and Katie Shepard. This episode was produced by Benjamin Frisch.
Derek John is executive producer. Joe Meyer is senior editor-producer.

Speaker 3 Merrick Jacob is senior technical director.

Speaker 3 We'd like to thank Jamie Bennett and also JJ Bursch for educating Isaac on product placement, Mark Flood for sharing his memories of the Gala Committee, and to shout out Cynthia Carr's book, On Edge, Performance at the End of the 20th Century, which is where Isaac first heard about all of this.

Speaker 3 If you want to see some of the artwork from in the name of the place, we'll include a link in our show notes.

Speaker 3 And please make sure to subscribe to our feed so you never miss an episode. Even better, leave a review and rating wherever you listen and tell your friends.

Speaker 3 If you're a fan of the show, I'd also love for you to sign up for Slate Plus. As a Slate Plus member, you get to listen to all of Slate's podcasts without any ads.

Speaker 6 And you also have total access to Slate's website, and your support is essential to our ongoing investigations here at Decodering.

Speaker 3 So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

Speaker 6 We'll see you next week.

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