Melrose Place, the subversive and anti-establishment series from the 90s that no one knew how to watch

2023-12-26 11:01:12

PABLO SCARPELLINI

los angeles

Updated Tuesday, December 26, 2023 – 10:01

Some artists ambushed by the production team filled their stages with pro-abortion and anti-racist messages, without their creators realizing it.

An actress from the series covers herself with a blanket with the chemical composition RU-486, the abortion pill. The 90s Live without ambitions and die without bothering

The taste for subliminal messages, for the subtle and the ambiguous, seems to have been lost. Outbursts are rather the norm in the incandescent shouting of social networks that flood the scene daily. But there was a time when, almost by necessity, the witty or insightful nuance prevailed over the clumsy, the crude or the obvious. It happened in the mid-90s at the hands of a group of left-wing artists, the GALA committee, determined to plant the seed of it in a very unfavorable terrain for that type of harvest: Melrose Place. His brilliant daring led to an exhibition in 2016 on the subject in New York. A book, Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the Gala Committee as Seen on Melrose Place, was published this year.

Aaron Spelling, the producer responsible for television series such as Dynasty or Vacation at Sea, never realized what was happening in several episodes of another of his great successes, the spin off of Sensation of Living. If he had known he would never have allowed it. It was the work of Deborah Siegel, responsible for the sets of Melrose Place. Siegel gave the green light to the idea of ​​introducing art objects with a political message into the filming, more than a hundred, in a project, In the Name of the Place, which lasted three years between 1995 and 1997.

For example, a blanket with the chemical composition RU-486, the abortion pill, in a reference to women’s reproductive rights that would surely have enraged the evangelical and ultra-conservative public in the United States. Or some sheets with a print made from condoms. Or a black billiard ball with a map of Africa in the middle as a reference to the ubiquity of racism.

The GALA artists focused on Melrose Place because it was a cult object for 14 million viewers a week, the audience figure it reached in the fall of 1994 in the US. And because it is totally devoid of political charge, with a romantic and soft cadence around a group of neighbors, rather handsome and undoubtedly white, in a West Hollywood apartment complex. The closest thing to an inclusive character was Matt, a young gay man without much specific weight in the series.

Siegel acknowledges in an interview with Slate that Melrose Place was not aligned with his values ​​as a “very left-wing and activist” person. So he told her that he knew the idea from Mel Chin, the brain behind GALA. The goal of this respected visual artist and professor at the California Institute of Art was to “smuggle art” and secretly display it in a mass television product. He surrounded himself with students from California and Georgia, the other state in which he taught, and proposed the anonymous and secret project to them. One of his students remembers him as a “very crazy son of a bitch.” At first, no one had a very clear idea of ​​how they would achieve their goal.

In a world that was still a few years away from connecting to the Internet, a series like Melrose Place could be the perfect vehicle for cultural guerrillas, faced at that point with financial globalization and end-of-century capitalism. Seeing his wife on the couch enjoying one of the episodes of the series, Chin’s lightbulb went on. For several seasons they displayed messages about the AIDS crisis or the abuse of human rights in China. Nobody, or almost nobody, noticed, something that in some way the creator of the idea had already contemplated. “No one had ever created public artwork on a television show before. It was totally experimental. So yeah, I understood that that could happen,” he said on Slate. Although the series stopped airing in May 1999 after seven seasons, streaming has brought it back to life. The illustrated hooliganism of Mel Chin is a work as relevant or more so than then.

Today the Obamas produce movies on Netflix where They shamelessly inject apocalyptic messages and findelmundistas, but then it was not so easy to connect with the masses. The film and television industry was run by white men under parameters that no one dared to break. The members of GALA did it clandestinely. They managed to infiltrate the posh series of the moment.