Mel
Chin Interview (2000)
interview, authors: Fareed Armaly and Ute Meta Bauer
Mel Chin
Mel Chin was born in Houston, Texas, to parents of Chinese origin. He lives in New York and Athens, Georgia. Since the mid 70s he is one of the main representatives of political and ecological art, presented through his sculptures, artworks in public space, performances and multimedia installations. He did solo-exhibitions in such well-known museums as the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Menil Collection, Houston. In 1989 his political interventions Forget Tiananmen (Washington) and Conditions for Memory (Central Park, New York) gained attention outside the artworld. During the last years he focused on the subject of racial hatred in the USA (Gallery, an installation which was shown in May 1992 simultaneously in Pittsburgh and San Francisco) and ecological questions (Revival Field and The State of Heaven).
Projects
The work of the American artist Mel Chin (*1951) has developed over the decades a unique enquiry into the role of contemporary art practice. His projects express his own research into the links and dialogues between Western and Asian philosphical models concerning alchemical transformative processes, set within the information age. Around this complex dialog he shapes projects that are philosophically modelled and defined in terms of an ecology, where the 'sculpture' consists of both the work of negotiations and working relations that develop their specific group dynamic, and the specific productions that are the result, as markers of the transformation, to be further distributed.
While Chin's work ranges from an early focus on ethnicity and identity in the US, through his large scale collaborative endeavors with TV publics, University ecological research, and inner city urban renewal projects, as these are set within the information age, these all share terminologies derived from engaging with 'diversity', whether demographic or biodiversity.
Different sources on Mel Chin and his projects:
http://switch.sjsu.edu/v7n1/articles/glen02.html
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcla/html/panyc/chin.shtml
http://web.mit.edu/lvac/www/exhibitions/WINTER/2000/knowmad.html
http://online.caup.washington.edu/courses/larc433/Phyto/Case.htm
The working methodology can be seen traced to an important shift in the early 90s that occurred for Chin, as his own personal philosophical enquiry was joined to offers for structuring larger scale projects, for which he could apply his development of thought onto systems.Chin's heterogeneous praxis includes: KNOWMAD, one of his recent works with MIT, a car-driving video game as a new narrative form, threaded through a version of a simulated topographical space which is being generated by specific nomadic carpet patterns.
'GALA
Committee'
/
In the Name of the Place
'GALA Committee' was a group project developed under the title In The Name of The Place (1997) for the American TV series Melrose Place. The collaboration between different individuals and institutions within the project GALA Committee / In the Name of the Place , concentrated mainly on the development and placement of specific related artifacts (which included the main set of 'The Bar' which is now the 4th floor of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart as an extended loan from the Twodo collection).
"The project consisted of a two year collaboration between artists and Primetime television–originally exhibited on "Melrose Place", with later showings at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Kwangju International Biennale in Korea, and Grand Arts in Kansas City.
This complex collaborative endeavor was created by The GALA Committee: a group comprised primarily of students and faculty from the University of Georgia (link to project description by Phil Williams, University of Georgia) and CalArts.
Gala Committee as a complex ecology, Mel Chin
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The group organized initially around the activity of developing site-specific art objects for the sets of the popular television series. Working first with Melrose's Set Decorator, GALA's collaborative structure quickly grew to include scholars, critics, other artists, and, most notably, the writers and producers of Melrose Place itself.
With the ultimate goal of involving the television audience, the GALA Committee placed numerous props and set pieces in camera's view, which were then broadcast to an international audience of millions. Although the artworks were not intended to subvert or parody the series, the characters and stories often provided an opportunity to create pieces which addressed topics like gender, infectious diseases, violence, environmental devastation and global conflict. The exhibition sidestepped editorial posturing and aimed instead to infiltrate and transform the medium, reinventing television with interpretive, interactive possibilities. Simultaneously, the GALA Committee moved public art into the most broadly communicative context possible.
During the collaboration the series reached millions within the television audience. In The Name of the Place is an experiment - an ecology sketched out by Chin - between museums, mass media and artistic praxis, which was intended to shed light onto a yet unexplored creative field. The final auction of the works distributed the money to two charities supporting minorities and women over 35 who wished to continue university studies. Other objects which had been seen in the series are now underway and became part of an urban renewal project for revitalizing inner city housing in Detroit.
Thus the project GALA Committee / In the Name of the Place echoed the classical public TV mandate of "information, education, entertainment".
