MC I won a college scholarship through a national high school art competition, and after I got into the state finals, I looked at the colleges I could choose, and one was Peabody College. SO How did you end up going to art school in Nashville? I learned that early on, when I was an undergraduate at Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee.
( laughter) Though, I would say, even if I tried to make art for art's sake now, what drives a stake through its heart is my need to have a concept or idea behind what I'm going to do, otherwise it's not worth picking up the tool, the brush, the pigment, the clay, or whatever to realize the work. SO It's a work that's still ongoing, like many of your long-term projects. Works like The Opera of Silence, about China, Tibet, and the CIA, were presented at my first museum exhibition at the Hirschhorn Museum in 1989.īut after the opening of that show, I was in the elevator, and I heard a voice asking me: "What do you love?" And I thought, Woah, man, what do I love to do? I said to myself, "I love making things with my hands I love doing research and destroying my preconceived notions." And the weird voice said, "Okay, then stop." I said, "What?" And the voice went, "Stop." So, I listened to that voice, and that set up the conditions to conceive Revival Field, which linked art and ecological issues. I made political lamentations, which were loaded with materials and formally staged objects to lure the eye and mind into the content they were addressing. I stayed away from agitprop since others were doing it very well already. I was making protest signage during that time, but works with the links you mention took shape during benefits for Amnesty International in the 1980s- Jilava Prison Bed, a prison bed for an incarcerated Romanian priest in 1982, and (Belief/Punishment), a sculpture of ruined books for the tortured leftist Pakistani poet Jam Saqi in 1986. I grew up politically in the '60s and '70s, when we were actually optimistic, at least for a little while. But awareness is not enough, and I am compelled to make works that go beyond pointing out the issues. It seems to be the only kind of art I make. Mel Chin I don't think of it as just a link. Saul Ostrow At what point did you realize that you could link art and social issues? In 2017, the community-based arts organization No Longer Empty will mount an independently initiated, post-retrospective survey of his work in New York, titled All Over the Place: No Escape.
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TOTAL PROOF: The GALA Committee, an exhibition at Red Bull Studios this fall, revisits Chin's collaborative work on the TV series Melrose Place from 1995 through 1997. It was during this five-week period, as Chin met with curators, collectors, and foundations, that I got to know him as a charming full-time traveling salesman and raconteur, who is committed to approaching social and environmental issues in a constructive, often humorous manner.
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In 2013, I invited Chin to install his sculpture Cabinet of Craving-a monumental Victorian cabinet in the form of a crouching spider-in my loft as part of Critical Practices Inc.'s 21ST.PROJECTS series of viewings. Alongside projects such as Operation Paydirt/Fundred Dollar Bill Project (2006–ongoing), an initiative that started in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, he continues to make sculptures, drawings, performances, and installations. Many require multidisciplinary collaborations and teamwork as well as long-term engagement. He is an activist artist, who has made works that engage cross-cultural social and political concerns. While Revival Field has become an iconic work involving art and science, Chin's practice over the last thirty years is far more eclectic.
I have known about Mel Chin's work since the days of Revival Field (1991–ongoing), a project in which he uses plants to remove toxic heavy metals from the soil.
Lucile Hadžihalilović's Evolutionby Sabine RussĬarmen Boullosa's Before, Translated by Peter Bushby Will Heinrich MillerĮteam's OS Grabeland: Art Novelby Micaela Morrissette Stephon Alexander's The Jazz of Physics and Jace Clayton's Uprootby Paul D. Hans Ulrich Obrist's Conversations in Mexico
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