Envision dwelling inside a shopping mall illegally it may not sound like fun, but that’s exactly what a ragtag group of conceptual artists does in an intriguing movie that calls into question everything from what can be considered an act of resistance to the very definition of art itself.
Furious at gentrification and the razing of their beloved industrial core to build the enormous Providence Place Mall, eight artists led by the irrepressible Michael Townsend find an unseen, abandoned space up a ladderway between cracks in the mall’s outer shell off the underground parking lot. They want to figure out how to make living quarters. They scrounge for furniture, even construct a wall and put up a door to create a 750 square foot room. They drop a cord down to an electricity source. They eat at the food court, clean up in the mall washrooms and come back to the apartment to watch TV and play video games and plan their next moves. From 2003 through 2007, they schedule it so each person can stay for up to three weeks at a time while maintaining other living quarters.
In “Secret Mall Apartment,” the eight arts activists who had built an exact replica of their hideaway for this film discuss their working process over drinks. For example. How did they get such big pieces of furniture and so many concrete blocks, among other things, up a ladder? The answer comprises one of the movie’s more delightful sequences. When they find a door in the underground parking lot that leads to their ladderway, they open it and an alarm goes off which is terrifying until they realize that when this alarm sounds, nobody comes. It’s only psychological; there’s nothing else behind it as security measure. And when guards finally do catch sight of them accidentally one day, this group gives them some convoluted explanation about being called here by someone from maintenance or whatever (I don’t remember) and the guards just shrug and say, “OK, fine.” To their credit, they acknowledge that it probably wouldn’t have been so easy for them if they were Black or brown.
All eight activists speak eloquently about their politics, their alienation from everything represented by this mall, the joy of tricking authority figures in order to create a secret hideout in the very heart of their most loathed institution. But the leader of the group is undoubtedly charismatic Townsend, who has also overseen an impressive series of art installations described with appropriate admiration by director Jeremy Workman (“The World Before Your Feet”). Townsend’s Tape Art Crew finds willing collaborators among young people, hospital staff and even patients anyone who wants to help them make big public images out of tape. The images can be made for interior walls, even, kids at one hospital did some for their rooms. Another project involved honoring first responders killed on 9/11 by creating portraits inside those individuals’ home communities.
You come to like these people especially Townsend! and you don’t want them to get caught, you have to admire both their bravery and determination in fighting gentrification/commodification/capitalism. (It should be noted here that Townsend’s tape art is public art, whereas a secret mall apartment is not.)
The brilliance of this document is that it leads you up to the point where you ask yourself, why in the world would they do that? Ariana, Townsend’s partner during the event, admits that eventually it all just got a bit old. She realized she didn’t want to live at the mall, she wanted to buy things from the mall and take them home to their apartment, but Townsend disagreed.
If this was resistance, wouldn’t it have been helpful for the people you’re resisting against to know what you were doing? Who does this benefit anyway? And if no one can see it then does “it” even count as art?
Like any great reflection on what art means and how it can be used as a political weapon, Workman’s doc raises more questions than answers which is never a bad thing.
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