Secret Mall Apartment is a documentary about some art students who assembled an apartment in a hidden grotto of a new shopping mall in Providence, R.I. While the film first came out about a year ago, it had only a short run in this area. Now on Netflix, it's a film with unexpected power.
What those eight young art students did in 2003 is either a brilliant art project that confronts major social questions – or it’s just a prank that they managed to pull off inside a huge shopping mall in Providence.
Back in 1890, the British writer Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Conundrum of the Workshop,” a poem in which Adam makes the first drawing and the devil comments, “It’s pretty but is it art?”
At the end of the day, I don’t think the question can really be answered, and it also may not matter much. The very making of art is irrational, so what is art and what is not can be a dicey matter, but it’s still a good question to ask. The tension lodged in the question provokes the imagination, and that tension, that ambiguity, may be the genius behind the film Secret Mall Apartment.
According to Jeremy Workman’s film, the secret mall apartment came about because the city of Providence decided it needed a very big shopping mall. And Providence Place was built. Early on, a TV ad showed a smiling mom touting the convenience and pleasures of the mall, where she could get everything she needed in one place.
Adriana Valdez Young, one of the artists, describes on camera that she sensed the absurdity of that commercial, and was also aware that many people had been displaced from their homes by this immense project. She says, “I just had this idea we should live in the mall.”
Michael Townsend, an artist with social concerns and an eye for big demonstrations, who was then married to Adriana Valdez Young, had watched the construction of the mall and saw an odd, unused space tucked in between the maze of walls and passageways, stairways and retail spaces. He found a way to sneak in, and then another path to reach the large open area he’d noticed.
One was by squeezing in and around walls, while the other was through a door which sounded an alarm when opened when the group dragged in furniture, but they were able to lie their way past security guards.
And isn’t this what artists do? They find and define spaces other people don’t recognize or know about, and they build something there.
In one scene, Adriana Valdez Young describes how she and the others worked off the language used by the developers and gave it new meaning.
"Any time I went into a hearing at city hall for a new real estate development, this term of 'underutilized space” kept coming up," she recalls.
She and the others ran with it. “We needed to develop this underutilized space,” she concluded with some sarcasm.
So the secret mall apartment became a parody of the behavior of large-scale real estate developers who cloak their business dealings in the language of social welfare.
And as Secret Mall Apartment moves along, it looks at the human cost of urban real estate development, how cities think about themselves, greed and selfishness – and of course generosity – and how people in many occupations or walks of life overvalue their own importance.
Secret Mall Apartment does what good documentary film should do: it makes viewers think beyond the surface subject matter to consider larger questions and the implications of its subject.
What’s clear is that the film is not simply about a mall in Providence, secretly invaded by a small band of creative troublemakers.
It’s provocative, but is it art?
