It's the stuff of urban legend: Someone built a secret apartment in a shopping mall in Rhode Island. Except it's not a myth, but a stranger than fiction tale of a bunch of artists who collaborated on something more than a prank, but less than the name implies. Thus we have Secret Mall Apartment, a documentary by Jeremy Workman that recently popped up on Netflix.
The Providence Place Mall was built and opened in 1999 to revitalize the depressed former industrial areas of Providence, RI. As part of this gentrification a neighboring block of tenements and artist spaces were condemned, displacing artists, musicians, etc. in order to open a shopping center near the mall.
One of those artists was Michael Townsend, who had a penchant for art in odd places like an elaborate statue installation underneath railway bridges and in tunnels where no one would find them without being informed how to locate it. While exploring areas inside the mall in 2003, he and friends came across a space that was in a sort of void between parts of the mall left due to the odd shapes of the building on the oddly-shaped parcel.
Intrigued, they decided to convert this space into an ersatz apartment, buying furniture from the Salvation Army and lugging up a steep staircase to where the area was. A couch, table, china cabinet(??), a Playstation and TV, it was set up as spot to discuss their artistic endeavors. They'd use the food court for food and use the mall's bathrooms. Realizing that the area was open for anyway to stumble over, they decide to enclose it with a cinder block wall and a locked door.
Throughout they documented what they did with a tiny point-and-shoot camera that had rudimentary video capability and could be concealed in an Altoid's tin and their footage raises serious questions as to how terrible the mall's security was? They would move huge pieces of furniture through a door that's alarm would go off when opened and they even got stopped by a mobile unit patrolling the parking structure while they were offloading cinder blocks for their wall.
While most of modern "art" is rubbish, what's interesting about this group - all of whom escaped accountability when Michael was ultimately caught, but come forward for the first time for the documentary, including Townsend's ex-wife - is that they focused on projects like tape art, using masking tape to create murals in hospitals as well as memorials for 9/11 and Oklahoma City bombing victims. The apartment was their clubhouse and they weren't looking to cause harm or rob the stores.
While Secret Mall Apartment goes a bit long on the art project stuff, the group come off as bright and likeable, probably because their art was positive and not the usual nihilistic agitprop that's pawned off as "art" these days.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Netflix)
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