Michael Townsend, the Rhode Island artist at the center of Jeremy Workman’s documentary Secret Mall Apartment, knows that taking up space is a political act. From 2003 to 2007, Townsend and a collective of seven other New England artists built, furnished, and occupied a living space hidden in the back walls of the Providence Place mall, a room in which they’d break bread and plan art projects and veg out in front of a PlayStation 2. When the apartment was inevitably discovered — Townsend would be slapped with a trespassing charge and a permanent ban from the mall — news circuits posited the collective’s exploits as a puff piece, the antics of a gaggle of quirky but harmless artists. Secret Mall Apartment endeavors to suggest that Townsend and company’s Providence Place occupation wasn’t just a stunt they felt capable of pulling off, but an imperative act of defiance.
Townsend had charged himself to record his exploits at the mall with a Pentax Optio — a digital camera he brags could fit in an Altoids tin — and that footage joins a series of talking-head interviews, news footage, and B-roll to comprise the better portion of Workman’s documentary. The director’s hand here is slight but works diligently to couch the mall apartment in cultural and political context. Namely: Townsend, a drawing instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design, had been a denizen of an artists’ residence in Providence’s Eagle Square neighborhood. The Providence Place mall opened in 1999, and its developers, in tandem with Mayor Buddy Cianci, were quick to frame the mall’s booming financial success as something of a commercial renaissance for the Rhode Island town. They saw opportunities for expansion via strip malls, where rows of old mill buildings — including the artists’ residence — sat in nearby Eagle Square. Bulldozers rolled in, and the artists were kicked out with nothing to take with them but chips on their shoulders.
Secret Mall Apartment follows Townsend as he discovers a considerable amount of loosely monitored space in Providence Place’s back rooms, puts together a team of artists (including design researcher and Townsend’s now ex-wife, Adriana Valdez Young), and slowly sneaks a studio’s worth of furniture through the mall’s labyrinthine back rooms. The movie’s muscle lies in its edit, and it’s often thrilling to watch the collective shuttle couches through buzzing emergency exits and talk their way out of close calls with security. Their efforts snowball with the sort of one-upmanship that best ferments under the freedom of getting away with it: a sofa gives way to a dresser, then a television center, then a China cabinet. By the time Townsend and his crew successfully wall off their space with what they estimate to be over two tons of cinderblocks, it’s all you can do but to beg them to up the ante.
As a symbolic gesture of revenge, occupying an illegal apartment inside a functional mall for four years is nothing to sneeze at. But Secret Mall Apartment expands its aperture to consider Providence Place’s impact not just on a handful of punks and outsider artists, but on the economic reality of the mall’s surrounding neighborhoods. Valdez Young explains that the mall was built without entrances that favored the working-class communities on the building’s borders, and the movie pairs her interview with archival footage of Rhode Islanders scratching their heads as to how they’d afford to shop at this place that was now disrupting their everyday lives. If the new mall hammered a burgeoning wedge between blue-collar workers and Cianci’s idea of a “premium” Providence, then the secret apartment was an act against gentrification, an exercise in divorcing space from commodified function. Or, at least, according to Townsend and Workman. Secret Mall Apartment does a fine job of underwriting the artist collective’s intention, but it has a harder time quantifying the impact of their occupation.
Every member of Townsend’s collective is white, and Workman allows a few soundbites in recognition of the protection these artists are afforded by their race — artists of color would almost certainly have faced harsher legal repercussions, to say nothing of police brutality. The film’s gesture is noble and necessary, but it invites easy cynicism. The artists speak to their privilege with the somber liberalism of an Indigenous land acknowledgement before an undergraduate theater piece, and Secret Mall Apartment doesn’t lend much more curiosity to the matter than a bowed head.
Nor does the movie probe much into the apartment’s artistic function during its time of operation. Workman’s documentary is careful to frame the room’s utility as a space to plan other ventures — the collective executed a series of touching, tape-based wall-art projects in children’s hospitals and around New York City to honor 9/11 first responders — but it’s harder to gauge the space’s merit in and of itself. Secret Mall Apartment marks the first instance in which any of the footage Townsend shot has been shown to a large audience and the first time any participants besides Townsend had spoken to their involvement. As news circuits of the time had proven, a story like Townsend’s is vulnerable to novelty, and without an explicit and well-publicized artistic statement, the apartment’s capacity as an act of resistance buckles under its own kitsch and camp.
Art, and especially performance art, can and often should function as an end in itself. The artists’ residence lost to the Providence Place developers yielded stacks of tapes that capture brutally loud punk shows, abrasively avant-garde dance pieces, noise collages, and mâché monstrosities and paintings only the artists themselves would see. Secret Mall Apartment’s cultural placemats are vital, but there’s an inherent hedonism to any space that builds a PS2 into its own centerpiece, and Workman’s overextended reverence toward his subjects bars the movie from considering that perhaps the apartment was not an act of community benevolence, that maybe it only served its eight tenants.
And that might have been enough. There is a renegade defiance in taking up space inside a commercial behemoth that had once displaced you, by drawing your own borders within those borders drawn to keep you out. Keeping the footage he shot under wraps had allowed Townsend to maintain a certain purity around that defiance; by sharing the tapes with Workman and framing the apartment as a political act, the project’s face is bared to a level of scrutiny it may not have been equipped to contend with. Secret Mall Apartment, then, is an engaging and thoughtful examination of a thorny piece of performance, one made even thornier by the movie’s own existence.
DIRECTOR: Jeremy Workman; DISTRIBUTOR: Wheelhouse Creative; IN THEATERS: March 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 31 min.
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