One of my guilty pleasures is watching vapid documentaries while I am working out. My workouts take about 25 minutes, so I usually watch a sitcom I don't have to concentrate too much on. But every once in a while I like to watch something that takes no thought whatsoever like The Liver King, The Shopping Conspiracy or Train wreck: Balloon Boy. Last week I decided to start Secret mall Apartment.
I figured Secret mall Apartment would be the mindless fluff I'd need to keep me occupied during a week's worth of workouts. I was assuming it would be about some crazy college kids who set up an apartment to get high for a couple of months. I kind of expected it to be a silly spin on the "true crime" documentaries that are so popular. You know, break down the "crime" and the "criminals". But wow was I wrong.
Secret Mall Apartment is freaking beautiful. And I don't mean the apartment itself, that is just a bunch of cinder blocks and used furniture. I mean it is one of the coolest examples of art as rebellion, expression, love, magic, story telling, life... I could go on. I'm not normally an artsy fartsy kind of guy. I typically roll my eyes at performance art and bananas taped to walls. But this was different.
The movie starts out as I would have expected. They show a mall being built in providence Rhode Island. Of course the young hipster sin the area who live in barely reconditioned old mill space hate this ginormous symbol of capitalism. A few of them, who were starving artists, accidentally found a secret spot within the walls of the mall. It was an area that only existed because the architect wanted the outside of the building to have some weird angles. The space was completely wasted. So as an act of art and rebellion over their neighborhood being destroyed, a group of artists decided to make their space their own.
The group very easily brought in furniture including a full sofa and a giant china cabinet. Luckily because they were artists and this was 2003, they filmed everything on a crappy camera so the documentary creators could use that footage of the group getting that china cabinet up a flight of stairs and then a ladder into the secret space. As time goes on the group added more and more to the space including a new cinder block wall and a door with a lock.
They used an extension cord tied into a mall outlet for power to fuel their few lights, TV and of course a PlayStation. Over the years they continued to make it more homey. While one of the artists did seem to live there, the rest just used it to hang out. They even show how they survived on food thrown away at the food court.
I figured that's about as deep as it would get. They would show them building the apartment and then getting busted and having to take it down.
Then something amazing happened. They started to show other projects the artists, led by Michael Townshend were doing. And then I cried.
One of the art projects involved Tape Art. And yes it is exactly as it sounds. The artists used colored painters' tape to make images on the walls. And damn did they make some cool stuff. But here's the thing, they didn't just keep that art for themselves. Michael and the rest of his posse would go to children hospitals and volunteer to teach patients to make tape art. And man was it beautiful. Just hearing them talk about the impermanence of beauty made me cry. Knowing some of these kids would die before their art was peeled off the wall made me cry. Seeing how happy and proud the kids were made me cry. It was fucking beautiful!
OK. Enough of that. Back to the apartment shenanigans. Oh wait no. More crying first. This group of artists decided that to honor the 490 first responders and airplane passengers who died on 9/11, they would go around New York city and make tape art that represented every single one of them. More crying.
The movie gets back to the mall Apartment but that was so minor when compared to the real point of this movie. Art makes life better. This artistic documentary made my life better.