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| Secret Mall Apartment |
One of the most famous documentaries of the past year, Secret Mall Apartment, directed by Jeremy Workman, tells the story of a group of Rhode Island artists who created an apartment hidden in the in between spaces of a mall and lived in it, on and off, over the course of several years. Amongst those artists was Michael Townsend, whose career has spanned three decades and included a good number of secret things. He and I met to talk about the film, the apartment itself, and his career before and since.
“I get categorised as a public artist, and that's primarily because my main thrust of making art in the world is drawing and building with tape. I'm a tape artist. I've been doing that for 35-plus years. Our little group of artists gest identified as the inventors of an art medium, and that would be the collaborative use of tape to take over buildings and make these large ephemeral artworks. That journey has allowed me to travel a lot and work in communities with a shockingly wide range of people, because this medium is not only good for us to make large public artworks, but to teach collaborative drawing and give other people an opportunity to have a voice in their neighbourhoods and cities.
“That work has given us just enough financial freedom to make other artworks that are patently unfundable, primarily because they're either illegal or too undefined to start with. And born of that pattern, we ended up with the secret mall apartment. We end up with underground sculpture pieces that were never designed to be seen by anybody, and rogue memorials. All of those works are captured and put into this one film, Secret Mall Apartment. It shows this cycle of art making and response and financial struggle, and it's wonderful to have it encapsulated in 90 minutes and it’s a view into the world of art-making very few people ever get to see.” He hesitates and smiles, remembering something. “Except for right now, because that movie is hanging out in the Netflix top ten. It's currently number four.”
Is he surprised by that?
“It's very surprising, shocking, absolutely shocking because we lived in a space that's not obscurity, but it skirts along it, because our work is temporary and we're really bad at marketing. Since we have no compulsion to promote ourselves, the works will be seen in the cities and towns they're made in and then disappear, and that’s it. So apparently in the last week, tens of millions of people have witnessed some of those efforts, some of those artworks that we've made over the year, through this film.”
I express my sympathy. It's really hard to find the time and energy to make art and promote it.
“That's why we've always put our energy only into the making of the work,” he says. “This is an unusual scenario because the film is not our film. The film is the work of Jeremy Workman. So we have another artist making a film about our artwork, and that's put us in more of an objective position to promote it or share it, because it's an object outside of ourselves.”
Was it the perpetual struggle for money in that situation that led to their interest in unused spaces, and in squatting?
“Yeah, I think so. I think inevitably being in a cycle of not having a lot of money trains your focus on spaces that you can have a sense of ownership over or [leads you to] create meaning in places and spaces that don't seem to have meaning. And you're always living in uncomfortable scenarios, so you're hungry all the time. In the particular case of building the secret mall apartment, that was the direct result of losing that home that we lived in. That created a vacuum, and we filled that vacuum with that apartment in the mall.”
To me, I venture, it feels very much like an evolutionary thing, in that these big walls come along and take up the space, and then other people inhabit them kind of the way that insects would inhabit a dead tree – there’s a new item there and someone's going to make use of it.
“Yes, I think that's a really good way of visualising it. But this is sort of a shinier version of it because the tree is not dead. This mall had opened up four years before we started our apartment. So it's big and bright and shiny, but, yes, we are the bugs that are occupying the little crevices of that thing and trying to get any sort of life out of it that we can.”
It’s not hard to guess how the story of the apartment ends, and indeed, it’s likely that you’ve already seen the film, but Michael reveals a postscript that wasn’t included in it.
“I can talk about it now. It’s that they [the mall owners] did try to keep it secret. After my arrest, this story became international news. And the mall's response – to be clear, it's not specifically that mall, the mall is part of a larger franchise where the headquarters at that time was in Chicago – from their point of view, it was sort of like a rebellion on the outer rim. They squashed the rebellion there and they sicced lawyers on me with the intent of making sure that this story was never, ever told. And the legal argument that they zeroed in on was the idea that we have had created a body of intellectual property, copyrights, photographs, but because it was done in an act of trespass, they believed that there was some sort of legal throughway for claiming ownership of it for themselves. And this battle went on for several months before they finally relented.” He laughs. “I love copyright law, like as a hobby. I love it. So this was a challenge I was willing to dive head first into.”
Did that increase the value of the intellectual property as well, by giving it more news value?
“Yeah, I would guess so. I think it's of note that we won that little battle with them and then just sat on the story. We didn't share it. We intentionally turned down every movie deal, TV deal, book deal, and just bided our time. Meeting Jeremy Workman, the director of this movie, was...” He pauses for a moment. “He was the good fit. We didn't know what we needed, but he was the right guy.
“What he did is he made some good movies about artists. Before were ever in the same space with him, I had seen some of his previous work and really liked it. The World Beneath Your Feet being one that I'm particularly charmed by. And I appreciated his approach because he was dealing with the subject, this man who walked every single street of New York City in the suburbs, and there's sort of a kindness to it, but he's made the subject approachable to the viewer. In other films that's been his obsession, trying to find how to make these people accessible. And he heard the story, and it sort of fit into his wheelhouse as far as things he likes to challenge himself with.”
When they originally set up the apartment, he says, they were expecting that it would just be another art project that nobody ever found out about outside their own circle of people.
“Specifically the videos that we took were never meant to be seen by anybody. It was all shot for in-house use, and so Jeremy Workman was the first person who got to see all the footage. We handed him the hard drive, and we were like, ‘You can have a look at this and you tell us whether there's a movie sitting here or not.’ And within 24 hours, he came back, he was like, ‘Oh, you guys! I can't believe you sat on this for close to 20 years. This needed to be in the hands of somebody who makes movies.’”
Despite the film’s success, his rewards have been modest. “If I was wearing a shirt that said famous but poor, that would be very accurate,” he says. “There hasn't been any sort of big shift in our world. We're also very community oriented. So we wake up in the morning, we have 300 messages, we do our best just to respond to people, because we're so used to standing in front of our own big tape artworks and talking to people. This is sort of the hybrid of that. We continue to make large projects that we fund by ourselves that maybe someday will be seen by other people, maybe not. And to be clear, there is no big windfall – it's attention, not money. There does exist the odd chance that just that right person, a person who has some sort of cultural cachet, who's maybe involved with a large institution, can say ‘Hey, these artists should get some attention and support?’ I would like to think that we would not squander that. That would be wonderful if that happened.
“The relief of this movie for me is mostly through the lens of art education. Half my life, I would say, is doing these big public art pieces. Some are very public-friendly, some are very sort of esoteric. I keep those more private. But the other half of my life is teaching artwork and collaborative drawing, so I'm deeply interested in people's ideas about art and their own art experiences. The thing I have come to appreciate about this movie is that it does the heavy lifting of my art education. The movie presents to a viewer such a wide buffet of art ideas that I like to believe that anyone sitting watching it is going to feel satiated and also delighted perhaps that they can't quite place whether the thing they're looking at is art or not.
“I think the movie does a good job of sort of showing artists as intentional beings who make art for very specific reasons, and helps guiding a viewer to the point where they're like, ‘Well, I'm not sure if I would call it art, but I can appreciate it as art because is being done by these specific people. And so it's doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us. I think that it's inevitably going to inspire a lot of artists. I know that just because of the messages that are coming in. But possibly more importantly, people who do not define themselves as artists – if it’s a call to action for people who would never use that as a label to describe themselves, then it's doing the Lord's work for us.”
A lot of people have this idea of art as something that belongs to the establishment, that's remote and formal, I suggest. They don't understand that you can make art and misbehave.
“Yes, yes, absolutely. That's a nice way of saying it. I have in my teaching career worked with over 60,000 first time tape artists. Of that large volume of people of all ages, all abilities, the ones that have a particular interest are always the adults. Because my gosh, if you're standing in front of a room of adults, let's call it 40 to 65-year-olds, and you say to that room of adults ‘You're going to be making a collaborative drawing here on this wall with tape,’ they will put up the biggest fight. What they're really good is theatre. That's their true calling. Because they're like, ‘Oh, I could never, I can't draw a straight line, I can't draw a stick figure.’ They get a little glassy eyed. But with the proper support...
“In our case we have a medium that meets people where they're at. We're teaching them how to work in a collaborative format so they're part of a bigger vision. And pretty universally, those adults walk away from their creations going ‘Oh, apparently I am very capable of making visual things that I'm really excited about, or making visual decisions, or even just conceptual decisions.’ Some people are very strong at big picture stuff, and in a space where the big picture stuff can be articulated in real time on a wall, they get that. That satiated sense that ‘I'm good at making things’. So if the movie inspires people to make stuff, adults out there, come on, you make aesthetic decisions all day long. It may seem really basic, but all the way down to the colours you put on your body, the way your house is arranged, everything is a very clear decision. You can transfer those skills into other mediums.
“The big thing that's happened to us in the last year is that we started using social media. I realise it sounds like we're really late to the game.” He laughs. “As public artists, we always were able to scratch that itch of feeling connected to people because we went down the street, we had conversations. But a couple years ago, we had a museum that was going to sign us for a week of residency stuff, big murals, committee workshops. And they didn't commit to the contract because they found our social media. And at the time, we had 300 followers. And the magic number for them was 10,000 followers as a minimum.
“I was like, ‘Explain this to me.’ And they said ‘Well, if we're going to invest in you, we need to know that money is going to continue to grow.’ I said ‘Well, that makes a lot of sense.’ So I started Tape Art in 1989, and here we are in 2026, and the algorithm is definitely coming for us. So we've dedicated ourselves to Instagram.com – we're starting to build something there, and we're not sure what it is yet. We don't know whether even making that stuff is art. We just don't know that's our new stuff. We have some residencies coming up this year where we’re working at a small museum up in Brattleboro, Vermont, in mid-March doing a project called Tape Art Megacorp.
“Tape Art Megacorp is a business simulator based on tape art. We will be in an administrative building for nine days running continual job training in the arts and then having people do ridiculous art assignments in office spaces. And for nine days, we'll keep doing that while trying to keep our business alive. So it's going to just be a big act of interactive theatre and art making. If you're in Brattleboro mid-March, in Vermont, that's an option for you.”
