Mallology 1

Better than Living

Adriana Valdez Young

Mallology 1

“Everyone knows shopping is the only thing better than living. And it’s more patriotic.”

-Kelly Jones SharpIndianapolis, March 13, 2007

The New York Times

“Everyone knows that I lived in the mall to be a better shopper-citizen. And it’s more patriotic.”

-Adriana Valdez YoungNew York City, February 21, 2011

City as Lab

I don’t remember where I was going, but I remember where I bought this dress.

MAY 1988 I was the youngest client at the Neiman Marcus beauty salon - 10 years old at the time of my first cut and color. This dress is also from Neiman Marcus, which was my favorite place to shop, snack, and explore. I don’t remember where I was going in that dress, but I do remember when a 2.5 million square-foot upscale shopping mall emerged from Neiman’s left rib. The Westchester Mall was the perfect city - a library of edenic urbanism and pristine consummables. I glided alone along its padded floors for hours, studying every store and pretending that the mall was my world. I learned so much.

This is not a bed, but it had to do.

After days of sitting in the food court, I started seeing things.

OCTOBER 2003It is very dusty, drafty and dark. It is the forgotten concrete backbone of Filene’s Basement (in fact, it is the basement of Filene’s Basement). There are no sock bargains here; only a make-shift mattress of discarded insulation tiles, a crinkly aluminum emergency blanket, a pillow I bought at Bed, Bath and Beyond preserved inside its original plastic packaging and a bucket, where I can pee outside of mall hours. From this temporary home, I am living the late capitalist dream and nightmare of seamless consumption. Shopping is living. The mall is my home, my city, and my life.

For four days, I made Providence Place Mall my control space for consumer conformity. Those four days became four years of experimental living.

By making the mall my home, shopping (finally!) enticed me with existential bottom lines. I played the role of the good shopper-citizen in order to survive in the mall ecology. Oh, to live entirely on mall. I slept in an abandoned construction space turned makeshift loft apartment. In the morning, I washed my face at Origins and drank tea and read the New York Times at Barnes and Noble. Since I had $20 tp spend over the four days, I did lots of window shopping, and I sat a lot - in the food court, at the Nordstrom cafe, and on the leather couches of Pottery Barn playing backgammon. I had time to look at things and wonder how to build a future from all this stuff.

My sleeping space was very dusty. The kind ladies at the nail salon gave me one of their dust masks, which I wore at night. I don’t think it helped my breathing very much, but it made me feel calmer and more scientific.

And a word on this jacket. Simply put, it was perfect! Its colour blended in with the dust and its faux-sheepskin, 70’s style screamed ‘I like to shop at Urban Outfitters with my friends.’ It was my camouflage and lab coat.

This is not a shopping bag - it is part of my costume. One of the first tasks we set upon after immigrating to the mall was to find shopping bags to tote with us, signalling that we were purposeful shoppers, that we belonged.

“Show your confidence . . . Show you’re not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping.”

-Mayor Giuiliani, September 14, 2001

“We cannot let the terrorists achieve their objective of frightening our Nation to the point where we don’t–where we don’t conduct business, where people don’t shop.”

- George W. Bush, September 20, 2001

Anerican malls prepare for biochemical attacks.

“The increase in number of new malls is a positive sign of security improvement . . . They are still a good sign that the situation overall is heading in the right direction."

- Baghdad Governorate Council member Mohammad Al Rubeiei May 2010

“Anything I can do to help this country. They’ve been through 30 years of hell under Saddam.Now it’s time to give them something to enjoy.”

- Developer of Mane Mall, Erbil May 2010

Baghdad rebuilds itself and plans new malls.

In 2003, the U.S. bombed 6 out of the 7 shopping malls in Baghdad as part of its “Shock and Awe” campaign topple Sadaam Hussein and install democratic rule. Without convenient shopping, it was hoped that the Iraqi people would lose their will to resist. This is a mall outside of Baghdad that was converted into a U.S. military base.

This is the City Center Mall in Kabul, Afghanistan. On February 14th 2011, Tailban suicide bombers entered through the mall’s 4-star hotel and killed two security guards. A report in the Wall Street Journal noted that, “ the attack did little to disrupt Kabul’s daily routine. Streets as close as one block away from the mall remained packed with traffic, and shops and restaurants were open for business.

In 2008, American and Iraqi investors broke ground for “American Village,” an American-style luxury gated community in northern Iraq. The freedom to suburbanize, though not explicitly American, is a core spatial practice of the American lifestyle that is replicated globally. American Village is in close proximity to a private internationa school, a private hospital and two new “Dubai-style” shopping malls and resorts.

In 2008, renderings for the new American Embassy in Baghdad were leaked. Plans included a Hilton Hotel, a golf course and a shopping mall.

You might be wondering what the point of all this is. I study malls. Malls as spaces that idealize individuals and cities. They are machines of lifestyle - globally replicated. And malls in a post 9/11, Global War on Terror (GWOT) context became the perfect laboratory to incubate mutant forms of blending fantasy and frontline.

I am hijacking hyper-conformity to enter and be closer to the system. I take the mall’s directives literally. I am prototyping its vision for a model city, model citizen, and model lifestyle. I am embedded like a war journalist on the frontline of consumer choice.

Malls deserve more attention. The mall is a soft-serve city, a spatial confection of suspense and desire. It is a seamless sensory experience that caters to our most primal sweet tooth: that insatiable hunger for happiness. It promises instant gratification without the fat, the workout or the politics.

When malls advertise themselves they often use images of women alone or in a carefree cabal, totting brandless shopping bags or sipping refreshments (look up). Or my favorite reoccurring mall image is of the woman trying on multiple pairs of shoes - open boxes of heals are scattered and stacked all around her as she gazes up in a state of blissful indecision (now look left). For being serious-minded and practical is not what the mall is for.

In 2003, I decided to take shopping seriously. As shopping and shopping malls were defining theideal vision of the city, the country and the countries we were at war with, the mall was becoming much more than a place to shop, dine and be entertained.

We started with a personal challenge to spend one full week in the mall without leaving. We stripped shopping of its whim and fancy and turned play into work. For four days we did not leave the mall.

We did not go outside except to return to our sleeping place off the parking lot.

Being at the mall for the full time it is open - 10AM to 8PM - can get boring. To break the monotonous routine of elevator music, sickly smell of cinnamon, and boring potted plants, I conducted research. For one full day, I made lists. I decided to study the stores where I was most compelled by the merchandise and overwhelmed by the sudden, hyper-awareness of all I lack and simultaneous longing to quell this dearth of the perfect top, barstool, or grapefruit spoon.

We devised a method to assess items for purchase in the most clinical and cynical of manners. On a scale of 1 to 5: 5 was something you buy immediately because you love it; 4, you buy because you have the extra money and you think, why not?; 3, you are depressed and you need a pick-me-up: 2, as a gift only; and 1, the apocalypse is upon us and this item makes a great weapon or survival implement.

This was completely Mike’s idea. Anyone with a lifetime inculcation in the visceral pleasures of shopping could never be so cold as to reduce the desire of physical goods to a numerical hierarchy. But I went along with it. It was my attempt to become more detached, more pragmatic, more intellectual – less susceptible to impulse and in essence, stronger. We tried to make a science of shopping, and I tried to imagine if the mall was all there was left to build from.

One morning, Jay joined me for skincare sampling at the Origins store. He was inexperienced, and confused the eye serum with the facial cleanser.

After that mishap, Jay relaxed with a stack of books at Barnes and Noble. Although he is a skincare novice, Jay is a prolific reader and expert lounger.

A PASTABILITYFor the four days we lived in the mall, we each had $20 – not nearly enough money to buy three meals a day at the array of restaurants or fast food venues. So we relied on the kindness of friends to deliver provisions. Without cellphones to coordinate individual drop-offs, we set up “office hours” at the food court so that every day at 12PM and 6PM our friends could find and feed us. My acute longing for non-mall food included pear, goat cheese, walnut and arugula salad, sauteed brocoli rabe, nim chow, risotto balls from Whole Foods, and the list went on. In the midst of food fantasies, the term ‘pastability’ emerged as the possibility that someone might bring us pasta for dinner. This never happened.

The mall is a food dessert. There is no possibility to grow or buy fresh fruits or vegetables. I don’t remember what I ate. But I think I ate a lot of pizza samples, pita bread, hummus and those listerine breath strips that dissolve on your tongue to give you the illusion of having mouth washed. Simulated hygience and temporary refreshment. I think that is one many shoppers find at the mall.

I was so hungry. I distracted myself by exploring and mapping every interior space I could access. If the mall was a desireable urban typology, I wanted to understand its spatial and security logics. The mall had also been the gateway drug to gentrify the adjacent neighborhoods – to cut historic buildings that were “under-utilized” and paste luxury condos and big box retail. But within the body of the mall itself, I found vast swaths of abandoned terrain. The internal real estate pastabilities were endless.

While I conducted research, the others transformed the 750-square-foot makeshift sleeping space into a “luxury” lifestyle chalet. We bought things from the mall and used them to furnish our secret apartment in the mall.

We built our own cinder block wall, installed a locking metal door, and furnished it with couches, plants, tables, dishware and textiles. Our goal was to breed a stealthy

Pottery Barn doppleganger to be released on the market.

Mike was arrested in 2007 as he was preparing to install hardwood flooring.

While Mike was in jail, I was busy tracing colonial legacies in another mall.

The story of the secret mall apartment became both a tabloid and academic sensation. Mike and James gave interviews with Fox and Friends. I gave lectures at design and law schools in New York, Mumbai and Hong Kong. Stories are always better than the real thing and people loved hearing it. This perturbed the mall owners, who are the second largest mall owners in the country and own 225 malls in the U.S., Brazil and Turkey. Their company is called General Growth Proporties and its lawyers tried to confiscate our intellectual property so that we wouldn’t be able to tell our story anymore and embarass their security force. But don’t worry, they gave up because we did funny things like sold all of the mall apartment furniture to the Rockefeller Contemporary Art Collection (for $1), leased timeshares in the idea of the mall apartment to distribute the ownership. Sometimes it’s better to be funny than to be corporate.

She is the lady of Providence Place. She is on the front cover of the mall guide and map brochure.

I tried to be like her and I bought all these things at the mall. I also rewrote her lines. The print is tiny, so you won’t be able to read that the City granted the Mall a $298 million tax break. “We gave them the gift that gave us the mall.” It’s true.

This is living.They are sincere and have jobs and good taste, and are being rewarded for it all. They show us how it’s really done. I think it might be too late for us.

This is better than living.We are faking it and being ironic with borrowed furnishings and clothing with the tags still on because I will return them later (except for those socks, which I think are useful).

This was our showroom. Our actual mall apartment was never as beautiful, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone remembers and cares about the simulacrum rather than the real thing. See, the mall taught us something! I look scared here because I was stressed out about General Growth Properties suing us. Has a multinational corporation ever tried to take you to court over your photos, maps and ideas? It is pretty terrifying.