Photograph: Mall Apartment, Michael Townsend Michael Townsend’s Communal Utopian Spaces
Written by Linnea Hult
You might have heard of Michael Townsend from a headline like:
Artist Lived in Providence Place Mall for Four Years!
Coverage of this secret apartment, constructed in 750 square feet of architectural ‘dead space’, is often sensationalist, focusing on the wow more than the why. In searching for the why, I discovered that Townsend is a man of many portals. His work in Providence begs the question: what does it mean to occupy a public space for a moment in time? And what does it mean to leave?
Townsend, who comes from a military family, moved around a lot growing up. He did not seriously consider art until his senior year of high school. While he describes climbing a tree to photograph a huge Mickey Mouse that he mowed onto a field from memory, it is hard to think of him as anything but an artist-to-be. Evidently his art teacher felt the same way, as he pulled Townsend aside and revealed he had saved a year’s worth of his trashed drawings and photographs, from which the young artist constructed his RISD portfolio.
On his very first night in Providence, Tape Art was born. The idea was simple, drawing with tape on buildings in the depths of night. It was collaborative and, for anyone passing by, participatory. The drawings were living entities, morphing as they grew. And as they grew, so did Tape Art. Founded by Townsend in 1989, the collective now runs workshops everywhere from schools and offices to psychiatric hospitals, all while working on enormous building-based murals. The catch? Every mural comes down before they leave.
Townsend’s studio is littered with rolls of tape but is largely empty. On the wall there is a huge map of the US, marked with pieces of tape that represent every mural from their first “international tour” in 1995, when Townsend was only 25. At a large desk at the end of the room, Townsend and his art partner Leah Smith sit watching a spy movie, which they describe as their “lunch project.” Townsend is chatty, affable, and talks with his hands, while Smith is more measured, adding only when she thinks he has missed something; the pair reference past projects and laugh at one another’s jokes. Townsend describes the pair as “the right type of weird” for the psychiatric patients they work with, something that I remember when they tell me that the affectionate elderly white cat sitting next to me is named “it,” because it doesn’t respond to a name.
“Don’t you think it’s selfish to take it down?” Smith brings up an objection to their method that has recently surfaced. Townsend’s justification is that for him “capital A Art is the moment when the thing being made, the maker and the viewer are all in the same space.” It is as much about the mural itself as it is about “being fully present, becom[ing] part of public space and being available for conversation,” with passers-by, even conversation about the horror of the mural’s removal. But not everyone feels this way; Townsend points out that 500 people showed up in the rain to remove their mural on the Memphis Brooks Museum. While they peeled off the vibrant blue trees and the women perched in them, they took part in a shutting of the portal that had been opened.
This question of impermanence as a conduit for presentness brings up social media. Despite being “constantly pleaded with to post [their] work,” Townsend keeps off of social media, not because he thinks it is antithetical to his art but because it disturbs his peace. He laughs, “I am anti-doing it myself.” Smith is the one who brings up Fort Thunder. “When I talk to people who’ve been in Providence for a long time,” she says, “they always reminisce about art that’s been done in the dark, in spaces that aren’t allowed, in spaces where there aren’t cameras.”
She’s referring to the infamous Providence art collective Fort Thunder which was active from the 90s up until the early 2000s. When Townsend pulls up photographs, I find myself staring at rooms covered in what he calls “collective stuff.” There are hundreds of posters, stuffed animals stuck to ceilings and objects glued to the walls. He points at a space high up on the wall that I barely register is an opening: “that’s the door to my room.” Situated in a historic mill building downtown with cheap rent and an apathetic landlord, Fort Thunder became the place, hosting famous bands and strange events whilst a group of artists lived “in cocoons” within its absurd walls. Townsend ties the threads together. “I don’t think this space would have existed like this or lasted as long as it did if it had been in the Instagram era,” he says. “There’s no fucking way. Because, and this isn’t to mope, if you showed up to this space, your impulse would have been, I gotta gram this.”
The risk of instagramming a space like this is not just that other, less cool people might find it, but also that it becomes visible to the world at large, including the police, the fire department, and anyone else who might have it out for the space. Giving the location of a place that relies on rule-breaking is equivalent to destroying it. And, sure enough, the millennium swung around and a developer began planning Fort Thunder’s demolition. Whilst Townsend and others were fighting to save the space, he was also working on another project.
After ten years of cleaning out a water drainage tunnel that he had locked up, he created coffin-like structures and put everything he owned (save for his car, his computer and some sketchbooks) into them, as a “letting go”. He constructed strange, humanoid sculptures as his “alter-egos,” and hung them all from the ceiling in a matrix. The webbed structure forced anyone traveling through the tunnel to imitate the movements of these ‘people.’ After months of dodging Amtrak work to keep his secret, he showed it to thirteen people and locked it up again. The only remaining entrance was a manhole that led to a ladder that lowered you down into the tunnel, if anyone dared look for it - and they dared! Townsend quotes an estimate he himself admits is bold: that at least 10,000 people found the tunnel. Interestingly, the project remained unscathed for six years before someone peered through the grate and called the police about ‘dead bodies’ in the tunnel. When Fox News and the ambulances arrived, they broke it open and broadcast its location. Within six months it was destroyed.
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Photograph: Water Drainage Tunnel, Michael Townsend
Returning to the tape mural removals, it becomes clearer to me why Townsend might want to position himself as a “gateway” to his art. With so much current discourse on the internet that paints all gate-keeping as a selfish, negative act, I begin to wonder when gate-keeping might be not just useful, but essential to a project. Townsend has “no problem with the explorer class coming in,” but when information is broadcast to people who have no skin in the game, it seems a certain degree of destruction is bound to occur. As for the murals, he notes that “only three murals that have ever been fundamentally harassed and it was all white women over fifty.” Controlling the murals' demolitions may be the “grand inaccessible thing,” but it keeps the work accessible for its entire existence. It challenges the idea that visibility is safe whilst gatekeeping is dangerous.
Where does the infamous mall apartment sit in all this, I hear you say. As Fort Thunder’s obliteration loomed, all eyes were on the Providence Place Mall, the largest construction in Providence history with an equally large tax break. Setting out to explore it, Townsend found an empty space in the floorplans, and made plans to move in with a few others. He describes it in a tongue in cheek way that parodies the language of gentrification: “If you have an underdeveloped space, we have a responsibility to develop it. For the community.”
Over four years, they covertly moved in furniture and flooring. The eventual goal was to live there for a year, full time, but he was arrested right before he could begin this phase of the project, something he seems mildly grateful for. The point, he says, was “to have the mall to transform us as people,” to fully let loose and succumb to the “tides of capitalism.” “If Abercrombie says: this is the greatest shirt for Spring, we’re like, damn straight it is,” he laughs.
But I’m not sure if he is joking. This project strikes me as opening a similar type of portal to those created in his tape murals, in the depths of the drainage tunnel, or in Fort Thunder itself. It is hiding in plain sight. To build these “communal utopian spaces,” arguably one must struggle to give them boundaries that keep their inhabitants safe from outsider and state destruction. The world-building Townsend performs in his portals is ultimately open to everyone, you just have to look for it.
After ten years of cleaning out a water drainage tunnel that he had locked up, he created coffin-like structures and put everything he owned (save for his car, his computer and some sketchbooks) into them, as a “letting go”. He constructed strange, humanoid sculptures as his “alter-egos,” and hung them all from the ceiling in a matrix. The webbed structure forced anyone traveling through the tunnel to imitate the movements of these ‘people.’ After months of dodging Amtrak work to keep his secret, he showed it to thirteen people and locked it up again. The only remaining entrance was a manhole that led to a ladder that lowered you down into the tunnel, if anyone dared look for it - and they dared! Townsend quotes an estimate he himself admits is bold: that at least 10,000 people found the tunnel. Interestingly, the project remained unscathed for six years before someone peered through the grate and called the police about ‘dead bodies’ in the tunnel. When Fox News and the ambulances arrived, they broke it open and broadcast its location. Within six months it was destroyed.
Photograph: Water Drainage Tunnel, Michael TownsendReturning to the tape mural removals, it becomes clearer to me why Townsend might want to position himself as a “gateway” to his art. With so much current discourse on the internet that paints all gate-keeping as a selfish, negative act, I begin to wonder when gate-keeping might be not just useful, but essential to a project. Townsend has “no problem with the explorer class coming in,” but when information is broadcast to people who have no skin in the game, it seems a certain degree of destruction is bound to occur. As for the murals, he notes that “only three murals that have ever been fundamentally harassed and it was all white women over fifty.” Controlling the murals' demolitions may be the “grand inaccessible thing,” but it keeps the work accessible for its entire existence. It challenges the idea that visibility is safe whilst gatekeeping is dangerous.
Where does the infamous mall apartment sit in all this, I hear you say. As Fort Thunder’s obliteration loomed, all eyes were on the Providence Place Mall, the largest construction in Providence history with an equally large tax break. Setting out to explore it, Townsend found an empty space in the floorplans, and made plans to move in with a few others. He describes it in a tongue in cheek way that parodies the language of gentrification: “If you have an underdeveloped space, we have a responsibility to develop it. For the community.”
Over four years, they covertly moved in furniture and flooring. The eventual goal was to live there for a year, full time, but he was arrested right before he could begin this phase of the project, something he seems mildly grateful for. The point, he says, was “to have the mall to transform us as people,” to fully let loose and succumb to the “tides of capitalism.” “If Abercrombie says: this is the greatest shirt for Spring, we’re like, damn straight it is,” he laughs.
But I’m not sure if he is joking. This project strikes me as opening a similar type of portal to those created in his tape murals, in the depths of the drainage tunnel, or in Fort Thunder itself. It is hiding in plain sight. To build these “communal utopian spaces,” arguably one must struggle to give them boundaries that keep their inhabitants safe from outsider and state destruction. The world-building Townsend performs in his portals is ultimately open to everyone, you just have to look for it.