THE LUXURY MALL
The
luxury
mall
was
full
of
shellshocked silent people who made a lot of noise but there were also moments of humanity. I went to Saint Laurent, Marni, Bottega Veneta, Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana. In each I tried on various items for size, cut, colouring until I found ones I liked. Then I asked the deferential salespeople to keep the clothes back for me for a few hours, intimating with a heavy nod that I would return to purchase. I couldn’t tell whether they believed me
or not, though I knew each would have an opinion on the matter. I walked through luxuries and watched a mother watch her adult son try on €30,000 watches – her gaze could have burnt through metal or crushed a skull. I might have drawn a Venn diagram with three circles labelled “funny”, “beautiful” and “sad” that would have been able to sort every object, moment, person and experience in the luxury mall but I didn’t because the idea instinctively repelled me (the categories
“funny”, “beautiful”, “sad”) so I put the whole thing out of my mind and never thought of it again from that day onward. I had run out of film and had no camera but I wanted to photograph every single inch of the luxury mall and then build a full scale 3-d photomosaic recreation of it (in “warehouse space”) so everyone could experience each pathetic display translated into pure surface but then given once again an eerie 3-d form, ditto the terrifying children’s clothes and shoes, the rough
edges of the building work that showed through, the hole in the wall where an air conditioner had been and every single person there, I wanted to follow them home and photograph them in their homes standing with their purchases, displaying them for the camera proudly with unpretentious smiles and with a vulnerability critics would say my surface had found their human side. I contented myself with looking at parts of the mall as through a viewfinder, carefully composing the shot
then walking away without any apparent payoff, thrilled. I did this for hours while loudly whistling hotline bling (a flamenco-style cover version had been playing in Bottega Veneta). Once I got bored with this I went back to Saint Laurent, Marni, Bottega Veneta, Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana and bought all the items I had earlier reserved, coming to â‚Ź3,718 in total, and as agreed met my partner for lunch in the caffe in Gucci. After showing our purchases smiling to each other we drove home.