RIP
Prestonwood Town Center
1979-2004
On November 20, 2024, Dr. Nomi Stone and her Graduate Class,
“Documentary and Field Poetics”
hosted an interdisciplinary and interactive final exhibit.
Introduction
Dr. Nomi Stone
This semester, we used the tools and methods of documentary and field poetics, ethnography, hybrid poetics, concrete poetry, and conceptual art (installation and performance) to consider the glittering surfaces of contemporary DFW shopping centers as well as their complex underbellies. We worked to understand dynamics of race, class, belonging, power, and exclusion through the histories, politics, and current social and aesthetic realms of the shopping mall — a space in flux and declared dying and dead by some? As poets, we recorded our own mall and market experiences of boredom, pleasure, addiction, nostalgia, fantasy, promise of fulfillment and dystopia, as well as used field trips and interviews to investigate the worlds of other shoppers, employees, and mall corporate management.
Our exhibit displayed work critiquing logics which equate capitalism with progress, proposing that poetry, at its best, works to resist the market. While art installations evoking the mall abounded in our exhibit (the 1990s game of Mall Madness on a table to be played; dressing rooms; mirrors and make-up), we simultaneously punctured and subverted these spaces with our poetry performances.
Why did we host an exhibit about the shopping mall in an apartment? Throughout our coursework together, we analyzed the “public spaces” malls seem to produce for some people and not others, and we considered the increasing privatization of the mall — less “a common” and more a contested and liminal space. What kinds of public speech or acts can occur in mall? A sign on the door at The Galleria states: PRIVATE PROPERTY: Areas of Galleria Dallas are under surveillance. Considering these complexities, we staged our exhibit about a mall in all the rooms of a home — so-called “private space”— which we rendered public.
Exhibit Key Bibliography:
Hannah Arendt, “The Public Realm: The Common,”
Walter Benjamin, “The Arcades Project.”
Karl Marx,“CommodityFetishism.”
Browsing Options
Poems
At NoonAt TargetBlack FridayCamel in the Fitting RoomCollin Creek MallDisappearing ActDo You Want to See a Magic TrickElection Day (video)Freshly Caught, Humanely RaisedI Bought a Bag of ClothesIn Praise of Walmart's Organic ApplesIn Praise of Walmart's Organic Apples (video)'merican Dream (video)Notes on Westward ExpansionPeople PricePlaying Mall Madness, 1992Red Bird Mall Revisited (September 15th, 2024)Syntheme: Impossible Choicesthe 'strip' in strip mallVillage LifeVillage Life (video)What is the Price?Who is Morgan