Death by Chocolate West Edmonton Shopping Mall 1986-2005

Dan Graham remains one of contemporary art s most influential and important practitioners, working across film, performance, writing, and an ongoing series of glass and steel pavilions that explore the way built structures can frame social and psychological experience. His conceptual practice has examined the interstices of art, architecture, and social relations in over 40 years of work. Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986-05)
Self-heralded as “the greatest indoor show on earth,” the mall’s five hundred million square feet includes innumerable shops and multiple amusement parks and water rides subjecting its patrons to the overwhelming spectacle of total consumption. The film starts with Dan Graham grimacing into the camera and then pans outward into the many pavilions and quadrangles of the mall’s shopping areas. We are at once caught within the cascading lights, slowly rising glass elevators, mirrored escalators, and automated jets of arched water within the mall’s many pools. The mulleted visage of a karaoke singer is effaced by the glare of reflected neon as he struggles through Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive. The camera slowly circles and we see that a sweet shop in the mall shares its name with the title of the film.
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