Spectacular, Spectacular can one feel nostalgia for the old West Edmonton Mall?
Peter Osborne and Joylyn Marshall
w est Edmonton Mall, on the edge of the city, was bankrolled in 1984 by a wealthy Edmonton family, the Ghermezians. As first built,West Ed could have been seen as the family’s cabinet of curiosities. Treasures from peacocks to crown jewels were displayed in glass cabinets throughout the halls. Entire wings of the Mall were devoted to site-specific spectacles taken from Europe and New Orleans. The textured surfaces of these areas created associations to real places. While the objects might not have necessarily been collected from the family’s own travels, it was enough just to imagine that they might have been. In fact, the objects may have been plastic reproduction, but it did not matter as long as the consumer believed. Originally, one moved through the Mall reading each spectacle. There was no specific interconnectedness between the events but together they added up to an extravagant whole. In 1999, renovations to the Mall’s surfaces began to link these events together. This thematic shift supresses the treasure-chest of individual spectacles, replacing different stories with a single dreamscape. The old surfaces, whether they were glass, concrete or wood, have been spraycreted with an industrial paper maché and painted bright pastel colours regardless of location or attraction. These new surfaces incor- porate a singular colour scheme and style, changing the diverse and eccentric Ghermazian layout. The new style is based on fantasy charac- ters, removing the ‘realism’ of the original surfaces. The new surfaces are now unified and decidedly less powerful. No longer about the strong family and actual places, the renovated mall is a disassociated abstraction of generic fantasy worlds. The ‘original’ Pebble Beach miniature golf course has now become Professor Wem’s Adventure Golf. Other areas like Bourbon Street did not change in theme but changed in character. Where there once were statues of prostitutes being arrested by the police there is now an oversize head of a jester floating above multi-coloured concrete. The consumption of play here has become as important as the con- sumption of goods — an Ikea store was replaced by Red’s, a 100,000 ft 2 rec room. The change in surface has changed interpretation; once- realist depictions of places are now filtered into a single branded image. The consumer no longer has to understand individual associations but just a single commodity. You used to be sold the possibility of going places, places you can’t go because you are in Edmonton. Now you know you cannot go there because they are not real. By changing the surface treatment, the char- acter of West Edmonton Mall changed into something so generalised that it is not even imaginable. You can loose yourself in a specific myth but you always wake up from an unfocussed dream.
Here, you can see a glass column half covered by the new surface treatment.
Joylyn and Peter are recent graduates from Dalhousie University and live, but not yet work, in Edmonton.
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