Coming in from the Cold

It is a sunny morning in the spring of 2002 and Anissa Mack has just finished setting out the first of many apple pies she will be making that day inside a tiny single-room cottage situated on Grand Army Plaza in the heart of Brooklyn. The cottage looks like it has sprung out of the pages of a fairy tale, complete with pale blue shutters, a Dutch door, window boxes planted with petunias, and a bouquet of flowers painted over the entrance. Surely Hansel and Gretel will be arriving any moment. The pie sits cooling on the windowsill, crust golden brown, as the aroma of apples and cinnamon floats across the plaza enticing pedestrians over to the cottage. Mack is hoping that one of them will steal the pie, thus completing a cycle of her performance Pies for a Passerby. Over the course of six weeks ¹ Mack, dressed in a variety of floral and gingham aprons, baked countless pies (one at a time), and set each in turn on the windowsill to cool and hopefully be “snatched” by an opportunistic member of the public who happened to be walking by. This performance and installation was sponsored by the Public Art Fund, based in New York. At the same time, across the East River in Central Park the Public Art Fund also sponsored Bluff, a work by Roxy Paine. ² “Planted” between the Sheep Meadow and the Mall, Bluff was a fifty-foot stainless steel tree weighing thousands of pounds. Complete with parasitic steel fungi “growing” off its two-foot-wide trunk, Bluff shimmered against the stark background of a stand of deciduous trees that had yet to come into leaf, “like an oak designed by Frank Gehry.” ³