Ah, wow. I thought this article was hilarious. Evidently, there’s an artist who bakes pies and leaves them to be grabbed by opportunists off the windowsill of her custom-built playhouse. To me, it demonstrates the adverse effects of American gimme gimme consumerism.
When Mack originally conceived the piece, she envisioned different layers of meaning. There’s the iconic pie, of course, but also ideas about neighborhood, community and domesticity. But several dozen pies later, her perceptions about the installation began to change. “Maybe it’s not so much about an American icon, but about how Americans act,” she says.
Lisa Osorio, a Brooklyn lawyer in her forties, is one of several people circling the cottage with the calculated patience of a prowling lioness. “The other day, there was a girl here eating a whole pie. I was like, you should share.” The girl didn’t, so Osorio watched and learned. “You have to kind of be around when she’s about to put the pie out,” she explains. “I’m just going to wait till I get one.”
Surely there are easier ways to acquire an apple pie. Maybe going to a store and just buying one? No way, says Osorio. “I want one of these, because I want to be a part of something special.”
When Mack finally puts the afternoon’s first pie out to cool, it is immediately snatched from the windowsill by Cynthia Otrupcak, a substitute teacher from upstate New York.
Like a victorious beauty queen, a flushed and gushing Otrupcak is surrounded by envious well-wishers who actually hate her, and it isn’t long before the scene turns ugly. Several witnesses accuse her of grabbing the pie from in front of a small boy whose nose had been pressed against a window for hours. Otrupcak is defending herself when she is approached by a man who has still other plans for her pie. “Excuse me,” he says, holding his maybe-6-year-old son by the shoulders and pushing the boy toward Otrupcak. “He’s been here four times now, and — ”
Otrupcak refuses to relinquish — or share — her pie.
“I’m appalled,” says Ellen Beyda, a Park Slope psychologist, shaking her head in disgust.
- Once Otrupcak and her ill-gotten pastry are gone, the mob turns its attention to the cottage again, and when Mack opens the top half of the door for some air and conversation, they press closer in. They ask questions about her other artwork and whether it’s hot in there. But mostly, they ask about the pies.
“How many have you made so far?”
“When’s the next batch coming out?”
And, from a man who sounds slightly desperate: “Would you consider putting out slices at this point, given the volume of people?”
Mack patiently explains that she’s baked 65 pies since the exhibit opened, and that it’s easier to get a pie on weekdays, when crowds are smaller. On those days, she says, pies have lasted two full minutes on the windowsill.
Mack retreats into the cottage again, where she pours herself a glass of water from a ceramic rooster pitcher and wipes her brow. She grew up in Guilford, Conn., where her parents were schoolteachers who encouraged her artmaking. She learned how to bake a pie from her father.
She studied art in college, earned an MFA in sculpture, and has had solo exhibitions in New York galleries. Several years ago, in a non-sanctioned public art event, she made a pair of ruby red slippers and brought them to Washington’s Museum of American History, and set them down in front of the exhibit of the real ruby reds from “The Wizard of Oz.” Delighted museumgoers tried on her slippers and took pictures of each other in them. “Being in possession of these objects gave them this extra level of joy,” she says. “I was interested in exploring how these objects, these things, can be so powerful.”
Now Mack works full time as a production artist for a textbook publisher. She’s been amazed by the response to “Pies for a Passerby.” Appreciative viewers have brought her flowers and presents. “On the whole, people are so nice. But sometimes people who’ve been waiting for a while get this sense of entitlement.”
Outside, the pie fiends are becoming belligerent. Children and adults claw at the closed windows. Someone starts knocking on the walls. Several teenagers begin chanting: “We want pie! We want pie!”
Mack had expected the installation’s visitors to draw her into debates about whether “Pies for a Passerby” is really art. “People are having their expectations challenged, and to me, that’s art,” she says.
But lofty discussions about art have been overwhelmed by more pressing concerns: “Mostly, people just want to know when the next pie is coming out.”