Catch As Catch Can: Anissa Mack at WaveHill

by Dominique Nahas

In Pies for a Passerby Anissa Mack put on a fifties homemaker's dress and an apron, tied her blond hair up in a bun and baked pie, leaving each one on the window sill to cool. The kitchen's oven was located in a cozy walk-in cottage in front of the main branch of The Brooklyn Public Library. You could see Anissa Mack's gift-giving in action and talk to her on weekends in May and June of 2002. While you may not have been lucky enough to make off with one of her pies, leaving empty-handed, no one left the site empty-minded. If you were charmed by Pies for a Passerby's premise or were put-off by its lore you knew it instantly. And you knew why. What became perhaps alarmingly clear over time were the staggering range and numbers of negative and positive projections of home, hearth and “traditional values” this piece generated. Mack relates that she was drained and exhilarated after the project because of the large number of public interactions over the course of Pie's run.

Something Borrowed, Something New the artist's summer project responds to Wave Hill as a popular site for summer wedding receptions. The current work shares some of the aspects of Mack's earlier work yet it is vastly different. What binds both projects together is the impermanence as well as Mack's unique ability to pinpoint a certain designator or signifier of shared belief or concern by the public and to bring unexpected responses out from it. In Something Borrowed, Something New Mack is fascinated, with the very subject of exchange between individuals. Another parallel is the artist's speculations on the shared realities of roles and role playing, and with the rules and categories set up to promulgate, what Pierre Bourdieu has identified as “the production of belief…[and an] economy of symbolic goods.” [1]

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