without wax

Alex Wisniewski was a good and dear friend when I lived in Ithaca in the 1980s. He was an MFA student in painting at Cornell. His lover, Vic Cardell, was the assistant music librarian at Cornell. Alex did wonderful things in his art, graphically and literally, with words and statements. We would sit and talk for hours, drink gin (straight), and smoke cigarettes (unfiltered), listen to Philip Glass or David Byrne (loud).

The poster for his MFA show was graphically busy with letters and numbers along with the information about the time and space of the show. Alex was interested in etymology of the words too and somehow got it into his brain that "sincere" came from "without wax." The "sin" was without in Spanish; the "cere" was like the "cire" in French for wax. You know, as in "cire perdue" or lost-wax casting. "Without wax" started appearing in his work. He may have mentioned it to me but somehow it became a thing in our conversations. He gave me a copy of his show poster with the words "without wax" in pink acrylic across it, like graffiti.

There's a bar in Alfred called Alex's. It happens to be owned and managed by a fellow whose surname is Wisniewski. I have to work hard to come up with his first name since Wisniewski is so associated in my memory with Alex the artist. Alas, Alex is one of those gay men that were taken from us too soon by AIDS. So I cannot invite him to come visit and we'd go to Alex's and meet Stan Wisniewski.

Back to without wax. It came up again this week during a virtual artist talk with Roberto Lugo. He started his talk with a short video and I about fell off my chair when he said the docudrama was entitled "Without Wax." He credited the phrase to sculptors who sometimes would inscribe the two words on their work to indicate that they had fully sculpted it without going through the wax model phase. The video is very moving and personal but I was sure set up for an emotional ride when he announced the title. Lugo's catchphrase is "ghetto potter and activist" so that all resonated at this moment.

We've all had some disappointments because of Covid restrictions of various sorts. Rob Lugo was supposed to have spent this year as a Rome Fellow at the American Academy.