Word: waxed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...will be a sad year for lovers of the Mutter Museum calendar, produced since 1993 by the fascinating medical museum in Philadelphia. The award-winning calendar highlighted objects from the museum's collection, including the skeleton of twins fused at the head and a wax model of a patient with syphilitic leukoplakia of the tongue (above). The calendar sold thousands of copies and won fans as diverse as the Las Vegas magician Teller (of Penn & Teller) and Harvard University professor of biology Stephen Jay Gould, who calls them "works of art." The calendars earned as much as $15,000 annually...
...Southerner in a dream. One night in 1954, by his own account, Johns dreamed of painting a large American flag, and the next morning he got up and began to do so. He would play with the flag motif for several decades more, rendering the Stars and Stripes in wax encaustic paint on newspaper collage, in oil on canvas, in bronze, pencil and lithography. His fascination with it came, in part, from his very nuanced and ironic feelings about the function of art, particularly in America and especially after Abstract Expressionism...
...flag, but it's made of paint, not cloth, and it cannot "fly"; it is static, stretched, rigid. You are meant to pay attention to its surface, which never happens with a real flag. This surface is discreetly sumptuous and full of energy, with marks and dribbles of wax encaustic over a ground of glued-on newspaper. On one hand, Johns seemed devoted to the flag--but his devotion was esthetic, not patriotic. On the other, by treating its sacred form as mutable, he undermined it as a conventional symbol. And since he did so without any visible aggression...
...small item of proof is the New York Times's "Vows" feature in the weddings-and-engagements section on Sundays. Once this section was a cathedral of boring probity; brides appeared to be photographed in wax, and weddings were reported as the cornerstone layings on national monuments. Now the "Vows" feature (the name itself suggests something ironic and tenuous) describes weddings that sound like the Ritz Brothers' movies, and the happy couple are sometimes photographed in such a way as to indicate that they will go directly from the altar to a mental hospital...
Andrew Stevens is even more emphatic. "Video is a wheezing, gasping, last bastion of collectors and a dwindling number of renters!" he roars. As a DTV icon, Stevens got candle wax dripped on his chest by Tanya Roberts in Night Eyes and got smothered in fruit by Shannon Tweed in Night Eyes 2 ("Nice use of raspberries," notes the invaluable Bare Facts Video Guide, which catalogs nude scenes in R-rated movies). But as the co-owner of Royal Oaks Entertainment, which produces a dozen or so action-adventure titles a year for the foreign market, he's pleased...