Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled, 2002 (the raw and the cooked)
My blog, Wax by the Fire, is sort of a love letter to Houston and the intelligent, diverse, and friendly community of creative people who live here. Now that the blog is part of Glasstire, I would like to continue what I have been doing on my own site for the past four years, namely recording my responses to what I see and do around the city, but add a few extra features such as interviews, videos, and things I see on my travels.
To give you a little background, I study art history at Rice University in their PhD program and work as a freelance writer for various arts magazines. One of my greatest joys is seeing new work that artists are making in their studio. For the most part, I get to experience that in my husband Jonathan Leach‘s studio at Box 13 ArtSpace. But I also love doing studio visits with other artists and seeing contemporary art exhibitions around town. Most of my posts will probably be about exhibitions I see here in Houston, but I would also like to occasionally share some ideas that I am mulling over.
One thing I have been thinking about lately is a quote by the preeminent twentieth-century German critic and theorist Walter Benjamin about reviewers writing literary criticism from his essay “News about Flowers”:
Opening a book so that it beckons like a table already set, a table at which we are about to take our place with all of our insights, questions, convictions, quirks, prejudices, and thoughts, so that the couple of hundred readers (are there that many?) in this society disappear and just for that reason allow us to enjoy life– this is criticism.
I have an appetite for art and hope to make that hunger contagious. So here it goes . . .
