I love not working....

I love not working. I know there are people in this world who say they don't know what they would do with themselves if they did not have a job to suck up 8 hours of every day of their lives, but I'm not one of those people. Perhaps that's why I was a tad depressed on Wednesday after the interview I had with a small employment law firm actually went well. I'm the first person they interviewed so I could still not get the job, but I gave good answers to their questions and even had them laughing. This firm offers a transportation allowance, birthday parties, holiday parties, jeans once a month and not I was never asked if I could work with "difficult personalities" its every paralegal's wet dream. Except I don't really want to be a paralegal. I don't want to work 60 a week in an office that takes three elevators and an escalator to reach. That's not even exaggeration for emphisis - whoever designed that building was high.

To make up for a day that was lost to suites and interviews I took myself to see the Menil collection yesterday. Its one of my favorite museums to visit. Its actually a complex of several galleries, that - in true Houston no zoning fashion - are located in the middle of one of the older neighborhoods near downtown. One this day I only visited the main collections located in a low gray building. The large gallery space is divided into smaller rooms of a dozen or so paintings each. Each space has two, sometimes three entrances, so you circle back through areas, peek around corners, compare paintings, view pieces from a longer perspective – intimacy and distance, the vague unsettling dis-ease induced by Surrealism. Claustrophobia and open-endedness. It’s dream work. It’s the uncanny that rises like perfume from the most familiar objects in your world.

A short brochure introduces new shows including my favorite this time around, KURT SCHWITTERS: Color and Collage. But in the exhibition areas, there are no texts on the walls, no structured guided tours explaining historical development. There’s simply exposure to art in an intimate setting. The perfect presentation of Schewitters' work. Schwitters transformed the “useless” forms of everyday life into a language and aesthetic by nailing and gluing together forgotten pieces of urban waste – train tickets, scraps of fabric, candy wrappers. I love making collages. There is something spiritual in the process of sitting before all these found objects and finding their collective beauty.

Photography is not allowed inside the galleries. I have located photos and a great article on the history Schwitters' work - in true Houston fashion - on the Dallas Art News blog. So CLICK HERE for more.