Muy Mago (Portrait of Aleister Crowley) (1961) by Xul Solar.
• “…snails amaze with their capacity to move so far, to spread so widely, while doing so little. This, it seems to me, is one of the real marvels of snail biogeography. Individuals do not need to exert great effort because natural selection has acted for them, acted on them, acted with them, to produce these beings that are so unexpectedly but uniquely suited to a particular form of deep time travel, drifting. From such a perspective, rather than being any kind of deficiency, the highly successful passivity of snails might be seen as a remarkable evolutionary achievement.” Thom van Dooren on how snails cross vast oceans.
• “Slow art has layers. And this is why it requires time and effort. We should see this as a good and necessary thing. If this is a kind of obstacle in the way of easy assimilation then it is an obstacle that is integral to the value of the thing itself. The mind is calmed, or disturbed, or made exultant by the art that rewards us for our goodwill and our capacity to take our time.” In Praise of Slow Art by Chris Horner.
• “I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition but perhaps there is a third way. Let’s call it the supranatural stance…” Paul Broks explores the roots of coincidence.
• At Unquiet Things: The art of Hector Garrido, an illustrator who specialised in the Gothic staple of women in gowns fleeing at night from sinister mansions.
• “The writer Jorge Luis Borges once referred to his friend the artist Xul Solar as ‘one of the most singular events of our era’,” writes Miriam Basilio.
• At Spoon & Tamago: Japanese craftsmanship meets Pokemon at Kanazawa’s National Crafts Museum.
• At Public Domain Review: Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s Microscopic Delights (1759–63).
• New music: Rest Of Life by Steve Roach.
• The Four Horsemen (1972) by Aphrodite’s Child | Supper’s Ready (1972) by Genesis | Six Six Sixties (1979) by Throbbing Gristle