Auras and Levitations

Susan Hiller's most recent artist's book pays homage to two images of aspiration, fantasy and sublimation. She takes as her inspiration Yves Klein's Leap Into The Void which delves into the shaman's defiance of gravity and Marcel Duchamp's Portrait of Dr. R. Dumouchel, which looks at the clairvoyant's perception of human auras. In this tiny volume (3 inches by 4 inches), Hiller has assembled a democratic sequence of images sourced from the internet. Opening the book from one side, the reader meets a sequence of levitations; flip the book over, and you see a series of images of auras. The result is a look at a phantasmagorical legacy of early modern art.