Auras and Levitations by Susan Hiller is our Book of the Month, with 30% off direct orders for the whole of May 2021. Order it now.

Susan Hiller’s artist’s book pays homage to two images of aspiration, fantasy and sublimation: Yves Klein’s Leap Into The Void, and Marcel Duchamp’s Portrait of Dr. R. Dumouchel. Both embrace the phantasmagorical legacy of modernist art; in the former, the shaman’s defiance of gravity, in the latter, the clairvoyant’s perception of human auras.

In her miniature book, Hiller has assembled images sourced from the internet, all paying indirect homage to these two artists’ gestures. She presents a sequence of levitations, back-to-back with a series of images of auras, so constructing an occult legacy thriving in popular culture, in which the artist’s gesture is reincarnated in the democratic medium of the internet. Read a piece about the work before its release in 2007, by Brian Dillon in Frieze, here.

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