In the House of the Trembling Eye
Aspen Art Museum
30 May to 29 September 2024
Colorado
To mark the Aspen Art Museum’s 45th anniversary, Allison Katz has assembled a transhistorical group exhibition of over a hundred works, including Katz’s own paintings and fresco fragments from Pompeii. The museum has hosted a number of artist curations, most recently Urs Fischer’s associative unfolding of John Chamberlain’s work and Monica Majoli’s queering of Tate Modern’s survey of Andy Warhol. To say that Katz’s contribution continues this trend is not inaccurate, but also does not do justice to its wonderful idiosyncrasy. Katz uses the literary language of staging –In the House of the Trembling Eye is “staged” by Katz in close creative collaboration with Stella Bottai and others – playing with theatrical ideas of versioning or reproduction, but also with the artificiality of deliberate invention. Posters designed by Katz, reminiscent of concert memorabilia turned into memorabilia, line an interior hallway and announce the event, marking the place and time of the exhibition’s activation and mischievously selling it to those who have already entered, for whom admission is free anyway.
The last point is literally thanks to the generosity of patrons, as museum admission is an ongoing gift from donors. The sense of collective responsibility that comes from privilege, though never assumed, extends to the checklist as well; the vast majority of the works on display have been provided from local households. In the House of the Trembling Eye is metacritical in this respect too, allowing the home to be the primary place for art. But the title not only speaks in a contemporary language of institutional criticism, but also of an ancient precedent in the Roman Houseor large and often ornate house. Katz participated in Pompeii Commitment’s first fellowship program, and her research permeates the Aspen presentation, from the didactics (which she partly wrote) to the staging (which used the ancient floor plan as a template) and the site-specific nature of the title. Archaeologists name Pompeian buildings after their owners as they become known, or after artifacts and occupational attributes that are excavated, as in the case of the House of Julia Felix, the House of the Faun, or the House of the Surgeon. Katz, for her part, invokes the distinctively anthropomorphic, eye-like motif of the deciduous poplar, known for colonizing fire scars.
From there House is referenced thematically and architecturally. Nine galleries follow one another from outside to inside: the Street, the Atrium, the Tablinum, the Triclinium, the Peristyle, the Cubiculum, the Culina, the Eruption and the Gradiva. The opening vignette evokes Pompeii’s main street, the Via dell’Abbondanza (Street of Abundance), depicted in Katz’ AKgraph (Abbondanza) (2024), where a self-portrait coats the cobblestones of the thoroughfare. Two companion pieces similarly explore registrations of selfhood, and the trio of Katz stand-ins peer into the supposed shopfronts. Fredrik Værslev’s untitled twin canvases, made in collaboration with Nordic Weather and modelled on awnings he remembered from his childhood, complete the outdoor scenography, framing a doorway leading into the atrium or courtyard. Katz makes of its contours a trellis holding not garlands but paintings—an Eva Hesse diagonal to an Amy Sillman; a Kerry James Marshall protrudes from the makeshift perimeter like a flag, back to back with an Ed Ruscha—as a kind of open storage space. The sunken pool, designed to collect water from the hole in the ceiling above, is cleverly represented by Nancy Lupo’s arrangement of Burger King crowns and 2023 Advent knickknacks. Towering above it all is a Pompeian fragment, a fresco from the House of the Sailor depicting Narcissus gazing into his own pool.
Looking at such heterogeneous arrangements, one is confronted with the vitality of the Pompeian ruins at their centre. This is evident in the freshness of their techniques – these traces have nevertheless survived since 79 AD – and their self-reflexivity. Katz writes in her guide to this section on extant techniques of seeing that these ancient painters found ways to break the sacredness of the walls “through the obsessive recreation of thresholds: frames, doors, windows, skylights, balconies, platforms, stages, empty spaces and shifts in scale”. So many illusions. Just behind the Narcissus, in the chamber that represents the office, Katz places Bharti Kher’s seated sculpture, Father (2016), on a raised plinth. The Patrician – a life-size cast of the artist’s father – stares into infinity with empty eyes, a hole cut out of his chest. Nearby stands René Daniëls’ oil on canvas Untitled (1982) features a double figure with blades that could also be cigars, ready to bridle their stubble or slit their throats. In any case, the composition represents a fable about the vulnerability, but also the incipient and compensating violence of masculinity.
In a broader sense, the exhibition produces such conjunctions. In the Triclinium, which means “three sofas,” Katz used her own recent murals: abstract frame elements applied directly to the walls as a backdrop for the art. By displacing the Wölfflinian will to binary comparisons that still organizes so much of art history, they create triangulations. For example, the Pompeian image of the young beauty and the old lecher, Panel with bust of a maenad and a satyr (45–79 AD), Mike Kelley’s chest of drawers and a matching panel with eyes and lips in the decoupage technique, Nature and culture (1987) and Alice Neel’s portrait of her granddaughter sitting on her lover’s open lap, Olivia and Joe(1983). Successive rooms offer different suggestions; particularly effective are the darkened niches of the Cubiculum (chambers for sleeping and other purposes), partitioned off with dark curtains and narrow stalls, and the crescendo of the Eruption Room. If Vesuvius is a structuring absence throughout, Katz eventually delivers the volcano in the form of images of apocalyptic underworlds and fire, as well as more abstract visualizations of heat and eruptions. Lisa Yuskavage’s epic red painting, Walking the dog (2009) shows one of her young women dressed in underwear in the foreground while an inferno rages in the distance.
Katz’s exhibition is also part of a history of Pompeian reenactments, something the artist acknowledges in the afterword to Gradiva, citing Freud’s 1907 essay linking archaeology and psychoanalysis, two disciplines that work closely together in excavating the buried. Elsewhere, writing about previous reenactments at Pompeii, Mary Beard quotes the archaeologist Jane Ellen Harrison criticizing a folly she witnessed in 1884 involving chariot races, priestly processions, and a double of Emperor Vespasian. She claimed that the streets were “alive not only with the footsteps of tourists but with the footsteps of the ghosts of dead men brought back to life by archaeology… We can study the dead past for our benefit, but we do not need to bring it back to life and make it dance for us.” In this context, Beard asks visitors to Pompeii in the 19th century: “How far or how often has history ‘danced’ for them?” For Katz, it is worth asking this question again, especially now when the proximity to death – even without incantation – feels particularly great.