The Brooklyn Rail

On the occasion of the Aspen Art Museum’s forty-fifth anniversary, Allison Katz mounted a transhistorical group show with over a hundred works, inclusive of Katz’s own paintings and fresco fragments from Pompeii. The museum has hosted a number of artist curations, most recently with Urs Fischer’s associative unfurling of John Chamberlain’s work and Monica Majoli’s queering of Tate Modern’s survey of Andy Warhol. To say Katz’s contribution extends this trend is not inaccurate, but it also sells its marvelous idiosyncrasy short. Katz uses the authorial language of staging—In the House of the Trembling Eye is “staged by” Katz in close creative partnership with Stella Bottai and others—playing with theatrical ideas of versioning or rendition, but also the artifice of willful contrivance. Katz-designed posters evocative of concert merchandise-become-memorabilia line one interior hallway, announcing the event. In this, she flags the space and time of the exhibition’s activation and waggishly sells it to those who have already entered and for whom admission is anyhow free.

The last point literally owes to patrons’ generosity, with museum entry the perpetual gift of donors. The sense of collective stewardship born of if never assumed by privilege extends to the checklist; the vast majority of works on view were shared from local homes. In the House of the Trembling Eye is thus meta-critical in this regard as well, admitting the domestic as a primary venue for art. Yet the title speaks not only in a contemporary language of institutional critique, but also of an antique precedent in the Roman domus, or large and often lavishly decorated house. Katz participated in the inaugural Fellowship program of Pompeii Commitment, and her research suffuses the Aspen presentation, from its didactics (which she in part authored) to its staging (enacting the ancient floor plan as a template), and the site-specificity of the title. Archaeologists name Pompeiian buildings after their owners once they are identified, or through artifacts and professional attributes that are unearthed, as in the House of Julia Felix, House of the Faun, or House of the Surgeon. For her part, Katz invokes the distinctively anthropomorphic eye-like motif of the deciduous aspen tree, known to colonize burn scars.

From there, the domus is referenced in theme and architecture. Nine galleries sequentially follow from the outside in: the Street, Atrium, Tablinum, Triclinium, Peristyle, Cubiculum, Culina, Eruption, and Gradiva. The opening vignette conjures Pompeii’s main road, Via dell’Abbondanza (Street of Abundance), pictured in Katz’s AKgraph (Abbondanza) (2024), where a self-portrait overlays the thoroughfare’s flagstones. Two companion pieces similarly explore registrations of selfhood, and the trio of Katz stand-ins gaze into the supposed storefronts. Fredrik Værslev’s twinned untitled canvases, made in collaboration with Nordic weather and modeled on awnings recalled from his childhood, complete the exterior scenography. They frame a doorway leading into the Atrium, or central courtyard. Katz renders its contours a trellis holding not garlands but paintings—an Eva Hesse diagonal to an Amy Sillman; a Kerry James Marshall protruding from the makeshift boundary like a flag, back-to-back with an Ed Ruscha—as a kind of open storage. The sunken basin intended to collect water from the hole in the ceiling above is cannily represented by Nancy Lupo’s 2023 arrangement of Burger King crowns and Advent tchotchkes. Presiding over it all is a Pompeiian fragment, aptly a fresco from the House of the Sailor bearing Narcissus gazing into a pool of his own.

To see such heterogeneous arrangements is to confront the vitality of the Pompeiian ruins at their center. This obtains in the freshness of their techniques—those marks preserved since 79 CE, despite it all—and their self-reflexivity. Katz writes in her guide to this section of extant technologies of looking, ways that these ancient painters found to pierce the sanctity of the walls “via the obsessive re-creation of thresholds: frames, doors, windows, skylights, balconies, platforms, stages, empty space, and shifts in scale.” So many illusions. Just beyond the Narcissus, in the chamber that stands in for the office, Katz sets Bharti Kher’s seated sculpture, Father (2016), on a raised plinth. The patrician—a life-sized cast of the artist’s father—stares to infinity with blank eyes, a hole carved out of his chest. Nearby René Daniëls’s oil on canvas Untitled (1982), shows a doubled figure with blades that might also be cigars poised to curb their stubble or slit their throats; either way the composition poses a fable of the vulnerability but also the incipient and compensatory violence of masculinity.

More broadly does the show produce such conjunctions. In the Triclinium, meaning “three couches,” Katz applied latter-day wall paintings of her own: abstract framing devices applied directly to the walls as backdrops for the art. Displacing the Wölfflinian will to binary comparisons that still organizes so much art history, these establish triangulations. For example, one holds the Pompeiian image of young beauty and old lecher, Panel with bust of Maenad and Satyr (45–79 CE), Mike Kelley’s chest of drawers and a matching panel decoupaged with eyes and lips, Nature and Culture (1987), and Alice Neel’s portrait of her granddaughter sitting on the open lap of her lover, Olivia and Joe, (1983). Successive rooms offer different propositions; especially effective are the darkened recesses of the Cubiculum (chambers for sleeping and sundry uses) sectioned off with dark curtains and compressed stalls, and the crescendo of the Eruption room. If Mount Vesuvius is a structuring absence throughout, Katz finally delivers the volcano in the form of images of apocalyptic underworlds and fire as well as more abstract visualizations of heat and upsurge. Lisa Yuskavage’s epic red painting, Walking the Dog (2009), puts one of her underwear-clad ingenues in the foreground, inferno raging in the distance.

Katz’s exhibition also participates in a history of Pompeiian revivals, which the artist acknowledges in the epilogue, Gradiva, citing Freud’s 1907 essay connecting archaeology and psychoanalysis, disciplines twinned in uncovering the buried. Elsewhere writing of earlier reenactments in Pompeii, Mary Beard cites archaeologist Jane Ellen Harrison, criticizing a folly she witnessed in 1884, replete with chariot races, priestly procession, and an Emperor Vespasian lookalike. She charged that the streets were “alive not merely with the footsteps of tourists, but with the tread of dead men's ghosts charmed back to life by archaeology … We may study the dead past to our profit, but we need not call it back to life and bid it dance for us.” Apropos of this, Beard asks of the visitors to Pompeii in the nineteenth century: “How far, or how often, did history ‘dance’ for them?” For Katz, the question is worth asking again, now, when this proximity to death feels—even without conjuring—particularly close.