ASPEN ART MUSEUM
SUMMER 2024 EDITION
9
Summer Exhibition
me her elaborate scale model of the exhibition, which enacts or stages—in a kind of “psycho-architecture”—the dierent spaces of the traditional Pompeiian home. “Stage” is a word that we both use often in the long and ow- ing conversation that follows, along with theater, mask, performance, iden- tity, intimacy, private, public—themes and realities familiar to any person from any time. But they are particularly relevant to the interior spaces of the domus , which were constructed to reect dierent purposes, customs, activities and power dynamics. Plus ça change , one might say—even in our era of open-plan layouts. But, for Katz, the organization of space also mirrors the questions and concerns of paint- ing: what do you do with/what happens inside/how does a body (or an eye) move around this space with its xed parameters? Does it embrace the real or the illusory, the plain or the deco- rated, the gurative or the abstract? Does it straddle all of the above to push against spatial and pictorial expecta- tions—break the walls down? I place my head close to the model and peer into each room as Katz vividly describes it: the street (from which you can see directly into the center of the house, where its patriarch sits elevated), atrium (courtyard), tablinum (oce), triclinium (dining room), peristyle (enclosed garden), cubicula (a personal favorite: curtained sleeping pods sometimes also used for meet- ings, trysts, murder or suicide), culina (kitchen). As the project started with Pompeii—where Katz visited as part of Pompeii Commitments, a program that hosts artists, curators and researchers on site—so does each room, only to quickly go elsewhere. (This, too, is how vision works, darting near to far, around and back, sometimes stopping to dream in the middle-distance.) The rooms are like stanzas in the poetic sense—they don’t illustrate or argue but gather thoughts and images to hang and jostle and rub together in tension and anity, producing a dierent experience for each witness. Looking closely, imagining walking from street to atrium to culina to cubiculum , I glimpse familiar works, some close to my heart: a Paul Thek trio of ames sinking into lapis waters; a pale Joan Mitchell triptych raucous at its center with dark green and eeting ames of crimson, yellow, magenta; an early Alice Neel drawing of the artist nude on the toilet while her similarly exposed lover urinates into a sink that seems to oat unmoored from the wall; an Ed Ruscha gas station silhouetted against a sky of glowing reds and oranges; Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s wallpaper in chalky pastels; a Cecilia Vicuña paint- ing of legs studded with breasts (or bulbous eyes?) oating against bright yellow and orange striations; a plaster leg, hip to foot, by Alina Szapocznikow. I could go on and on: in nite riches across many rooms. Amid these works and others that span primarily the 20th and 21st centuries (with one piece from the 17th) are scattered fragments of wall frescoes and objects from Pompeii (Narcissus and his reection, a group of men, a leering satyr, a cheetah chas- ing a fawn, a strangely geometrical stone thumb) and numerous paintings by Katz herself that deal with openings, frames, faces, authorship and enigma.
Left Allison Katz, Frequencies , 2024. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Eva Herzog
or “she who steps along,” “a woman who walks,” “the one who advances,” a Roman goddess who inspired the Surrealists and for Freud symbolized psychoanalysis as a cure for love. I think of her here as the visitor, the curator, the artist, the painter—con- soled by fragments and elated with combinatorial agility. She walks, keeps walking, through the domus , the gallery, the canvases and beyond.
it), enthusiastically broadcast. These devastations do not promise immacu- late preservation, as was the accidental eect of the eruption of Vesuvius, which froze everything—including 1,150 human bodies—precisely where it lay. “The Pompeiian fragments bring me consolation. Painting from 2,000 years ago that looks like it was made today. The fragment as a form in itself brings me consolation,” Katz says. The Pompeiian fragment is a form of painterly continuity and a reminder of what is at stake while we are alive because this time, after the eruption, there may be nothing left for any artist, curator or archaeologist to piece together. But here and now we have the canvas. The penultimate and nal rooms of “In the House of the Trembling Eye” escape the con nes of the domus into rooms titled “Eruption” and “Gradiva.” The former is hot and wild, teeming with reds (Anish Kapoor, Lucio Fontana), ying and smeared multicolored chaos (Julie Mehretu, Gerhard Richter), ominous ssures (Katz) and almost a dozen other eruptive images, both abstract and gurative. The latter is cool and spare, dominated by Katz’s large painting of a walking woman in silhouette, her form multiplied like a stop-motion kaleidoscope. She is Gradiva (2024),
My mind skips through Warburgian associations, linking images through pseudomorphism (a line here matches a curl there, hues echo across canvases, framing devices repeat and invert, animals and gures and faces leap and perform and sometimes look straight out at you), as if each room has some- how dreamed its contents, exhumed from somewhere between Aspen and Pompeii, between Katz’s studio and her staged domus interiors. Art-historical, painterly and thematic preoccupations would oer dierent routes through the house, which is also the gallery, as would a viewer’s own associations. As the artist avers, this is a show distinctly not about taste. “What does it mean to look for the continuum in painting, and to express, in an exhibition format, the inexhaustibility of the painted surface? To communicate across time, in a poetic logic, similar to Virginia Woolf’s de nition of poetry (‘a voice answering a voice’)?” Katz asks. The answer is a chorus. In 79 AD, the 20,000 inhabitants of Pompeii knew they were living on the edge of Mount Vesuvius, but they didn’t know it was a volcano, and that it would soon begin to tremble and destroy everything in its wake. Today, we live in a constant state of loom- ing catastrophe and impending doom (climate change, nuclear war, you name
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Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London, UK. Her book Dog Days will be published in the UK by Peninsula Press in 2025. “In the House of the Trembling Eye: an exhibition staged by Allison Katz” runs until September 29. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Italy.
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