C.F.T. Suite
(2000)
On July 30, 2000, my uncle Charles Francis Tauss died. I had lost contact with him for the last nine years of his life. Three days after his death I was asked by my cousin to assist her in archiving the accumulations of his life.
Entering his apartment I felt that I had broken a hermetic seal and had precious moments to record and safely archive it's vast contents before it would be turned over to the building's management firm to once again wipe clean a life's strata and provide a new (clean) cycle for it's next occupants.
Charles Tauss was an artist, collector, and conservator. He had lived at 1183 Grand Concourse in the Bronx for 58 years. He and his family moved there in 1942. Fourteen year later his family moved yet again, he stayed and took over the apartment and resided there alone for the rest of his life. Before our loss of contact I enjoyed my frequent meetings with him. But yet in all that time I had been to his apartment only twice, once as a young boy and then thirty five years ago. My memory was of a place of wonder with rooms neatly filled with paintings, objects, and scientific instruments.
For the last sixteen years although suffering from failing health, traumatized by the loss of a vast amount of his paintings and sculpture that had been destroyed through the neglect of the apartment building's superintendent, and other personal setbacks that plagued him, he still continued to make art daily, and surround himself with all the things that he loved throughout his life.
I documented the apartment as I found it.