Present Memorials : Houses of Passage
| Tim McDonald, Onion Flats | |
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FAARM / FOUNDATION FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH Philadelphia PA Founder and Curator |
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| Richard Taransky’s Present Memorials/Houses of Passage begins a series of exhibitions at FAARM entitled Four Voices, which will continue into June of 2000. The series has no intention to create a venue of the ‘best and brightest’ in the city, rather it hopes to present an image of the diversity and breadth of four distinct and highly individualized approaches to the discipline of architecture in the Philadelphia area. It is through the diversity and rigor of these four practices that the dialogue concerning the role and responsibility of the contemporary architect may continue within the architectural community. | |
| As the inaugural event of Four Voices, Richard Taransky’s Present Memorials/Houses of Passage appropriately initiates this series, for the tone that his work presents and the response that it illicit challenges most preconceived notions of the ‘function’ of any contemporary architectural practice. While most architects would agree that architecture is not simply a ’service-oriented’ profession, but one in which the responsibility to a client is equally balanced with its responsibility to a culture, a tradition and a critical discourse, few could actually offer such a position through their work. The tone of the ‘theoretical’ and ‘physical’ constructions, which fill the space of FAARM, is sure to confound both practitioner and theorist alike. It will confound because the content of the work is not easily consumed or digested. It requires participation on the part of the viewer, which is at times unsettling. It is unsettling precisely because we are presented with a series of constructs which take their form and function from archetypal images of man, images which link biblical parables to holocaust tragedy, ritualistic sacrifice to suburban home and funerary ashes to backyard grills. As Diane Lewis so apply notes, Taransky “grope(s) for an archaic sense of existence to permeate every element of a structure with meaning beyond the visible”. This ‘archaic sense of existence’ is the overriding tone of this architect’s work. | |
| Taransky’s installation “A Proposal for a Clearing“, which accompanies the exhibition, is a series of meticulously humble and heavy ‘figures’ composed of steel and wood. Through these figures, however, through their joints and juxtapositions, through their gravity and suspension, through their physical presence, Taransky is telling us stories. He is also telling us that we need to tell stories. As one looks into the protagonists of Adam, Eve and Lilith, one finds other images of chairs/thrones, cradle/coffin/womb, oven, picket fence, telephone pole/ tree of life….and the plot begins to thicken. Taransky appears to be presenting us with not one story of the original ‘fall of man’, but many, layered in time and woven uncomfortably with equally archetypal images of our present. Taransky finds it necessary to not simply speak of a loss of a ’spiritual continuity’; he must construct an image of it. It is in this constructing that one begins to encounter the function of the work as mnemonic, “intended to assist in the memory”. It is as if this construction is somehow a re-construction, an archaic founding ritual, a reconstituting of a forgotten hallowed ground, an act of commemoration particular to this physical space and time and yet somehow timeless. The appropriate titling of this piece reminds us that in any constructing there is first a ‘clearing’ in which tale needs to be told. | |
| FAARM is honored and privileged to exhibit the thoughts and work of an architect who tirelessly invokes a space of questioning which is larger than himself and the cynical time in which he lives. Our hope is that this exhibition will not simply contribute to the dialogue concerning a contemporary architectural practice. We expect it to raise the stakes. |
