Images Text
The series consist of five photographs taken in the Sheats-Goldstein residency in Beverly Hills, a building designed by architect John Lautner for the Sheats family in 1963 and remodeled by Jim Goldstein in the early 1970s.
In Los Angeles between 1940 and 1994, Lautner, a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright, built an entire series of sensational one-family homes that were also used as film sets with recurring regularity. His characteristic “California baroque aesthetic”—with its “soaring interior spaces, curving forms, dramatic vistas”—provided the impressive architectural spaces for films like Charlie’s Angels and The Big Lebowski. Lautner’s late Modernist symbiosis of functionalism and science fiction represents a space turned nightmare for Hollywood film audiences. His buildings usually function as sites of crime and perversion.
To build on this trop of the dangerous or criminal element we imagined who
we would like to see living there. We imagined a group of radicals living
and researching for a revolution and that the camera would detect what sort
of texts were being perused for this purpose. Dorit Margreiter
selected the set and Kaucyila Brooke to put together a bibliography from her personal library. The photographs in this series show the architecture documented by Margreiter and the books selected and arranged by Brooke.
The texts are from such disparate sources as Chinese communist comic books, lesbian pulp novels, Camp Fire Girls manuals, interior design books from the sixties and The New Women's Survival Sourcebook from the 1970's. The plot for this revolution thickens and one can imagine an eccentric cell of radicals that are conducting this playful research.