Zwischen Anlagen Anderer
A thin large-format book with a green hardcover by the artist duo Michael Meier and Christoph Franz is an integral component of their artistic practice. Meier and Franz built a walk-through brick sculpture in Vienna which took the form of a small investment apartment of the kind constructed in large numbers by investment firms, and they used the printing plates for the book to construct the flooring. In this way, the book’s essays about the residential property market which the artists had commissioned from a dozen sociologists, architects, urban planners and activists served as a discursive foundation for the installation. The pages of text, in three columns and a small font, will no doubt have been far from easy to decipher for visitors to the sculpture. The many pages of images, by contrast, with four-colour photographs of 14 current new building projects in Vienna defamiliarised through the use of grids and moirés and with coats of arms printed over them in a silver tone, were combined on the plates into larger units and sometimes even stand-alone posters. The numerous pages of cropped images in the book are thus the result of the installation’s floor design, with the strict method generating experimental and playful results. The design plays with proximity and distance to evoke a sense of space without needing to document the brick sculpture within the book. The green cover material and the plain title typography are suggestive of a project submission or documentation from a municipal archive.
