installation views: CCOOOO, Casino Luxembourg 2018
image credits: © Casino Photo, Mike Zenari

Seriality, repetition and reflexivity are an integral part of the artist’s techniques. Meier often revisits his previous works, presenting them in new contexts that suggest different readings. In Meier’s practice, content (the work as such) and container (the space it occupies) are inextricably linked, allowing for diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations. Consisting of various iterations of the same concept, his presentation inevitably departs from its original format to occupy or ‘fill’ the various spaces. While each new instalment ‘encapsulates’ its predecessors, the rearrangement of its original components – illustrated by the letters C and O – gives birth to new, evolved forms echoed by the exhibition titles. These remain deliberately abstract, as any arrangement of the letters into a word would imply a fixed meaning and the acknowledgement of a final form – a principle the artist categorically excludes from his working process.
Meier likes to undermine the codes and conventions of traditional exhibition-making to create spaces of encounter. The genealogy of the titles underlines both the site-specific character of his work and the importance of its relationship with the exhibition context.
Meier’s untitled is a work situated between display and installation. The construction, made of bamboo canes and plugs, evokes conventional party tents and creates open, cubic forms, covering the bottom of the room with a grid-like structure. This structure intervenes with, and seems to respond to, the existing architecture. It meanders between the gallery space and the adjacent rooms; it is not interested in spatial hierarchies, in prioritising certain areas, or in the functional differentiation of architecture. It is ultimately a ‘meaningless’ structure that insists on its own presence without lending the space a functional surplus value or influencing its perception in a surprising way. As a minimalistic, disruptive factor it claims to be site-specific, although it is not. Other versions have already been displayed, among others, in Portland, Vienna, Braunschweig, Catania and New York, for as an easily transportable plug-in system, untitled ideally adapts to the most various circumstances by its polite ignorance of them. If there’s a wall in the way, it is drilled through, without further ado.
A work such as untitled regards walls, doors, and fixtures as factors that have to be integrated without elevating them to a special status. They are components of an environment onto which the work is ‘grafted’, so to speak, implying a break with the existing context, and its subsequent re-inscription. The wall remains a wall, but it becomes a punctured wall involuntarily supporting the work. Therefore, the question of what ultimately belongs to a work of art is raised – the canes, the wall, the context, the surroundings? This question is deliberately kept open, for Meier’s temporary implementation of the cane system in an institutional space is neither a direct critique of the institution nor an independent view of the installation’s intervention. Instead, the structure’s working character equally constitutes its material presence and graphic quality within the space – as well as its uninterested interaction with it. Hence, it is an art that quasi displays the conditions of its exhibition.
With its gestural claim to the space and its non-relationality, untitled – and that stresses (in the positive sense) the rejecting stance of the work – deliberately makes the exhibiting of other works at this location impossible.
While untitled invades and uncompromisingly occupies the exhibition space, the other components of Meier’s exhibition unfold entirely outside the bamboo structure, engaging in a more symbiotic coexistence with the space that takes into account or even highlights its specificities. At Casino Luxembourg, Meier highlights the architectural context by negating or partly dissolving it. Entire sections of walls and facades are ‘pushed back’ thanks to a play with monumental mirrored surfaces. Wherever untitled comes up against the materiality of the architecture, or even physically passes through it, the floating walls create a sense of immateriality, as the building seems to become malleable and stretchable at will. The seriality and repetitiveness of the works is enhanced by their reflection in the mirrors. The mirrors do not occupy the whole space, ensuring that the artist’s gesture and the installative nature of his intervention remain visible. The meeting of the two realms – the point where the reflection becomes reality and the surface becomes space again – creates a field of tension. Rather than scenographic elements or effects, the reflective surfaces embody the intrinsic concepts of the artist’s work.
In the classical understanding of art, sculpture occupies the space statically: it is up to the viewer to move around the artwork and grasp its full extent while maintaining a certain distance, which acts as a sacred delimitation. Meier undermines this dogma and advocates instead a levelling of the sculptural hierarchy. By doing so, he aims to establish a different relationship between the viewer and his works, or even among viewers themselves. Doubt and hesitation in terms of transgressing conventional codes are an integral part of his approach, determining the relationships he is aiming to establish through his work. The exhibition space becomes a place for interaction and for questioning the potential of transformation induced by the functionality of some of the works’ components. Will the bottles be separated from their plinth/cap and release the mezcal they contain? Will the sculptures on mobile trolleys move along the twenty-six meters of rails on which they stand? Meier does not give answers to these questions, nor does he impose any definite form or reading of his exhibitions. Viewers may freely interpret the works as well as their relationships with the works and the exhibition space.