By PETER RICHTER

Just consider how insane it is that the city of Berlin is shutting down its stunning inner-city airport at Tempelhof in order to build a new one somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. Whoever would do such a thing ought not to be surprised when someone else from the provinces suggests an even larger insanity – or at least something insanely large. So artist Ralf Ziervogel suggested constructing a massive cube on the empty airfield, 100 hundred square meters long by 100 meters wide. Initially it sounds reasonably harmless, because plenty of buildings are a 100 meters long. But 100 meters high? That’s four times higher than Berlin building regulations permit. And the whole thing would simply consist of a steel framework and white gauze, no internal supports and no external traction cables. An unsupported ceiling: over 10,000 square meters of mossy field – that’s the size of a football stadium. Those who have seen the elaborate structures supporting a stadium roof aren’t the only ones to scratch their heads when Ziervogel blathers on about it, soon asking if they couldn’t rather see a few of his fine drawings depicting various tortures – which actually have something reassuring about them in comparison to the plans for his cube.

But Ziervogel has certainly managed to give the impression that he’s dead serious. The architect David Chipperfield is on board; the famous structural engineer Jörg Schlaich will do the necessary calculations to make the impossible possible. As far as Ziervogel is concerned, the project can get going. And if it actually ever does, it’s going to make the Tower of Babel look like a Kleckerburg drip sand castle. It would be the largest monument ever – but for what exactly?

Ziervogel is, fortunately, no Gregor Schneider. His cube isn’t black like Schneider’s, it’s white which will hopefully spare him the unfortunate debate about whether or not the artwork invites an unwelcome comparison to the Kaaba, or mistakes Tempelhof for Mecca. Out of fear for controversy, neither Venice nor Berlin would build Schneider’s black cube – only Hamburg dared put the piece next to Oswald Mathias Unger’s similarly cubic Kunsthalle, which itself irritated just about everyone, except actually Muslims. But even in white and without the essentialist musings that surrounded Schneider’s cube, Ziervogel’s piece forcefully “Heideggers” itself wherever pure forms and bare Dasein come together. Yet there is some thing good-humored and Christo-like about Ziervogel’s project, some thing fundamentally attractive: mossy ground is converted into a cathedral of light and gauze. You only have to imagine it once to see its charm: the materials themselves are grounding, when everything else around you is high- pitched. It’s even possible to consider how it will look when the wind and the rain affect the fabric on the open field – even though the cube itself, as a platonic body, indeed falls more into the category of Earth – of the hard and the dry.

You can already imagine how awe-struck you might be in front of such an object – not so much for its sheer size, but for its orderliness. An orderliness rendered bizarre by its sheer impossibility. A comet from a utopia of regularity, whose structure lines up with Sisyphus’ arithmetic: each side of equal length – though easily done in geometry books, in reality it represents the triumph of a cruel, beautiful, and ruthless mathematics beyond nature and all sanity. An object thrust into the world with all the power of hardcore idealism. Not even the boldest Pythagoreans in building history ever went that far. Why would they?

Ralf Ziervogel’s interests and logic unfold entirely in favor of the cube, having been preoccupied for some time about how to step from 2D into 3D, from drawing into reality. But that’s not all – this cube does not represent the future high point of Ralf Ziervogel’s career, but rather its beginning.

Ziervogel is now 33 years old, and well known internationally for his finely drawn pandemonium on paper. It all began not much more than four years ago, when suddenly a giant, meter-high paper was hanging in Berlin, in fairs and in exhibitions, scrawled with everything Dante and de Sade dared not write down. These were the technical feats of a sharp quill. One might use the artist’s own quintessential words to describe the content:

“At the bottom is an inflatable Grace Jones advertisement/screaming head, from which a Buffalo-shoe-wearing lesbian emerges with Citroën-logo balloons in her hands.”

Or: “Parallel right, a long, Aimee Mullins artificial leg impales a Korean DAAD student with dental floss running the length of his body.”

Or also: “On the bow, a detached elephant head bereft of its tusks is kept alive with adrenaline syringes, so its two fishhook pierced trunks can sniff at the bare ass of an Adidasclad baldy. Simultaneously sodomized by one of two sizzling pork skillets on a mobile hotplate, this one’s without further ado perforated by several rounds of canon fire, served up by a guy admiring his own muscles.”

Why is it so often assumed that someone who writes or draws such things is a private, glasses-wearing introvert? The opposite is by all means the case. For our interview, the artist wore black patent leather shoes, black jeans, a black vest, and over it, in the same color, a loose-knit, crocheted wool dressing gown – a surprisingly sophisticated ensemble. Standing under the threateningly low ceiling of one of Hans Kollhoff’s buildings in central Berlin, he explains how he rolls out his high-quality French paper on the laminate and, lying on the floor, draws with a pointed ink pen, figure by figure, massacre by massacre, month after month, until, in the end, the horror crystallizes into an overall pattern, into something he would never have imagined beforehand – because he doesn’t usually roll the paper the whole way out, just the section he is working on. There are historical as well as conceptual reasons for this, but to understand them, we need first to back up a bit. Ralf Ziervogel comes from Clausthal-Zellerfeld in the Goslar district of Lower Saxony, and is not someone who always liked to draw. At art school, when he had to take credits in figure drawing he would submit the work of fellow students – he simply wasn’t interested. Or so he claims. What interests him is “free art.” Even the word, the promise, the “cliché of art.” Because after all the cliché is a central concept for Ziervogel; he slips the word in three times for every two sentences. His fondness for the cliché tends to position his work under a latent suspicion of parody. It is often a bit like the attitude that a shrewd scriptwriter might come up with to portray the figure of the clever artist. So this artist might pursue the cliché of minimal art, for example; he might place “one million black dots on roughly one square meter” and then exhibit the work within the aura-centrifuge that is the exhibition space – or at least within an orderly post-structuralist discourse – just to see whether he can get away with it. Or he might shoot brilliant, short films: of himself furiously cleaning his teeth until there’s so much foam on the guy that he could shave with it; or of himself holding a baby as though it was a machine gun and aiming it at people in the street. Hybrids of the slapstick and the sad truth.

To explain how he came to drawing, Ziervogel offers up two similar-sounding legends. The more romantic one tells of a few years in New York, living in a tiny room in Spanish Harlem. Paper rolls lay under the bed, with the artist on top of the bed, and not much more space than that. It sounds like an aesthetic production in itself: sitting in the middle of roaring New York under claustrophobic conditions, unable to ever get a complete overview of the work he was stitching together.

The other story is about the search for a more direct means of expression than video or installation, about the shortest route from brain to hand, about a table covered with paper and spontaneous doodles that retrieve massacre from virtuosity, designer clothes from old masterliness, all to viciously mushroom out in the end. Everything must be meticulously traced, says Ziervogel; even the smallest, most absurd and horrific details must stand in a demonstrable causal relationship to any impending anatomical effect or torture. A world image emerges in which someone exerts plausibility – Ziervogel already goes beyond the addled neo-Surrealist motivations of so many of his peers. Another aspect is that nothing really repeats itself, there’s always something new and even harsher to discover, something that’s never boring.

It was this kind of “genius” (it’s hard to avoid the attractive, albeit ancient word here) that begs a comparison to Bosch and Bruegel – whereby both Pieter, the “infernal Bruegel,” and Jan, the “flower Bruegel,” come into question. Because, in the end, from a distance, the piercing penetrations and torturous entwinements form climbing patterns and floral ornamentations, whose beauty puts the beastliness of its basic building blocks into a different perspective. It’s not unlike Ernst Haeckel’s zoological artwork or the work of the Marquis de Sade – to whom Ziervogel in all likelihood owes his insight more so than his content – in which orgies are more an issue of mathematics and choreography than of the erotic.

From Schnitzler’s La Ronde to Adolf Loos’ reflections in Ornament and Crime and Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament – even if the latter had the Tiller Girls in mind and not “fucking gay colonies” (Ziervogel) – one could reference a whole series of key texts on decadence and early modernity here. At the same time, these structures are the intoxicated horrors of an almost extreme actuality: neural networks, molecular chains, relationships, networks, bionics – in short, everything that’s also currently fascinating architects and designers, to the extent that they like to replicate them in order to symbolize that everything is encapsulated therein. “Network” has be come the favorite word for all champions of globalization, and “collectivity” the alternative offered up by their leftist critics. Then there’s “interconnectivity,” the survival strategy for the alienated or those affiliated with cultural activities. The work may even remind some of Deleuze; of the “plateau” and the “rhizome.”

We know from film that “splatter” is just a term of endearment. And if you look at them long enough, Ziervogel’s images become all the more surprising, especially in regards to the cohesive forces that exist between different parts of the body, to the techniques, perversions, and filth that the figures barely cling to, so that they aren’t catapulted from their fragile synapses. Yet the strangest aspect of these drawings is the centrifugal force that dominates them. Ziervogel agrees that these entities could also be read as metaphors for the mechanisms of metropolitan society, at least in terms of nightlife: it’s a party. Everyone wants to experience everything, to take part; they all have the same wide-open eyes, they’re all “in ecstasy” and “the one lying down is just as horny.” And because it is so important that even the most tattered figures experience the moment, they are revived in a pinch for a final convulsion through electric shocks by a car battery, depicted alongside them. The verbal form of these artworks, as above, takes the present participle: so much simultaneity is typically rare.

The viewer is condemned to either dive into a Where’s Waldo puzzle or step back from the whole image and lose sight of the details. In these physical and spatial dimensions, the graphics suddenly subside again to Ziervogel’s interest in installation – he points out that issues of space, positioning, structure, and therefore architecture in these images also play an important role. And, from these tent pole-like connections of bodies against white paper, to the structure of white gauze against steel, there’s really only a small step for the artist – albeit a somewhat larger and acclimatizing one for his audience. After all, the cube is one of his oldest projects, originally conceived as a proposal for his application to Berlin’s UdK as an “object artist.” Ziervogel was asked what he wanted to do, and he replied: a cube. Hundreds of square meters in length, and so on. A cliché of a project – and if it’s not about clichés, what then?