Another Time, Another Space: The Art and Life of Rammellzee
Photos by Joshua White, courtesy of the Estate of Rammellzee and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles
We’re in a period of change unlike the world has ever known. Every society in every age has been sure Armageddon is on the way but when in recent memory has nuclear holocaust, authoritarianism, and (brand new to the mix) climate change threatened to converge all at once? All converging in an age when you can see the decline in real time, all on your preferred social media platform. As such, with wars waging and more on the way, we see information become a battlefront. Governments argue with the titans of industry over what kind of information can be collected, amassed, and deployed for benefit by profit or politics. People gather in these spaces and form new nations with groupthink focused on followers and hits and engagement and declare loyalty with pledges of allegiance we call Terms of Service.
Interesting, then, that there is a (maybe not so) lowkey obsession in a variety of cultural spaces blooming around the legacy of Rammellzee.
This year alone, Rammellzee’s art has been seen at a major retrospective with Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles, and will remain on view in the huge Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures show at the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian. Rizzoli will have a major tome on Rammellzee’s work later this year, subtitled Racing for Thunder. And lest we forget, there will be a sneaker from Nike in collaboration with Supreme featuring art in the mode of Rammellzee’s later two-dimensional paintings (Rammellzee was the first artist to make custom designs for the street brand).
Rammellzee was a polymath. Shortly following his start in graffiti in the early ‘70s, tagging trains in his hometown, Far Rockaway in Queens, he began developing a theory about life and liberation through controlling letterforms, transforming words and thought into a new kind of warfare against those that use information to control.
According to Viola Angiolini, the Director of Research and Curatorial at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery:
“Rammellzee’s references to scientific treatises, mathematical rules, on one side they seem to be pretty coherent, like proving some actual rules about how the world functions, how the human mind functions, how the universe is structured, but at the same time they’re not fully coherent. This dichotomy that it, at once, seems to really check out but also, it leaves you wondering what it’s all really about. Instead of thinking about it as something with a singular meaning, we can instead look at it as a coherent and incoherent theory for us to decipher.”
This theory arose from diverse sources. For instance, Rammellzee was famously inspired by late medieval monks who disguised their letters in their illuminated manuscripts to the point of being unreadable. These recorders of ancient knowledge endeavored to hide their knowledge, to protect it from those that might use it for evil purposes. His writings repeatedly reference that the Romans purloined the Greek alphabet for their own purposes as well as the lemniscate, our symbol for infinity.
“The infinity sign is a mathematical, scientific, military symbol. It is the highest symbol that we have and you know there isn’t even a key on the typewriter for it. I’m going to finish the war. I’m going to assassinate the infinity sign,” Rammellzee wrote.
HE’S THE KIND OF GUY YOU COULD TALK TO FOR TWENTY MINUTES AND YOUR WHOLE LIFE COULD CHANGE. IF YOU COULD UNDERSTAND HIM.”—JIM JARMUSH
Rammellzee started his artistic quest in graffiti, in a style he coined as “Ikonoklast Panzerism” and “Gothic Futurism.” The goal he laid out for himself and his collaborators in various tagging crews was to load the letters up with as many flourishes as possible. As he wrote, “panzerism is the armament of the letter,” and, “panzerism is heavier than the Pentagon.” His idea was to weaponize the letter. Writers that wanted to join his crew were tasked with arming a letter in this way, proving that they understood this vision and were prepared to join in the effort. Using these panzerized letters to remake language, and by remaking language, to unpack the secrets of hidden knowledge. If the universe that engulfs our little world is just an extension of what we see here, experience here, communicate to one another here, then a new method of communication might open up a new, previously unexplorable side of that universe.
The treatises and graffiti were rendered in three dimensions by Rammellzee’s ”Garbage Gods” and “Letter Racers.” These pieces are Rammellzee’s trademark work, which helped him breakthrough into galleries and museums. The Garbage Gods and Letter Racers are the guardians of the panzerized letters. Think of his graffiti as portal to another world. If we manage to comprehend these symbols then we can bring that world into our own. His Garbage Gods and Letter Racers both protect the symbols from those that might misuse or misunderstand them, and help those worthy of this gift to become initiated in its potential.
“Writing, alphabets, typographies are all ubiquitous elite technologies that have lowered themselves into your
consciousness where they adapt you to their habit, their reflex, their perception,” wrote Rammellzee. “The prize? Control of the means of perception.”
The project played on sci-fi tropes, styled off the kinds of lore used to backbone comic book and anime franchises, to build out Rammellzee’s philosophy in a way that shocked, that enticed, that thrilled. There was so much at stake. If the Garbage Gods failed to protect the Letter Racers, then all of reality was lost to evil forces.
AT ITS ZENITH, THE GASHOLEER WAS A ONE-HUNDRED-FIFTY-POUND BULK OF DOLL HEADS, A FULL SOUND SYSTEM, A KEYBOARD FOR A GUN, AND A WORKING FLAMETHROWER.”
WRITING, ALPHABETS, TYPOGRAPHIES ARE ALL UBIQUITOUS ELITE TECHNOLOGIES THAT HAVE LOWERED THEMSELVES INTO YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS WHERE THEY ADAPT YOU TO THEIR HABIT, THEIR REFLEX, THEIR PERCEPTION. THE PRIZE? CONTROL OF THE MEANS OF PERCEPTION.”
Both of these projects were made from found materials. The Letter Racers were smaller, built up off skateboard decks or objects of a similar size. Sleek, angular, intimidating. The Garbage Gods were more complex. These were suits that Rammellzee made from scavenged toys, scrap metal, and junked plastics. Each had a unique personality and attributes, although he was known to combine the components of two or more to create a third.
The main figure among these, however, is the “Gasholeer.” Creating this suit was a lifelong process. At its zenith, the Gasholeer was a one-hundred-fifty-pound bulk of doll heads, a full sound system, a keyboard for a gun, and a working flamethrower.
Cultural critic Mark Dery cited the Gasholeer in his 1993 essay “Black to the Future,” where he coined the term Afrofuturism. Today, Dery maintains that the Gasholeer occupies a unique space in Rammelzee’s work, “It gave eye-popping shape to hip-hop’s appropriation of science fiction and comic-book tropes; “Gasholeer” was full metal Jack Kirby, the sort of spit-and-duct tape exoskeleton a Marvel hero would wear if he shopped at one of those yard-sale souks that sprang up at Astor Place, and if he had to do battle in what were then the wastelands of the South Bronx. It potently incarnated Rammellzee’s theory of Gothic Futurism and his ingenious revisioning of medieval illumination as a subversive assault on linguistic orthodoxy.”
Angiolini adds, “Intense is a great word for the Gasholeer project. Rammellzee spent a lot of time trying to define the Garbage Gods and Letter Racers. But the Gasholeer was the ultimate project. Gasholeer was a coronated Garbage God, bigger and more important than a Garbage God, the one he identified himself with the most. It is possible Gasholeer was even in its own category of being.”
Rammellzee died in 2010, aged forty-nine, due to a disease caused, in part, by inhaling the fumes from the resins and other materials he used to fabricate his life’s work.
His philosophy and art has impacted culture far beyond inclusion in galleries and museums. He was a rapper. And on tracks like his seminal “Beat Bop,” he created the Gangsta Duck rhyming style that influenced artists like the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill. Fans of his art were numerous and ardent. He was friends, perhaps tempestuously, with Jean-Michel Basquiat, who personally produced “Beat Bop” and included a portrait of Rammellzee in his famed painting “Hollywood Africans.” Rammellzee was even known for his film roles, having for instance been discovered for his graffiti in Charlie Ahearn’s documentary Wild Style and roles like his small part in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise. An article in the Washington Post from that era quotes Jarmusch saying Rammellzee is “a genius. When you talk to him… he’s the kind of guy you could talk to for twenty minutes and your whole life could change. If you could understand him.”
“He was very charismatic,” says Angiolini. “More often than not he would show up with one of his iconic costumes. I’ve been told that most of the time he kept people guessing about where they stood with him. Whether he liked you, whether you were really in a position of trust with him. He was kind of a difficult, inscrutable character. Larger than life persona whenever he showed up to a gallery opening. He created a center of gravity in the room.”
Rammellzee devoted his life to building his philosophy, to creating artworks that made it real and material. His corpus of texts and sculptures and suits shows us the illusions that the powerful and wealthy use to control our perceptions of reality and offers instead an antidote, a path toward liberation, a freedom that cracks the universe itself and shows that there is nothing we cannot achieve, if we pitch in and learn what it means to panzerize, to be ikonoklasts, to race toward the godhead and see that among the trash there is treasure.
This article first appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 67. You can get a print copy of the entire issue here.
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