The immersive entire world of the polyhedric graffiti author, visible artist, musician, lyricist, performer, trend designer, innovator and philosopher Rammellzee lands in Los Angeles this November. The exhibition surveys his oeuvre from his graffiti beginnings on the A teach in the mid-1970s to his fine arts and overall performance follow formulated over the pursuing three many years.
A true iconoclast, Rammellzee dedicated to his considering and artwork-building with an tactic that was concurrently programmatic and shamanic. His esoteric manifestos encompassed philology and astrophysics and drew inspiration from modern day sensibility and medieval history alike. 1 of Rammellzee’s obsessions was a tale about medieval monks who made lettering so ornate to be considered unreadable by the better ranks of the clergy and eventually got banned. In his eyesight, this tale was evidence of the subversive, anti-institution probable of lettering. It illuminated the path similarly carried out by graffiti artists, who by rendering a identify mysterious and unrecognizable, could liberate language from its intrinsic electrical power structures. This was the birth of Rammellzee’s philosophy, “Gothic Futurism,” and the inventive method acknowledged as “Ikonoklast Panzerism.”
The weaponized letters of the alphabet ended up, for Rammellzee, the inspiration for a fleet of spacecrafts for letter racing and galactic battles in a postapocalyptic sci-fi fantasy. Quintessentially Do-it-yourself and nevertheless futuristic, the sculptural sets of the Letter Racers are on see at the gallery. They exemplify one of the facets at the core of Rammellzee’s system: participating in with metaphysical concepts in the bodily globe.
Aspect of a technology that grew up all through New York City’s notorious fiscal and infrastructure disaster, Rammellzee captured the decaying and lawless actuality of the streets of Manhattan in thick layers of epoxy resin. Repurposed objects and trash grew to become ingenious equipment to assemble and develop not only his Letter Racers but also several created sculptures, painterly assemblages and garments for his performances. By the early 1990s, Rammellzee had originated an Olympus of characters and alter egos made true via costumes, paintings and created sculptures. He would embody the Garbage Gods in their comprehensive-entire body suits of armor, some of which weighed far more than a hundred lbs. The most paramount character, The Gasholeer, was even outfitted with a flamethrower.
Rammellzee was the embodiment of his art and theories. At times contradictory and polarizing, he could enrage and amuse at the identical time. The magnetism of his inscrutable theoretical monologues can be perceived to this day. The critic Carlo McCormick poignantly remarked in an Artforum critique from 1987: “Rammellzee’s art incorporates so a lot scientific, military, and linguistic details that it is challenging not to dismiss his confusing techno-poetry as self-indulgent babble. Conversely, nevertheless, Rammellzee’s innate feeling of lyricism provides his mannered, mathematical prose a top quality that attracts a single in, and the seamlessness of his conceptual invention sales opportunities just one to question whether or not the which means is certainly decipherable and whether or not most likely it is only our ignorance that will make it seem like gibberish.”
Rammellzee was born in Considerably Rockaway, Queens, in 1960 to moms and dads of Italian and African American descent. In 1979, at nineteen, he legally improved his identify to the equation RAMM:ELL:ZEE. Given that the 1980s, his do the job has been exhibited in galleries and museums and supported by intercontinental collectors. As a musician, Rammellzee invented a nasal rap design and style recognised as “gangsta duck,” influential to artists these types of as the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill. He appeared in Charlie Ahearn’s iconic movie Wild Style (1982), and his 1983 track “Beat Bop”—produced and with a go over style by Jean-Michel Basquiat—was featured prominently in Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver’s documentary Style Wars (1983). In the early 2000s, Rammellzee’s Garbage Gods and his fleets of Letter Racers settled in his TriBeCa loft, known as the “Battle Station,” which he hardly still left towards the conclusion of his life. Rammellzee died in 2010 at the age of forty-nine. His beginning name stays a secret even to some of his closest good friends.
In 1979, Rammellzee satisfied the graffiti artist A-One particular at an night class at Match. A-One particular introduced him to the “Mitchell Crew,” the team of graffiti artists with whom he painted partitions and trains. The crew was named soon after the housing venture in the South Bronx where the users lived at the time: A-Just one on the eighth flooring, Kool Koor on the second ground, and Toxic across the street. The relationship with Rammellzee was speedy and these artists joined him to come to be portion of TMK (Tag Master Killers), the graffiti crew he launched. “TMK was about defending the letter,” claims artist Kool Koor. To become a member of TMK, artists had to establish their talent by executing a letter of the alphabet centered on Rammellzee’s Ikonoklast Panzerism. Each artist responded to the undertaking of arming the letter in their private style: Toxic’s was far more summary, A-One’s figurative, and Kool Koor’s architectural. Gothic Futurism at Jeffrey Deitch capabilities a gallery curated by the artist Kool Koor documenting the function of TMK and the unique universe of each artist.
Jeffrey Deitch satisfied Rammellzee in 1980 and taken care of a dialogue with him for numerous decades. He was with Rammellzee and Jean-Michel Basquiat in Los Angeles in 1983 when Basquiat painted his legendary function Hollywood Africans featuring a self-portrait and portraits of the artist Poisonous and Rammellzee. Deitch and Rammellzee expended several yrs preparing a gallery exhibition, but the venture was in no way understood. Right after the artist’s demise, Deitch recreated the “Battle Station” in collaboration with the artist’s spouse Carmela in his 2011 Artwork in the Streets exhibition at the Museum of Present-day Art, Los Angeles. Gothic Futurism is Jeffrey Deitch’s 1st gallery exhibition in partnership with the Estate of Rammellzee. In loving memory of Carmela Zagari Rammellzee.