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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