Rammellzee, From Living Letters to Living Sculpture

Graffiti was never intended to be archivable, so there are only a handful of examples of Rammellzee’s earliest work here. They are largely startling, though. “Maestro 2 Hyte Risk” (1976-79) is a robust riot of animate letters, and “Evolution of the World” (1979) turns graffiti grammar into longitudinal astro-funk storytelling.

What’s clear throughout this phase is his emerging battle against the limitations of form. Like much of hip-hop in its protean era, Rammellzee conceptualized his work in terms of resistance — against the world at large, but also, in his case, against the frameworks that were fast beginning to congeal on the trains as well as in the galleries newly flirting with street art. Jean-Michel Basquiat was a contemporary, a friend, a competitor and an occasional antagonist of Rammellzee’s. Basquiat produced Rammellzee’s best known song, “Beat Bop,” and immortalized him in the painting “Hollywood Africans” (1983).

Miniature figures of Garbage Gods from the Rammellzee show at Red Bull Arts New York.

Rammellzee — the child of an African-American mother and Italian father, and a model in his teenage years — also pushed back against his corporeal self, in what would become a recurring theme. He legally changed his name to Rammellzee, and he frequently referred to himself as an “equation.” (“Ramm’s name was a construction site,” the artist Lee Quinones says in one of the exhibition’s audio packages.) There is even, among the ephemera included in this exhibition, a business card advertising the services of Rammellzee, the Equation.

By the beginning of the mid-1980s, Rammellzee was becoming a favorite of progressive European gallerists, and his work was moving onto more formal canvases. But these pieces, when he was transitioning from fantastical 2-D representations into three dimensions, and nodding weakly in the direction of abstraction, are the least purposeful and challenging here — showing an artist constrained, not liberated, by success.

“Maestro 2 Hyte Risk” (1976-1979), pen and marker on cardboard, is a robust riot of animate letters.

In his graffiti, Rammellzee was precise and imaginative — a virtuoso of detail. (In one of the audio stations, his brother recalled him putting together car models as a child and then cutting them apart with an X-Acto knife.) By the late 1980s, he’d returned to that approach, but in mixed-media work. In resin and epoxy, Rammellzee found freedom. It made unusual juxtapositions and unconventional shapes possible. It allowed him to repurpose the detritus he found on the streets into beauty, a stroke of resistance all its own.

And most crucially, it brought the letters to life. Two of his inventive, fascinating Letter Racer sets, from 1988 to 1991, are included here — small wheeled sculptures composed of found items collaged into forceful warrior shapes and arranged in the gallery in triangular battle formations. (There is also a brief video showing off each letter’s corresponding Racer in detail.) Finally, he’d liberated the letters from the train wall and made them the superheroes he’d always proposed that they were.

Some of the 19 Garbage Gods by Rammellzee at his survey at Red Bull Arts New York.

And over time, he built himself into his art. His Laight Street apartment was called the Battle Station, and almost everyone who describes visiting him there noted, with retroactive concern, the intensity of the chemical smell. He lived among his resins and the creations they made possible — his art had become his life. (Rammellzee died at the age of 49 of heart disease.)

Unlike the main floor of the show, which is well lit, the basement is dark (thanks in part to black light) and is filled with the fantastical creations of these later years. Right away, you are met by the Gasholeer (The RAMM: ELL: ZEE), from 1987 to 1998, an epic, spare-parts statue with a keyboard gun, serving here as a kind of sentry guarding the ecosystem Rammellzee built for himself.