In the mid-1970s, a half-Black, half-Italian teenager from the projects in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens started hitting the A train with a spray can. At 18, he legally changed his name to Rammellzee, and since then no conversation about graffiti culture or the late-20th-century New York art scene has been complete without mentioning his influence.
In RAMMELLZEE: Racing for Thunder (Rizzoli, $65), the first major monograph on the multi-hyphenate artist, who died in 2010, the co-editors Maxwell Wolf and Jeff Mao intersperse more than a half-century’s worth of art, photos and archives with an oral history as told by the fellow artists, friends and family who knew him best.
As a teenager Rammellzee conceived his theory of Gothic Futurism, which saw language as a “tool of oppression” and graffiti writers as heroes in a fight to liberate the world of letters. In the ’80s he began experimenting with new materials and a more formal studio practice, producing large-scale paintings, frescoes, sculpture, music, performance art and the elaborate costumes he wore to embody otherworldly, gender-fluid characters, like “Chaser the Eraser” and “Shun-U.”
Rammellzee was an “enigma,” Wolf writes: “manic genius, style god,” and also “irascible overlord” and “to some, simply an incoherent madman.” A pioneer of hip-hop and freestyle, he played with idiosyncratic nasal and at times comic vocal styles that were widely mimicked in early rap and would inspire artists like the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill. He had an on-and-off friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat, who helped produce his 1983 vinyl single “Beat Bop,” and he had a small part in the 1984 film “Stranger Than Paradise,” whose director, Jim Jarmusch, called him an overlooked genius.
“He was not part of anybody’s school,” the artist Henry Chalfant says in the book. “Rammellzee literally invented his life and the compelling mystique around himself and his work. This is a quintessentially American thing.”
Source: StreetArt - nytimes.com
