Rammellzee

A Rammellzee exhibition catalog published on the occasion of a 1987 Rome, Italy solo exhibition at Galleria Lidia Carrieri.

• Rammellzee (American, 1960-2010).
• Rome: Galleria Lidia Carrieri, 1987.
• Soft-bound.
• Approximately 80 pages, mostly in color.
• With interviews between the noted art critics Edith Deak and Bonito Olivia exploring the artist's mythic, 'Iconoclast Panzerism / Gothic Futurism' philosophy and more.
• Includes rare photos of the artist donned as a 'gothic monk,' color images of key early 1980s paintings, sketches, sculptures.

A unique original 1980s insight & documentation into many rare artworks of the 1980s New York graffiti legend.

"Few people understood and internalized this power as deeply as the artist, rapper, and theoretician Rammellzee (which he styled as The RAMM:ELL:ZEE). He believed that his time in the train yards and the tunnels of New York gave him a vision for how to destroy and rebuild our world.

He was born in 1960 and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. His birth name is a closely guarded secret; he legally changed it to his artistic tag in 1979. (He also insisted that The RAMM:ELL:ZEE was an “equation,” not a name.) Little is known about his youth, aside from passing aspirations to study dentistry (he was good with his hands) and to be a model (in a 1980 catalog, he is identified as Mcrammellzee).

Ramm—as he became known—believed that language enforced discipline, and that whoever controlled it could steer people’s thoughts and imaginations. His hope wasn’t to replace English; he wanted to annihilate it from the inside out. His generation grew up after urban flight had devastated New York’s finances and infrastructure. Ramm channeled the chaos into a spectacular personal mythology, drawn from philology, astrophysics, and medieval history.

He was obsessed with a story of Gothic monks whose lettering grew so ornate that the bishops found it unreadable and banned the technique. The monks’ work wasn’t so different from the increasingly abstract styles of graffiti writing, which turned a name into something mysterious and unrecognizable. Ramm developed a philosophy, Gothic Futurism, and an artistic approach that he called Ikonoklast Panzerism: “Ikonoklast” because he was a “symbol destroyer,” abolishing age-old standards of language and meaning; “Panzer” because this symbolic warfare involved arming all the letters of the alphabet, so that they might liberate themselves. He lived these ideas through his art and his music, and by being part of the hip-hop scene during its infancy." (Hsu, The New Yorker, 2018)