In this creative economy, it can be hard to find anyone who adheres entirely to the ideals they espouse. Not Rammellzee – he lived the bit, across music, fashion and art. This legendary polymath of a bygone New York grew up in Far Rockaway and got in on graffiti’s rise throughout the 1970s, writing along the A Train and Manhattan Transit Authority tunnels. Rammellzee counted legendary graffiti writer Dondi as a mentor, and eventually formed the Tag Master Killers crew from a cadre of revolutionary artists who passed his invented tests. As graffiti made its unlikely break into the mainstream, Rammellzee imagined a whole sci-fi universe meant to save the world through art.
Rammellzee passed away at the age of 49 in 2010. His death remains formally attributed to heartdisease, but his friends are quick to point to the industrial epoxies and resins with which Rammellzee insatiably made art at his Tribeca home, studio and squat – aptly dubbed the Battle Station. Colourful, collaged sculptures of the hi-tech relics that powered Rammellzee’s universe crowded his workspace, including the spacecraft Letter Racers and the Garbage Gods.
To this day, few know Rammellzee’s real name. He changed it in 1979, at 19, steeped in graffiti’s pseudonymous nature. The name Rammellzee is literally an equation. Spelled Ramm:ell:zee with sigmas instead of epsilons, the artist’s half-invented mathematics made this function mean aerodynamics. His Garbage Gods, meanwhile, were maximalist, life-sized costumes crafted from detritus he scrounged around the city, as New York shook off its decades-long garbage crisis. He made 19 Garbage Gods. Each one represents a different demigod with a distinct personality, backstory, equation, and role in Alpha’s Bet, a 25th-century intergalactic conflict.
Now, models have reanimated a few of Rammellzee’s Garbage Gods for the first time since his death. On the eve of a new monograph, published by Rizzoli, curator Maxwell Wolf opened the archive up to stylist Akeem Smith, who supplemented bits of the Garbage Gods with accents of his own design. The Garbage Gods are incredibly precious, fragile. A rapt team of art handlers watched as the models posed. Wolf likened the atmosphere to a hostage negotiation.
Here, the blonde interstellar secretary Vain the Insane struts her stuff once more. Barshaw Gangstarr, a slick spitting dragon duck and ladies’ fowl, assumes the seductive visage of a reclining nude. Another model, naked save for pumps, crouches delicately behind the mug of Traxx, a 16 million-year-old political poet and bounty hunter. It’s fitting that models should be the first to bring these Garbage Gods back to life. Rammellzee himself worked for Wilhelmina.
Since then, Rammellzee has been hailed as the witch doctor of New York’s golden age. He was a collaborator and critic of Jean Michel Basquiat, who produced Rammellzee’s first hip-hop track, Beat Bop – which went on to feature in Henry Chalfant’s seminal graffiti film Style Wars, and become the most valuable hip-hop album of all time. That same year, Rammellzee also made a cameo at the climax of Charlie Ahearn’s equally important hip-hop film Wild Style.
Nonetheless, Rammellzee maintained suspicions about commercial art’s smoke and mirrors. He wanted to be a prophet, not a sellout. He was a member of the Five-Percent Nation – an offshoot of the Nation of Islam which claimed that 85 percent of the world is unenlightened, 10 percent want to use their knowledge to their exploitative benefit, and 5 percent want to use it to enlighten the masses. Rammellzee spawned two major theories: Ikonoklast Panzerism, an ostentatious graffiti style that transformed letters into weapons, and Gothic Futurism, which asserted that graffiti could wrest the power of language back from the Man, much like medieval monks once illuminated their manuscripts to such a degree that higher clergymen could no longer read them.
Rammellzee was ahead of the curve on more than art and music. His manner of making sculptures, out of the detritus that New York decried most, pre-dated the current fixation with upcycling, as well as the newfound Trashion movement, by many decades. Now, Meow Wolf organises garbage shows and Iris van Herpen has made couture from salvaged marine plastic.
These gestures are nice, but they can feel symbolic. Forces such as the gargantuan (and growing) fast-fashion industry undermine their meagre successes, selling many billions’ worth of cheap, synthetic clothes to consumers who are stretched too thin to afford the good stuff. Even the equally expansive used clothing trade can’t keep pace. As such, the Global North is increasingly offloading its unwanted plastic threads to landfills in more disenfranchised nations.
Rammellzee understood the value of trash by the time he hit his stride. He and his young cohorts crafted their first graffiti markers from cigarette lighters and pen ink. Rammellzee’s own collaged sartorial sense couldn’t be bought in stores alone. When it came to the Garbage Gods, he was making art as a sort of means towards sorcery. As anyone who does magic might know, buying secondhand means you can come across objects already pre-charged up with energy.
Even though his wide-ranging practice proved hard for art dealers to package, Rammellzee had ample opportunities to stake out his own fame, which he forewent to maintain the integrity of his universe. When art dealer Jeffrey Deitch approached Rammellzee about staging a show, Rammellzee insisted he’d only do it if he could pour his toxic resin in Deitch’s New York gallery.
That show never came to fruition. Rammellzee remained a cult hero amongst underground artists. In 2018, Wolf curated a major retrospective at the former Red Bull Arts Center in New York’s Soho titled Rammellzee: Racing with Thunder, which is also the name of the new book. Deitch, meanwhile, got the rights to represent Rammellzee’s legacy at the end of 2021, and staged another acclaimed show of Rammellzee’s vast practice, curated by Wolf and the famed South Bronx graf writer turned fine artist Kool Koor, at Deitch’s Los Angeles space one year later.
So, with Rammellzee back on the rise, how do we carry forth the spirit of the Garbage Gods and repurpose the artist’s ethos for the present? Predominantly, Rammellzee reminds us that appearances without substance are the real refuse.
Furthermore, Rammellzee’s enduring aesthetic influence offers proof that shiny new trash is rarely best – and that a bit of tarnish is actually solid seasoning. If society has any chance at seeing the intergalactic dramas of the next century, we have to start looking around and working with what we’ve got to build a new reality.
Make-up: Ayaka Nihei. Nails: Naomi Yasuda. Models: Georgia Moot, Jordan Hall, Elijah Mack, Navah Little, Bridgett Magyar. Casting: Kyra Sophie at CMS World Agency. Production designer: Hans Maharawal. Rammellzee archive and artwork co-ordination overseen and stewarded by Maxwell Wolf of New Canons on behalf of the Estate of Rammellzee and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York and Los Angeles.Lighting director: Colin Smith. Photo assistants: Max Bernetz, Julius Frazer. Digi tech: Kasandra Enid Torres. Styling assistant: Amontae Arnold. Set assistant: Eli Nurse. Art handlers: Jesse Hlebo, Emmanuel Limón, Chris Lesnewski. Production: Fresh Produce. Executive producer: Izzy Cohen. Producer: Sam Grumut. Production assistant: Isaiah Mackson. Special thanks to Bourlet Art Logistics