Book Review: RAMMΣLLZΣΣ: Racing for Thunder

 RAMMΣLLZΣΣ in 1981 at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, photo for the Italian magazine LEI

“The letter is armed to stop all the phony formations, lies, and tricknowlegies placed upon its structure.”

- RAMMΣLLZΣΣ
 

By JOSEPH NECHVATAL  Octoer, 2024

Rizzoli Electa’s colossal new book  is the first major survey of the idiosyncratic artist/rapper/philosopher RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ (1960-2010), an indefatigable and admirable New York City artist who embraced idea of defiance and resistance through excess. In this 384-page tour de force, edited by curator and art dealer Maxwell Wolf—whose RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ retrospective at Red Bull Arts New York in 2018 spurred the book into existence—and music historian Jeff Mao, RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ’s sumptuous and flamboyant semi-abstract imagery, such as the 1979 Maestro 2 Hyte Risk, does most of the glossolalia talking. This opulent and conceptually challenging anti-tricknowledgy imagery is based on his complex art theory he called Ikonoklast Panzerism and Gothic Futurism where the letters of the alphabet symbolically war against imposed social standards. The multivalent goal of Gothic Futurism and Ikonoklast Panzerism is to use copious ornament as a symbolic form of armament where ornamentation becomes, as RAMM called it with his typical radical dazzle, armamentation.

Maestro 2 Hyte Risk (1976–79) pen and marker on cardboard, 9 7⁄8 × 23 5⁄8", private collection

 Open pages of the book 

Queens-born and raised, RAMM frequented the A Train and would tag the cars and walls along the route, but he became a major figure in the hip-hop community and reached wider and new audiences in the iconic cult documentary Wild Style that was completed in 1982 by Charlie Ahearn with the help of Fab Five Freddy. The film propelled RAMM into the spotlight alongside with Freddy, Patti Astor, Grandmaster Flash and Lady Pink. In the book, the visual profusion of RAMM’s proto-Afrofuturist (Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic are obvious musical touch-stones) is augmented with memories of RAMM by some of the people that knew him: artists, musicians, gallerists, and family members including Ahearn, Al Diaz, Nick Taylor, Lee Quiñones, Lenny “Futura” McGurr, Chris “Daze” Ellis, Jim Jarmusch, Seth Tillett, and there is small bit by myself on how RAMM’s language and theories jived with those of French Post-Structuralism and the artistic language of Collins & Milazzo and of course the legendary words of William S. Burroughs.

Though I did not know RAMM very well, we had shared smokes and conversation a number of times outside various art exhibitions downtown, going as far back as 1981 when we met at the Beyond Words group show at the Mudd Club. There the superfluity of his thin-hot and wiry lines visually spoke to me for the first time. I later in 1984 edited and published on Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine Excerpts from Messages that included A-One, Toxic, Chuck Arbitrator Koor, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a long rap about the subway system by RAMM.

But reading-perusing this strongly designed (by Erin Knutson) book fills out the picture of RAMM as mythological icon for me greatly (he wrote a play?!) while bringing his work more closely aligned with that the Lettrism of Isidore Isou (né Ioan-Isidor Goldstein). Like RAMM, Isou’s theoretical hyper-graphics project was to do battle with the given forms of ideographic and lexical notation. Together with Gabriel Pomerand, Isou sparked the creation of the Lettrism movement (a term Isou coined in 1942) that had theoretical roots in the avant-garde phonetism of Dada whose nihilistic goal was to assure the collapse of national communication, as it was precisely what led to the very destruction of the societal world during WWI. The Lettrists centered their attention on blocks of rhythmically organized letters, symbols and sounds, so as such, I find it has a visionary dimension relevant as a predecessor to the Gothic Futurism word theory put forth by RAMM. His goal too was the liberating of the alphabet from corrupting social forces.

In art terms, RAMM’s Gothic Panzerism as Post-Minimalism also visually connects historically to the abstract art of Russian Constructivism, Wassily Kandinsky and to a lesser extent Wifredo Lam. But at the time of the post-punk Mudd Club and New Wave shows, RAMM’s work complimented the brief asymmetrical polyester/plastics/glitter art object trend seen in association with the Neo-Expressionist wing of New Wave called Energism—that included the artists Nancy Arlen (best known in the No Wave music world as the drummer for Mars), Dike Blair, Steven Keister, Judy Pfaff, Frank Schroder and Taro Suzuki (among others).

Tower of Panzerism, The S.S. Speedway (1984) graphite, felt-tipped pen and spray paint on board, private collection

Book cover

Though I am not a big fan of RAMM’s later elaborate handmade mannerist masks and dramatic-dripping-in-details costumes, the lasting artistry and visual delight of his drawings, such as Tower of Panzerism, The S.S. Speedway (1984), is confirmed by the book. RAMM’s artistic tormenting of the letter takes a very singular approach to both the hyper-corporeal subway system and an important approach to noology that places emphasis on self-re-programmable internal functions that explicitly offer furtherance in envisioning anti-hierarchical patterns of thought. The only thing missing from the book are clear and long samples of his thoughtful while wack verbosity. I have said for years that he has been under appreciated as a theorist, and the book does not help alleviate that situation. Visit what I have collected and posted on my Thing.net blog so as to encourage a wider study of them. WM