Writing, letters, printing are all ubiquitous elite technologies that have wormed their way into your consciousness, attuning you to their habits, their reactions, their perceptions. prize? Control the means of perception. “
Both projects are made from found materials. Alphabet racers are smaller and are built from a skateboard deck or similar sized object. Sleek, angular, and intimidating. The Trash God is more complex. Ramelzer made the sets from recycled toys, scrap metal and scrap plastic. Each one has a unique personality and attributes, although he has been known to combine two or more elements to create a third.
However, the main character among them is “Gasholeer”. Making the suit is a life-long process. In its heyday, the Gasholeer was a 150-pound doll with a head, a full sound system, a gun’s keyboard, and a working flamethrower.
Cultural critic Mark Dery cited Gasholeer in his 1993 article “Black to the Future,” in which he coined the term “Afrofuturism.” Today, Dery insists, Gasholeer holds a unique place in Rammelzee’s oeuvre, “providing jaw-dropping shape to hip-hop’s appropriation of science fiction and comic book tropes; ‘Gasholeer’ is the full-metal Jack Kirby, Marvel hero in Astor Place The sort of spit-and-tape exoskeleton one would wear while shopping at a flea market, if he had to, in which it powerfully embodies Ramelzer’s theories of gothic futurism and his clever modifications of medieval lighting as a subversive attack on linguistic orthodoxy.
Angiolini adds, “‘Intense’ is a great word for the Gasholeer project. Rammellzee spent a lot of time trying to define Garbage Gods and Letter Racers. But Gasholeer is the ultimate project. Gasholeer is a crowned garbage god, bigger and more important than the garbage god he most identifies with. Gasholeer may even be in its own category.”
Ramelzer died in 2010 at the age of 49, succumbing to an illness caused in part by inhaling fumes from the resin and other materials he used to create his life’s work.
The impact of his philosophy and art on culture extends far beyond the confines of galleries and museums. He’s a rapper. In songs like his seminal “Beat Bop,” he created the Gangsta Duck rhyming style that influenced artists like the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill. Fans of his art are numerous and passionate. He was friends, perhaps violent friends, with Jean-Michel Basquiat, who made “Beat Bop” himself and included Ramelzer’s likeness in his famous painting “Hollywood Africans.” Ramelzer is even known for his film roles, such as his graffiti in Charlie Ahearn’s documentary Wild Style and a small role in Jim Jarmusch’s Strangers from Paradise. A Washington Post article at the time quoted Jarmusch as saying that Ramelzer was “a genius. When you talked to him…he was the kind of guy you could talk to for twenty minutes and your whole life would change. If you could understand him.”
“He was very charismatic,” Angiolini said. “He would often appear in his signature costume. I was told that most of the time he kept people guessing where they stood towards him. Whether he liked you, whether you really trusted him. He was a difficult, elusive character. Whenever he showed up at a gallery opening, he was larger than life. He created a center of gravity in the room.”
Ramelzer devoted his life to constructing his philosophy, creating artworks that made it real and material. His texts, sculptures and costumes show us the illusions used by power and wealth to control our perception of reality and offer an antidote, a path to liberation, a freedom to decipher the universe itself and show that there is nothing we cannot achieve if we commit and understand what it means to armor, to become an idolater, to run towards the divine and to find treasures in the trash.
This article was first published in Issue 67 of High Fructose. You can get the print version of the entire issue here .
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