DURING the 1980s and 1990s a question was often asked sotto voce in certain overlapping circles of the New York art world:
"Have you been to the Battle Station?"
Entry to the fabled TriBeCa loft where the artist and musician Rammellzee lived and worked, all but secluding himself in a thicket of cosmic paintings, militarized plastic sculpture and Samurai-like handmade costumes, was like initiation into a secret society in which graffiti, hip-hop, linguistics and science fiction were being fused into a strange new category of art. But Rammellzee opened the doors to this world more and more rarely before he died in 2010 at 49, and even stars tended to be star-struck by an invitation.
"I took George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to the Battle Station for the first time, and they left feeling like they'd just had a close encounter," said the bassist and music producer Bill Laswell, who met Rammellzee in the early 1980s and remained one of the few people who saw him regularly.
Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks the building on Laight Street that housed the Battle Station was sold to make way for luxury apartments, and Rammellzee and his wife, Carmela Zagari, were pushed out, relocated to a conventional, smaller place in Battery Park City. Almost 20 years' worth of his obsessive artwork, enough to fill a large truck, went into a storage locker, where it remained unseen for years, in danger of being forgotten for good.
But pieces of it are now starting to reemerge, in a way that Rammellzee most likely would have approved of: in fighter formation. A bunkerlike, black-lighted re-creation of the Battle Station was one of the most talked about pieces in "Art in the Streets," a sprawling graffiti survey last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, organized by the museum's director, Jeffrey Deitch, who as a New York dealer had courted Rammellzee for years.
On March 8 the Suzanne Geiss Company, a new gallery in SoHo, will open its inaugural show by suspending, as if in flight, two complete sets of works that Rammellzee called "letter racers," spacecraftlike sculptures representing the letters A to Z, built bricolagestyle from scraps of cast-off consumer goods like flip-flops, sunglasses, toy cars, cheap umbrellas, Bic pens and air-freshener tops.
The only other complete set of the racers, made from gold-painted wood and surrealistically situated pieces of Kewpie dolls and plastic dinosaurs, is now installed high along a series of second-floor gallery walls at the Museum of Modern Art in "Printin,'" an eclectic exhibition of print-influenced work that opened Feb. 15.
The emergence of the sculptures from deep storage, engineered by Ms. Zagari with the help of Ms. Geiss, who represents Rammellzee's estate, has already begun to reshape the reputation of an artist regarded by the established art world during most of his life with more bemused curiosity and confusion than serious interest.
Was he a hip-hop artist with visual-art leanings? (He was a renowned 1980s M.C., and his 1983 collaboration with K-Rob, the 12-inch-single "Beatbop," became a hiphop landmark, its cover designed by the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rammellzee's friend and rival.)
Was he most important as a muse and scene maker? (He is depicted in several Basquiat paintings, most memorably in customized, gogglelike sunglasses in "Hollywood Africans," in the Whitney Museum of American Art's collection. And he had a scene-stealing cameo in the 1984 Jim Jarmusch movie "Stranger Than Paradise.") Or was he mainly a painter and sculptor whose frenetic genre-bending and wildly eccentric visual style obscured his seriousness? (His early paintings and resin works sold briskly for several years to European collectors, including major ones like Heiner Friedrich, co-founder of the Dia Art Foundation. But by the time the Battle Station was disassembled, his works could make their way ignominiously down the streets of Manhattan in the back of a truck, as Ms. Zagari remembered, with "kids watching, saying, 'Mama, look, they're throwing out all those toys.'")
Rammellzee never made it easy to answer any of these questions. His pharaonic name - which he formulated as a teenager, after leaving home in the projects in Far Rockaway, Queens, and later legally adopted - was not a name at all, he insisted, but a mathematical equation.
His artwork, though he did show it in galleries, at least in the early years, was artwork only secondarily, he said. Its real purpose was to illustrate a deconstructionist-type dual philosophy, called Gothic Futurism and Ikonoklast Panzerism, that imagined a world in which Roman letters would arm and liberate themselves, at his command, from the power structures of European language. He believed he had inherited his role as a kind of lexical commander in chief from medieval monks, whose literacy in a mostly illiterate world demonstrated the extraordinary power of words to shape reality.
"He felt that even now if you control the language, you control the discourse, you control the power," said Henry Chalfant, a filmmaker and graffiti scholar who first met Rammellzee at a 1980 exhibition of graffiti work by Lee Quinones and Fred Brathwaite (better known as Fab 5 Freddy) at White Columns gallery in SoHo.
"The letter racers were in his conception totally functional, like models to demonstrate how the letters would work if they were ever to be mechanized and able to fly into battle," Mr. Chalfant said.
Rammellzee's belief that his models could be used as templates for workable military vehicles was so deep, in fact, that he came to fear the government would stop him or forcibly enlist his talents. In his earlier years, though, he had a correspondence with the Defense Department, examples of which he showed Mr. Chalfant.
"In their responses the government thanked him for his proposals, and they said that if they ever needed him, they would get back in touch with him," Mr. Chalfant said, adding as a swift and perhaps necessary second thought that while Rammellzee always operated "at a remove from present earthly reality," he never lost touch with that reality. "He always functioned in a very practical way vis-à-vis his career and his work as he saw it. His philosophy was rigorously elaborated. And he worked very hard, right up to the end of his life."
In a 1987 Artforum review, the critic and curator Carlo McCormick captured the central Rammellzee puzzle as well as anyone: "The seamlessness of his conceptual invention leads one to wonder whether the meaning is indeed decipherable, and whether perhaps it is only our ignorance that makes it sound like gibberish."
Ms. Zagari, a models' agent who supported Rammellzee during many years when he had little money coming in, said that the more reclusive he became, the more relentlessly he was sought out by fans and by scholars of urban culture, science fiction adepts and philosophy students. "The buzzer would be buzzing, people would throw rocks up at the windows," she said. "People would yell up and say, 'Rammellzee, we know you're in there.'"
Though he read little and saw few friends, she said, he seemed able to keep tabs on the world of contemporary art and underground culture, and gravitated to those he saw as kindred spirits. On a visit to Amsterdam for an exhibition of his work he met William S. Burroughs - possibly, Ms. Zagari said, because Burroughs was seeking a reliable source of marijuana -and the two fell into rapt conversation. Some years later, when they met again in New York, Burroughs approached Rammellzee "and said, 'Father!'" she recalled. "And Ramm opened his arms and said, 'Son!'"
Mr. Laswell, who enlisted Rammellzee for music and video projects, said: "When he said let's do a record, you had no idea whether that meant he wanted to do a real record or a performance or a manifesto or a painting or something else completely. It was all of a piece for him."
Stephen Torton, who worked briefly as Basquiat's studio assistant and helped Rammellzee mount several early exhibitions, said that while Basquiat and Rammellzee had a difficult relationship, the friction was usually productive for both artists. "He was our T. S. Eliot," Mr. Torton said of Rammellzee. "In terms of his ideas Jean-Michel was white bread compared to Rammellzee, and I think he knew it."
But Basquiat also opened Rammellzee's eyes to the world of money and power, which helped deepen his already instinctive ambivalence toward success on conventional terms. In the early 1980s Basquiat flew Rammellzee and Mr. Torton to Los Angeles, where the three outfitted themselves lavishly at Maxfield and stayed, at Basquiat's insistence, in the Chateau Marmont bungalow where John Belushi had recently died. Basquiat also tried without luck to persuade the powerful dealers Larry Gagosian and Bruno Bischofberger to represent Rammellzee. "You had no idea where he got his ideas from," Mr. Torton said of Rammellzee. "To this day I'm not quite sure he was a real person." Over the next several years Ms. Zagari said she hoped to bring greater attention not only to the letter-racer sculptures, but also to veritable stockpiles of related work that came to cover the walls and ceilings of the Battle Station. As part of his prophetic philosophy Rammellzee made full-body costumes that grew more elaborate by the year. Each was tailored to one of 22 cosmic characters that he dreamed up and began to perform so regularly that visitors never knew whether they were talking to Rammellzee or another of his personas, a life as-art performance that would put even Warhol to shame. The costumes were wired so that his voice would radiate robotically from them and outfitted so that sparks and fireworks would shoot from his hands and other parts of the suit. One suit, for the character most closely related to himself - called Rammellzee the Gasholeer - weighedmore than 150 pounds and had to be assembled from more than a dozen parts "that only I knew how to interlock," Ms. Zagari said.
During their last years in the Battle Station, she said, "he was building me out of house and home. "He wasn't a hoarder, but he kept on finding all of this great garbage on the streets of New York that he would keep and categorize," she said. "He knew exactly which thing was going to go where, even if it was for a piece he wasn't going tomake for another year."
One thing he never paid enough attention to was his health. Exposure without a mask to glue, paint fumes and resin in his work took a toll. And while he was fastidious about what he ate, he was also a heavy drinker. "He would say that he drank the Olde English 800 to wash all the other toxins out of his body," Ms. Zagari said.
Two years before his death, he suffered a seizure that put him in the hospital. Afterward he refused to see a doctor -"Even being out on the street became a big fear," she said - and he began to be plagued by liver problems. The official cause of his death was heart disease, Ms. Zagari said, but though he was not yet 50, his entire body had begun to fail him.
Mr. Chalfant, who last saw him about a month before his death, said that one of the most striking things about Rammellzee was how he persuaded those around him to participate in the world he had built, one in which he had sprung forth fully formed.
None of his friends who knew his original name would reveal it, Mr. Chalfant said, because to do so would be an almost sacrilegious act, the breaking of a spell. "That's the American dream, isn't it, that you can completely invent yourself?" he said. "It's what he did his whole life."
