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27/11/2014

Hannah Weiner and Rammellzee

Kunstverein, Amsterdam

On three Wednesday evenings in March 1970, Hannah Weiner and her boss, Simeon Schreiber, of Schreiber Co., Inc., were available at her studio on 10 West 33rd Street, N.Y.C., where they sold bikini underpants at their usual prices of 49 cents and 1 USD. One item was made especially for this show by August Fabrics and A.H. Schreiber himself.

Hannah Weiner (1923–2004) worked as a part time designer of ladies underwear. She liked her job and the firm she worked for. According to Weiner, they made and sold a product without unnecessary competition. She felt that if things couldn't be free then they should be as cheap as possible. "Why waste one's time on producing expensive products that one then needs to waste more time on trying to acquire," she said.

As a poet and an important part of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement of the '70s and '80s, she recorded everything, even (and maybe especially) the minute. Developing her own style called "clair-style"—some of her works are signed "clairvoyantly written, Hannah Weiner"—she saw words in things and on people's foreheads, "in a wide variety of sizes, script and printed, on [her] own forehead and on other people, forehead included, and on every imaginable surface or non-surface." She explained: "It turned out that the regular upper and lower case words described what I was doing, the CAPITALS gave me orders, and the underlines or italics made comments. This is not 100% true, but mostly so." The words started to appear in August of 1972, before that she had only been "receiving messages through FEELING energy, and later pictures developed, and colors."

Weiner was interested in trans-space communication, organized objective fashion poetry events; sprinkled stars on the street while feigning solicitation. Her Clairvoyant journal begun in early '70s, appeared as The Fast (1970), Country Girl (1971), Pictures and Early Words (1972), Big Words (1973) and Clairvoyant Journal (1974). Her code poems and performances were based on the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations. According to Weiner, there were three obligations a poet had: one, to work on oneself; two, to work to change the world; and three, to work on poetic forms.

Flipside:
"The letter is armed to stop all the phony formations, lies, and tricknowlegies placed upon its structure."

"In the 21st and 22nd century the letters of the alphabet through competition are now armamented for letter racing and galactic battles. This was made possible by a secret equation known as THE RAMM:ELL:ZEE."

Rammellzee (1960–2010) was a graffiti writer and author of Ionic treatise Gothic Futurism assassin knowledges of the remanipulated square point's one to 720° to 1440°, a treatise so crowded and thick, that, when attempted, it becomes a viscous, disorienting reading experience.

His career began with the A train, tagging it in a style known then as the East Village wild style, with a script originating from Gothic or medieval manuscripts. According to Randy Kennedy of the New York Times (February 23, 2012), "[Rammellzee understood] 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 called himself a Gothic Futurist and believed his work to point towards Ikonoklast Panzerism, a world in which Roman letters would liberate themselves from European power structures. His name, which he legally adopted, was, in his mind, not just a name, but a mathematical equation (RAM plus M for Magnitude, Sigma (Σ) the first summation operator, first L - longitude, second L - latitude, Z - z-bar, Σ, Σ - summation).

Rammellzee: "How can a government be structured straight using a symbolic code subconsciously re-manipulated and its symbols do not belong to the verbal formation. To my knowledge societies and disease culture symbols have violated universal symbolic laws and short circuited the electromagnetic code of the Roman letter symbols and others used to build a word, the definition of a word to build a society and then a government and a future educational process to complete universal transit system and manipulate (blood system)."

One of the early hip hop artists, his now legendary song Beat Bop with K-Rob was produced by Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1983 and is considered "the grand-daddy opus of hip-hop experimentalism," by chairman Mao of the famed hip hop magazine ego trip. It featured in the legendary documentary Style Wars (1983). Rammellzee can also be seen rapping in the grand finale of John Ahearn's classic film Wild Style (1982) and briefly, in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), playing the role of "man with money."

Hannah Weiner and Rammellzee is a show about two people who use language/words and even letters in their very own way. Rammellzee liberated letters from their enslaved status in the alphabet so that they could do battle. And Weiner saw words in the air and on people and objects.

Kunstverein will be showing paintings by Rammellzee and books by Weiner.

Other dates:
Thursday 4 December, Adam Pendleton reads Hannah Weiner
Saturday 17 January, 2015, Nora Turato covers Rammellzee's Beat Bop

Image: Rammellzee, mid-1980s. © Vincent Vlasblom, NL.

For further information, please contact:
Maxine Kopsa or Riet Wijnen, office@kunstverein.nl

Preview: Friday 28 November 5–8pm
Featuring Duitenkornuiten, next door at I'm With Her Records* and Eau de Cologne #2 Queue by Laurent-David Garnier at BOB's YOUR UNCLE

Kunstverein
Gerard Doustraat 132 1073 VX, Amsterdam
open Wednesday until Saturday 1–5pm, sometimes more often, and of course by appointment, with special consideration to members.

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