a man of many masks
Elsa Flores Almaraz and Richard Montoya
(writers and directors) Carlos Almaraz: Playing with Fire / 2019
I
lived through the several years it took Howard to mount the art show and saw
several earlier versions of the documentary as Elsa and Richard Montoya were
struggling to complete it. If I was asked, accordingly, to answer whether or
not I could be objective about the review I am about to write I’d have to admit
that that would be impossible to know. I saw the love, caring, and worrying
that went into the exhibition and the film from the very first moment Cheech
and his wife invited LACMA’s Govan and his wife, then Curator of Contemporary
Art Franklin Sirmans and his wife, and
Howard and me to dinner where the museum director lured Howard out of
retirement to curate the show.
The
only thing I could say that might mitigate my utterly unobjective viewpoint is
that, unlike Howard, I never met the artist who is the subject of his wife’s
and friends’ celebration of his life. Yet we have to ask in this case what
precisely was that life? Carlos, always
fascinated by the many masks that every individual daily displays, would never
have allowed a single adorative viewpoint to express his more than complex
manner of living.
After a quick arc of his childhood travels from his birth in Mexico City
to his family’s move to Chicago where he lived in a community that was highly
diverse, to their eventual settlement in Los Angeles, where the young boy found
himself within a large Spanish speaking community of people from Mexico and
Central and South America that in its every vastness and linguistic differences
was highly separated from the rest of the fabric of the sprawling city, the
film focuses in on Carlos the precociously charming kid.
Early
on, the young Carlos entered a newspaper-clipping competition for drawing and
soon after was visited at his home by executives from the Walt Disney Studios
interested in hiring him—he was age 9 at the time—later, as a young man,
becoming the kind of person everyone who met him wanted to be around—in New
York City he was described as having gone AWOL for two days after knocking on
Robert Rauschenberg’s studio door.
The
New York scene into which the two friends had descended, while obviously
agreeable to the would-be actor and later theatrical agent Guerrero, was, in
its conceptual and minimalist sensibilities of the mid-to late sixties (Carlos
was in the City from 1965 to 1970) the polar opposite of the gifts of this, one
might almost argue, romantic young artist. And in a world of primarily
all-white males who controlled not only galleries and the museums but defined
most of the artists themselves, a brown face, as the film describes it, was
something difficult for the scene to assimilate. While he might be sought after
as a sexual partner, his agitated and colorful grid compositions seemed to be
statements in contradiction.
Depressed by the reception he received and, perhaps, by the sometimes
hostile and violent sexual scene he inhabited, Carlos begin to drink heavily,
and by the time he returned to Los Angeles was a full-fledged alcoholic at age
29 who, after one night of drinking, was so psychotically disturbed and
physically near-death that he was hospitalized for several weeks, at one point
hearing the last rites being read over his body.
When Howard first begin doing research on Carlos Almaraz’s work, he has
startled by the fact that what had been written, whether by academics or
journalists made utterly no mention of his homosexuality. He feared that
perhaps Elsa was holding back some of the truths about Carlos’ life to accord
with her and Carlos’ deep love and commitment to each other. In fact, when
Howard asked her about this, Elsa openly laughed and said that she too had
wondered about the omission, insisting that she welcomed a fuller evaluation of
all aspects of her husband’s complex life.* Neither this film (nor Howard’s
show), although both representing the artist in a positive way, could at all be
described as a hagiography.
Even when he was “reborn” after his
near-death experience, Carlos took directions that no one might have expected.
With Frank Romero, Robert de la Rocha, and Gilbert Luján (the group later
adding Judithe Hernández), Carlos became one of the Chicano art collective Los
Four, which brought their collectively-conceived notion of art and Chicano art
in general into public attention, particularly when Jane Livingston (then a
curator at LACMA) organized a show centering on their work, which was the first
larger gathering of Chicano art in a major US museum. attracting many viewers
who had never before felt welcome in a museum setting.
Yet the group was fairly short-lived because of divisions between
members, particularly regarding the difference between defining themselves as
part of a group or from an individual perspective. Carlos, moreover,
increasingly moved on to explore different political values. In one short
period, Elsa somewhat humorously notes, Carlos was a Maoist, a Marxist, and a
Trotskyite at one time. He traveled to Cuba, but didn’t like what he saw there.
So conflicted were Carlos’ many activities that artist and gallery
friends both argued that he must sacrifice some of his political work to devote
time to his own painting. When he successfully did that, painting the first of
what might almost be described as autobiographical representations of
unexpected relationships between the individual and fate in his famous works
depicting car crashes, some friends saw the move as a kind of abandonment of
his political and social commitments.
Carlos had also long been exploring his sexuality through women instead
of simply with men, eventually falling
in love with Elsa Flores, in 1981 marrying her. In 1983 the couple had a
daughter, Maya. Friends note how perfect they appeared to be for each other,
allowing both of them as artists to create new works in the most joyful of an
atmosphere Carlos had perhaps ever experienced.
In
the mid-1980s he and Elsa co-organized a remarkably successful show of his art
at the Jan Turner Gallery in Los Angeles, allowing Carlos to return on a short visit to New York, now
with noted works and sales in his portfolio.
As
Guerrero noted, observing the couple’s pleasure in each other’s company and the
way they lovingly related to their beloved baby, it became clear that Carlos
had now found what he had always been looking for.
A
brief mention that as a child he had been sexually abused by his uncle and a
priest, is not to suggest that those acts were necessarily the cause of his
homosexuality, but that they had, as Elsa has argued elsewhere, severe
repercussions regarding his earlier sexual relationships with males.
And
now that Carlos was experiencing what might be described as his halcyon days, that
had awarded him love and joys of family life and a new explosion of artistic
expression, almost like one of the several car crashes he had painted, his own
life seemed to be ready to be consumed by fate. For, as the 1980s came to a
close Carlos discovered that he had contracted the then still misunderstood
virus, AIDS.
Fortunately,
when tested, Elsa and Maya were both free of the disease. But, in order to
protect their daughter, whose friends they were afraid might be fearful of house
visits where it openly known, they kept the fact of his illness secret from
most of their friends.
Close friends and relatives knew he was extremely sick, but didn’t in
these early days of AIDS truly comprehend the cause. For his part, Carlos
painted more intensely that he ever had, producing works that, in my
estimation, were some of the most narratively complex and theatrically
conceived of his entire career.
At
first Carlos felt, Elsa states, a great deal of guilt, a feeling that because
he had been a “sinner” he had suddenly lost all the joys he had finally been awarded,
as if he were somehow being punished for his sexual activities. Yet, in the
end, she assures us he was able to realize that his sexual desires were no sin
and what had happened to him was not a punishment. “I’m so glad he was able to
get there and not leave this earth feeling resentment or incomplete,” she
confides. The artist died in 1989.
In the final few moments of this powerful
cinematic work, we see the opening of the Carlos Almaraz exhibition at LACMA in
August 2017, the camera tracking us through the museum doors into various
galleries both empty and filled with opening week celebrators, as if 28-years
later this significant Los Angeles artist was finally coming home to where some
of his earliest art had been shown. And in that sense, the documentary ends
with a kind of uplifting message that suggests it simply took the art world a
few decades to catch up with what Carlos had long been expressing so clearly in
his art.
Along with a large catalogue of pop-music accompanying the images, and
the stunning use of his flip-books and fascination with cinematic animation,
I’d argue that this was the best artist-based documentary in many years, made
even more fascinating by its LGBTQ links.
*I would also posit the idea that in the
earliest days of his art it was still exceedingly difficult for anyone to bring
up the issues of homosexual and bisexual behavior. What’s more, as Almaraz
increasingly became associated with the Chicano movement, critics and friends
alike played down the sexuality of the artists while centering their
observations about the political and social contexts. The same thing happened
to several black artists and writers of the Harlem Movement, notably Langston
Hughes, whose estate still resists any mention of Hughes’ gay sexuality.
Los Angeles, October 2, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My
Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).
No comments:
Post a Comment