a man of many masks
by Douglas Messerli
Elsa
Flores Almaraz and Richard Montoya (screenwriters and directors) Carlos
Almaraz: Playing with Fire / 2019 [Documentary]
In reviewing the LGBTQ documentary Carlos
Almaraz: Playing with Fire offered for the first time yesterday on Netflix,
it’s hard to get past the fact that I am good friends with the major director,
Almaraz’s wife Elsa Flores Almaraz and with several figures who appear in the
film, including Cheech Marin, Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael
Govan, and Dan Guerrero, as well as being acquainted with several others
including John Valadez and Jane Livingston. Perhaps even more importantly, I am
married to Howard N. Fox, the curator of the LACMA show Playing with Fire:
The Paintings of Carlos Almaraz which occasioned the documentary and who
appears throughout the film, including being the first voice you hear during
this film’s 1 hour and 22-minute run.
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 Govan LACMA’s 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, he quickly became 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.
Yet
even then he was also a man of extremes, a kind of haunted being, particularly
in his early days, when he seriously embraced many different identities in an
attempt to discover and satisfy his numerous passions. A short time after he
and his friend Dan Guerrero left their Los Angeles homes to discover life in
New York, Carlos explored his sexuality so radically that even his gay friend
admits he was startled by some of the sexual events in which Carlos described
himself as participating.
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 began 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 began 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 the very moment. He traveled to Cuba, but didn’t like what he saw
there.
More important, only a year after his hospitalization, the artist became
deeply involved with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, painting large
banners not only for that union’s conventions but for Luis Valdez’s Teatro
Campesino, which brought plays into the worker’s fields.
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.
These beloved works, however, revealed another side of his passion, as,
along with his “Echo Park Series” paintings, Carlos committed himself to art, slathering
paint so thickly upon the canvas it was as if, as Fox puts it, he were painting
with butter. One can only recognize the act as a sensual representation of
something akin to pouring out one’s blood and guts upon the canvas, pulling and
pushing color and paint across the surface in a manner that might almost remind
us of a more realist-inclined Jackson Pollack. As the film suggests, of the
abstract expressionists only Pollack remained of deep interest to Carlos.
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 newborn 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).
