IVORY BASTARDS

Victor Luis Chavez
(1931-1980)



	Chavez at the opening of his show “Bolas de masa hervida Del Puño” in 1961.

Victor Luis Chavez, born March 2, 1931 in Salina Cruz, Mexico to Carmelo Chavez and Erendira del Monte. His father was a butcher and his mother worked from home as a candle and soap maker before and during motherhood. A loving couple, the two were both born in 1910, at the start of the Mexican Revolution. The two lived their lives in acts of rebelliousness in the spirit of the year of their birth and encouraged their children to live their lives in the same spirit, encouraging artistic and individual freedom.

The oldest of six children, Victor Luis was born nine years before any of his subsequent siblings and, thus, enjoyed the greatest amount of free time with his folks and shared in exposure to their interests: attending music recitals, meeting artists who lived in town (Salina Cruz being a premier tourist destination at the time, it supported a thriving arts community) and listening to tales of the revolution from various neighbors and townsfolk.

Exhibiting artistic promise at an early age, Victor Luis’ main interest at the time was musical, showing promise and ability at guitar, piano and concertina. He also wrote small plays and stories that his parents would help him to act out and develop.

At the age of 10 he was forced to attend the birth of his sister, Juanita. His mother went into labor a couple of weeks earlier than anticipated, and Victor Luis was the only person around to help when his mother suddenly went into labor while they were picking beans in their backyard garden. Guiding him through the process, Victor Luis successfully delivered his baby sister in under a half an hour. The pride felt by his parents of his handling such an important task, he was actually quite shaken by the experience.

Surprised by his son’s ability to handle the situation, Carmelo had Victor Luis begin work in the butcher shop; both to foster responsibility and to save money on assistants, now that there was a larger family to feed. The son was taught how to handle a knife and how to successfully chop an entire steer or sow into choice cuts of meats.

The family expanded quite rapidly, Erendira bore five more children in the next six years. Superstitious, she insisted that Victor attend every single birth during that time. Victor Luis’ life at that point consisted of attending Catholic school, cutting meat in the afternoons and anticipating the birthing process of his mother.

Victor Luis’ writings began to take on a very surreal flavor during this period of time as did his original compositions. He first took up sketching and painting at this time. Working with bright primary colors against black canvases, Victor Luis’ first paintings were bold images of steaks, chops and tenderloins pouring out of canyons and gorges, usually with a Christ figure hidden behind a tree, one eye peeking out. Some of these paintings still exist and are considered the promise of a fruitful career to come.

In 1948, at 17, Victor Luis won a partial scholarship to Escuela de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) in San Miguel de Allende. He worked in the evenings at a meat packing plant on the outskirts of town to support his tuition and housing. It was here that he had first real exposure to the effects of poverty, scholastic ignorance, unsanitary and hazardous work conditions and drug addiction had on the Mexican people. The populist and leftist teachings of his youth were now gaining a focus and clarity due to his new experiences.

At first encouraged by Victor Luis’ promise as a surrealist/dadaist and revolutionary artist, professors and administrators began to be worried and peeved by some of his behavior and art. It was not uncommon for Victor Luis to appear in class late, drunk or in women’s clothing. For his sophomore final project, he tied together 60 sheep in rows of three by twenty, painted the first fifteen rows red and titled it “Tapón Muy Grande” (Very Big Tampon). Severely reprimanded by the school’s governing body for what was perceived to be an attention-getting stunt, Victor Luis brought forth a reactionary piece for his junior year mid-term: a living tableau of the Last Supper populated by prostitutes (female and male transvestites), live swine and fat children wearing jackboots and smearing chocolate syrup on themselves. Titled simply, “Administración de la Escuela” (School Administration) this piece proved the end of his scholarship.

Victor Luis promptly left San Miguel de Allende and headed directly to Mexico City in hopes of finding favor with El Nuevo Método (The New Method) a guerilla / underground art collective that had been gaining some notoriety for their shocking multimedia performances (think Central America’s version of Dadaism, but without the overly precious exclusionary flavor). Once again using his butchering skills to support himself, he was able to curry favor with some of the organization’s leaders by keeping them supplied with fresh meat. By gaining favors, he would be able to work his way into some shows with some painted and collage pieces. In 1955, one work, “Globos oculares Abajo Abajo” (Eyeballs Down Below – an upside-down zigguraut of lacquered sheep’s eyeballs) gained praise from Diego Rivera himself who encouraged its purchase by a French collector. Victor Luis’ star was rising.

By 1957, Victor Luis was able to soon give up work as a butcher and was able to support himself entirely with his art, as long as he supplemented his income by painting retablos (devotional paintings commissioned by penitents giving thanks for some miracle in their lives) which he enjoyed doing. (A retrospective of thirty four of his retablos from this period was held in 2002 at La Galería Popular Nueva (The New Folk Gallery) in Puerta Vallerta.) His retablos were praised for reflecting the desperate and frenzied bargaining of the supplicant caught in a moment of religious fervor. Dreamlike and often frightening, the saviors being praised often took on the qualities of demons, bestowing miracles, but for a price.

In 1959, Victor Luis had his first one-man show at a converted factory space in industrial Mexico City. Titled, “Apenas Esto Una vez” (Just this Once) the show was a bold and daring venture, combining paintings, sculpture, film loops and other media. The show caused a sensation with a performance piece, “Retablos Posterior” (Backwards Retablos). In this performance, scenes of despair would be posed live as a still life painting, one such example being the sexual molestation of a daughter by her father. The saint or elegiac figure would then be posed in the act of pleading for forgiveness by the person being wronged for allowing the pictured tragedy to take place.

It caused a sensation. Every piece in the gallery sold and fetched high prices for someone so young and unproven. His showing was covered by the mainstream Mexican press and the topic was in the forefront of the national consciousness for weeks. Praised by artists, radicals and free thinkers, railed against by fundamentalists and the church, Victor Luis Chavez was, for a brief time, one of the most famous artists in Mexico.

The sudden upswell in attention was an intoxicant to Victor Luis. He spent this period attending as many parties and openings as he possibly could. He traveled Mexico as the invited guest of other local art collectives and visited the homes of celebrities of the day. This delicious attention and notoriety fed his ego and he wanted more.

Some radical elements were not content to let Victor Luis wallow in such decadence at the expense of defiling the Catholic Church. An unidentified group of Catholic zealots captured Victor Luis as he was getting off of a bus to attend a gallery opening in Monterrey by posing as the gallery owners he was supposed to meet. They drove him to a churchyard where they forced him to get on his knees and pray for forgiveness to an icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe at gunpoint.

This experience shook Victor Luis and he dropped out of visibility for a while. He returned to his parents’ home in Salina Cruz to rest and get his head back together. He lived off his earnings from his gallery sales and even gave some money to his parents so that they could afford some travel and a few luxuries. Victor Luis laid low for a while, pondering his recent flash of fame, money and attention.

He decided that he liked it and that he wanted even more of it. Instead of letting this recent threat intimidate him, it reinforced some of his artistic daring and helped him to realize that there was art within celebrity, fame and sensation, a position taken up with much wider acclaim, attention and savvy just a couple of years later by Andy Warhol.

The experience of his abduction brought to him the understanding that small and closed minds could not appreciate statements that challenged their preconceived, limited notions. He came to the conclusion that any worthwhile art should be deliberately antagonistic and exclusionary. The more surreal and obscure the art, the greater its value and meaning.

Beginning what he referred to as “Sensación Impopular” his art now turned toward confrontational statements, designed to pierce pomposity and tilt at staid authority. His artistic endeavours now leaned ever further toward the lurid, the spectacular, the exaggerated and the dramatic. Victor Luis had become a provocateur.

In 1961, Victor Luis came back with a new show titled, “Bolas de masa hervida Del Puño” (Fist Dumplings). The exhibition had two stages to it. Guests would walk into a stark white room on which seemingly uninspired “surreal” sculptures and objects rested, including: a plaster and foam-rubber ass with working toaster slots that operated by pulling on the penis, a pair of trousers made of cocktail sausages, a life-size plastic Jesus that poured wine from its palms with the words “1959 Vintage” printed on His forehead, as well as large white buckets with toilet seats and paper currency as toilet paper. Immediate response by those in the room was harsh and unforgiving as haughty laughter and sniggering filled the air. After a half an hour when all of the invited guests and critics had arrived, the entrance door was loudly closed and locked. Every single guest was locked inside for four full hours.

No one was able to get out. There were no windows and no entrances to other rooms. Eventually people had to go to the bathroom and room consensus allowed that desperate souls who needed to use the buckets and currency to relieve themselves could do so. Eventually people began to eat the trouser sausages which they heated in the ass toaster. People drank the wine straight from the palms of Christ. Natural urges and human frustration led to the destruction of the gallery and its artworks. At this point, stage two began.

A chainsaw was heard to start on the other side of one of the gallery walls. The blade of the chainsaw suddenly sliced through the wall, creating an opening. As the guests cautiously crossed through they walked into a darkened room filled with podiums. On each podium lay a torn masthead of the various national and urban newspapers of the critics who had attended the opening.

Next to each masthead was a typed copy of the reviews that Victor Luis had written and submitted in the name of each individual critic to their morning-edition newspaper editors while they had been locked in the gallery for the previous four hours. In each review (posing as the critic) Victor Luis mercilessly trashed his own show, and did so with a meticulous imitation of the style and mannerism specific to each critic.

Submitted to the newspapers along with the faked reviews were accompanying photos taken by hidden cameras of the bacchanalia that took place in the gallery; important critics crapping in buckets and defacing currency, getting drunk from stigmata, eating sausages from asses and destroying private property.

Immediate reaction was explosive, both from the view of the public as well as within the art world. Art critics were furious that their authority was ridiculed and deflated. The public, instead, thought that the joke was being played on them, poking fun of their lack of artistic awareness and understanding. Careers were ended, lawsuits were threatened and trust was lost. However, once the dust cleared, this was seen as an incredibly important artistic and critical statement. Once again, Victor Luis was reveling in his notoriety.

Victor Luis was a dividing factor in the world of art. Some took his bravado and socio-political commentary to be genius, the rest regarded him as merely a show-off, a petulant child who insisted on deflating the works of others instead of creating meaningful works of his own. While the art world took notice of every one of his moves, it was as much out of wariness as it was interest.

Over the coming years, Victor Luis garnered yet more accolade and more disdain. In 1963, he secretly led a political campaign to get a grapefruit elected 9th Ward Alderman for the city of Colima. In 1965 he taunted the “Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios” (League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers) by breaking into the publishing offices of “Compartimiento Feliz del Ama de Casa y de la Madre” (Happy Housewife and Mother Magazine) and secretly posting in their June issue an article praising the organization for its family-friendly sing-alongs, puppet shows and rhyming books. In 1966 he spiked the after-dinner cordials at the pre-event reception for the Academia Mexicana de Ciencias (Mexican Academy of Sciences) with LSD then sent gorgeous prostitutes dressed in lab coats into the room to mingle and surreptitiously place Chinese finger-traps on all of the attendees. It took hours for anyone to be able to dial a phone for help.

By this point sales of his paintings and sculpture ably supported his extravagent and decadent lifestyle, his publicity-driven commentaries and stunts, as well as his parents, to who he remained a faithful son. He also met Beatriz Perez, a singer and actress, at this time. Theirs was a whirlwind romance and typical of couples with such strong artistic personalities: intensely personal and loving as well as violent and acidic. Both were consumed by love for the other, but indulged in their selfish egos by conducting open sexual affairs. They married in September of 1967.

Eventually Victor Luis turned his attention toward experimenting with film. He produced a few surreal works mainly as background atmosphere for his gallery shows. It was only when guests to his shows offered cold, hard cash for the film pieces did he realize he could sell them. He declared they weren’t for sale, thus doubling the original offer. It was then that he began working in earnest with film production.

In 1969 he got a limited release for his first feature film, the 70-minute long “La Gente De la Matanza.” The (so-called) plot involves a detective on the hunt for a hired killer who didn’t finish the job. The story eventually degrades into a conceptual combination of sex, surgical footage, cross-dressing, zombies, zeppelin races and lucha libre. The film was panned, even by staunch supporters, and Victor Luis himself later declared the film to be a failure.

Victor Luis was able to get some commercial work, by contracting under the name of Augustin Kasen Acevedo. He did work for Bebé Delicioso (Yummy Baby) baby food. The advertisements consisted mainly of two babies sitting side by side. One is fed a spoonful of Yummy baby and the other is fed the competing brand. Instantly, the children are grown up and the effects of the separate foods are seen: the child that ate Yummy Baby is educated, polite and well-heeled, and the one that didn’t is either a criminal, a glue-addict or dead in an alley. The ads always ended the same: with a baby purple-faced from screaming with the sub-title, “The future is not yet written! Give me Yummy Baby! It is in your hands!” Though controversial, the Yummy Baby Company experienced a 17% sales increase, which disappointed Victor Luis.

In 1970, Victor Luis was approached by television network Telecine Nacional Mexicano to take over direction of their failing Lucha Libre telenovela, “The Ivory Bastards”, a cheaply-produced children’s wrestling action-hero show. In a TNM press release, Chavez is quoted defending his turn from artist to schlock-merchant, "Creating art is exhausting. I'd like to churn out some rubbish for a while." He said that in return for complete artistic control and freedom, that he would return a profitable product in two years time. He completely retooled the show’s premise and tone, replacing all of the lucha libre characters (which were broadly drawn racial and ethnic stereotypes), setting the show in the future and turning away from the slapstick and straightforward action to a more contemporary, angsty surrealism and existentialist action.

All was fine for the first two years. The sensational content of the second season attracted new viewers and made the show profitable a year earlier than promised. The third year saw continued profitability, despite a slight decline in viewership. Victor Luis was prescient in retaining merchandising rights to his new characters and made quite a tidy sum with comic books, taffy and action figures.

In May of 1972, just as season four was ending production, Victor Luis suffered a devastating blow. His wife Beatriz filed for divorce for irreconcilable differences. Under the guise of finding religion she used evidence of their past (consensual) sexual practices and a sampling of his private, unsold artwork as evidence of abuse and cruelty.

One week after the divorce became final, Victor Luis’ parents were both killed in a terrible house fire. Always close to his parents, even when separated by distance and lifestyle, Victor Luis was inconsolable. He was unable to take comfort in the remaining members of his family, as they had grown up jealous of their older, famous and most-favored brother, and refused to speak with him in the period after the tragedy.

Victor Luis descended into a black hole of alcohol and self-destructive behavior. Ironically, Chavez's work habits did not suffer. His output as an aritst, writer and filmmaker, while somewhat diminished in quality, became astonishing in its quantity. He wrote novels under numerous pseudonyms, painted murals, designed advertising campaigns, produced mainstream Westerns, and even released his signature line of fashion accessories made entirely of plastic.

Near the end of 1972 into 1973, Chavez became obsessed with Ivory Bastards. He spent months locked in his apartment on the TMN campus writing scenarios, storyboards and synopses. Longtime TMN producer Martino Ablus recalls the walls of Chavez's bedroom were covered in floor-to-ceiling diagrams outlining character arcs, motivations, even fictional family trees. What began as a lark had become an obsession. He wrote over a thousand pages of Ivory Bastards adventures. Most of them remained unproduced.

The fifth season of the Ivory bastards proved to be its undoing. Show content took a turn for the horrendous as Victor Luis poured his own grief and hatred into the storyline. He veered the show toward overt sexuality (including bestiality, necrophilia and homosexuality), drug use, on-screen suicide, and ever-increasing acts of depravity and violence. The final 2 episodes were the most controversial. According to newspaper articles, the penultimate episode ended with an accident at a particle-accellerating power plant, one that apparently destroys the entire universe. The final episode consisted of 28 minutes of black leader, depicting the absence of all existence. Critics interpreted this as a raised middle finger to TMN management, who had refused to provide the budget for the finale Chavez had written. Others saw evidence of creative bankruptcy. The few fans that remained were outraged. Chavez's home was firebombed and he received hundreds of death threats. Perhaps foreseeing the reaction, Chavez chose this time to undergo rehab for his addictions in a Barcelona sanitarium. TMN cancelled the series amid the furious public backlash.

Chavez returned to Mexico in 1975 still obsessed with Ivory Bastards, unable to concentrate on the painting and high-brow art that had provided his living for many years. He was determined to end the series the way he had always planned. For the next four years, he squandered what little money he had left from his successful art career producing an Ivory Bastards full-length feature film. He assembled what he could of the original cast and subjected them to a rigorous shooting schedule for very little money: sometimes shooting in dangerous locations with stolen equipment, sometimes using homeless drunks to stand in for actors who had given up on the whole project. Despite the difficult conditions, Chavez demanded nothing short of perfection from his cast and crew, often demanding hundreds of takes for a single shot. It is believed Chavez poured nearly $2 million of his own money into the project. In 1979, the well ran dry and he turned to Mexico City's numerous loan sharks to continue production. He secured up to $500,000 from dubious sources, and it lasted about one month.

At this point he had amassed thousands of hours of film shot over the course of nearly five years. Post-production dragged into 1980, and the borrowed money was beginning to come due. By now, Chavez was destitute, calling in favors from old friends to engage in all-night editing sessions in ad agencies and small production houses. He never spent two nights in the same place, afraid the loan sharks would catch up with him. One night, they finally did.

On November 18, 1980, the brutalized body of Victor Luis Chavez was found in a shallow grave just outside the principality of Tacuba. His murder remains unsolved. It is unknown what became of the project for which he gave his life.