Reflections on the Many Faces of Public and Private Selves Through Paul Chisholm’s The Lost Children of Paradise (2018).
Text by Wil Ceniceros
Contemporary artist Paul David Chisholm (b. 1983, Canterbury, UK) started his art education in Nottingham Trent University (Class of 2004) before completing a Master’s in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts (Class of 2019). His artistic practice includes painting, sculpture and performance art, and it is through these various mediums and their subject matter that he creates a visual language exploring themes regarding his homosexuality, sexual abuse trauma, mental illness and politics. Among the artworks Paul Chisholm became widely known for is his sculpture Viral Load 2010, a black dildo covered with glass-headed pins which he created as a response to his HIV diagnosis and referred to by the media as ‘the world’s most painful sex toy’. Chisholm has donated artworks to charity organizations such as the Terrence Higgins Trust who have auctioned the pieces at Christie’s auction house in London to help support people living with HIV across the UK. In 2011, Chisholm’s artworks Fuck Me I Have Love & H*I*V was exhibited alongside Felix Gonzalez Torres, General Idea in the New York exhibition ‘Mixed Messages,’ a benefit for the US-based non-profit organization Visual AIDS, which raises awareness and dialogue around HIV/AIDS. The most recent 2019 Terrence Higgins Trust auction at Christie’s featured Chisholm’s oil on canvas painting, Lost Boys (2017), which alludes to the boys lost to HIV, AIDS and related suicide deaths while exploring the “juxtaposition between public and private selves and the battle to survive.”
Although much of Chisholm’s artwork can be seen as recognizing the progress made in HIV research and treatment, his artwork serves to reminds viewers of the persistent stigma associated with the disease and reveals the need to continue raising awareness on the subject matter. Anchoring Paul Chisholm’s recent body of artworks is a series of clown paintings, which transport us into a journey that includes a dark and invisible, yet omnipresent reality Chisholm has been experiencing. In the clown paintings, we see Chisholm extending his exploration of the themes of ‘public and private selves’ previously seen in Lost Boys (2017) and he creates a new visual language through the figuration of portrait-like clown faces. It is these themes of ‘public and private selves’ that are relevant to all human beings regardless of age, gender or background and which make Paul Chisholm stand out as a noteworthy contemporary artist.
How can an artist represent the dark and invisible world of individuals living with HIV, trauma and mental illness? In 1949 Theodor Adorno pronounced that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” a hyperbolic rejection to the aestheticization of all forms of post-traumatic expression. Instead, Adorno suggests that art ought to be transformed “from the harmonic and knowable to the jarring and irresolvable”1 and argues that “mimesis in its physiological, somatic dimension is Angleichung, a becoming, or making
1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber, Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 39.
similar, a movement toward, never reaching a goal. It is not identity, nor can it be reduced to nonidentity together as nonidentical similitude and in unresolvable tension with each other.”2 Contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) and Susan Coe (b. 1954) have found mimesis useful to represent trauma “and the resulting frustration with memory that is neither transparent nor orderly.”3 Similarly, contemporary artist Paul Chisholm uses his artwork to elucidate and simultaneously dissolve the stigma and social marginalization felt by himself and others in similar situations. Through mimesis, or the uninterrupted interplay between past and present, Chisholm invites the viewer to understand that his paintings as representations pale in comparison to the individual and collective albatrosses around our necks that we carry every day.
Chisholm’s clown paintings consist of a series titled The Lost Children of Paradise (2018), in which the clown is used as a metaphor to make visible his exploration of identity, and the process of mythmaking. Inspired by the 1945 French epic drama Les Enfants du Paradis, this body of work was started in December 2018 while pursuing a MAFA degree at the Chelsea College of Arts in London. Through the highly stylized clown paintings, the artist explores connections beyond traditional associations of comic relief, and instead reminds the viewer of the individual and collective frailty and weakness in human beings. In his essay on The Lost Children of Paradise, Chisholm explores representing the need to mask sexual identity stating that “for a Queer Artist like myself we have always had to make magic happen. Life was never simple, we always had to be inventive [and] put on our mask and face bravely a heteronormative society.” The clowns are also a metaphorical representation of Chisholm’s identity as ‘the artist,’ exploring the role he takes on as an entertainer. He refers to the series as alluding to the clown images as fascinating “because of his ability to mask in make-up and flamboyance his true sadness, he performs and entertains very much like an artist does. A vagabond, an outsider and a fool dedicated to his Art.” In addition, he states that the portrait-like paintings represent the personifications of society riddled with the “veneer of instability, this gloss, this shine, this vision of ourselves and how we present our beings to the world which is so crushingly hopeless, we buy, we shop, we consume, like automated robots looking for the next kick.”
Central to understanding the clown series is Chisholm’s intellectual and aesthetic depth include understanding the process of layering which he uses to create a vocabulary to explore the hybridity between the subjects and the themes. Through the use of curved lines, dripping paint, and incomplete/broken lines, Chisholm illustrates a vocabulary that reveals the complexity of the subject (self, viewer, society) and the themes being explored (mental illness, trauma, HIV). In the subjects/clowns, Chisholm interweaves traditional references about clowns as jovial, amusing figures. Acting as a self-portrait for the artist, the clowns’ exaggerated smiles allude to the artist’s inner turmoil whilst
2 Andreas Huyssen, “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman and Adorno,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, 32.3 Janet Marstine, “Challenging the Gendered Categories of Art and Art Therapy: The Paintings of Jane Orleman,” in Femenist Studies 28, no. 3 (fall 2002), 632.
dealing with depression and anxiety which he feels must be masked in order to be taken seriously in society and the artworld. His use of curved lines in the clown’s curly hair and his exaggerated smile help create a psychological sense of comfort and ease corresponding to the symbol of the clown as a harmless, approachable figure. Simultaneously, the verticality of the painting and the largesse of the figures suggests a sense of dominance and strength which confer onto the clown a double meaning that oscillates between having an air of comfort and menace. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Clown Upside Down, the upside-down clown takes the figure and myth of the artist/clown as a jovial, comical figure and subverts it. Further evidence of the layering includes by appropriation of Georg Baselitz’s upside-down painted subjects to allude to emotional distress. The artwork is exhibited resting on two side-by-side, identical backwards ticking clocks referencing “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) (1991) by Félix González-Torres, which serve as abstracted substitutions for bodies while acting as a metaphor for love.
Additional layering can be seen in the foreground, where Chisholm appropriates artistic processes that have inspired him such as the dripping paint tracery. Here we see Chisholm paying homage to Peter Doig who painted a tracery of snow-covered branches in his landmark painting Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991) which act as a veil to draw the viewer closer to the painting. In his clown paintings, the tracery of dripping paint takes on a more emotional connotation conveying a sense of melancholy. Upon closer inspection one notices Chisholm’s use of gestural brushstrokes which gives the viewer an insight into the artist’s exploration of representing his anxieties and frustrations. In keeping with the aforementioned allusions to myths and roles we take on, and alongside an environment filled with avarice, artifice and apathy, the foreground tracery also reads as a tool to depict the emotionally incarcerated and grotesque individuals we run the risk of becoming when we conform to social norms for acceptance. Implicit in the clown paintings is also an indication that escape from the strictures of society are unobtainable. The clowns’ asymmetrical and distorted facial features disorient the viewer further developing a language of despair, while through his use of drips in darker tones of red paint take on a morbid sense, akin to splatters of blood as if making the subject appear as a damaged individual.
Through the clown series, Chisholm masterfully chose the idea of portraiture to explore the challenging nature of surviving trauma and mental illness. Philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe argues that the self is “unrepresentable” and that (self) portraiture forces us to face the illusion that a portrait depicts the self as a unity, however it also fragments, dislocates and evokes terror.4 Through the broken lines scattered throughout the clown paintings, Chisholm expresses the illusory self as unity and depicts a sense of fracturing or disruption having taken place. Further, the clowns are painted alone, without friends or family members, speaking to the feeling of isolation often felt by individuals living with mental illness, trauma.
4 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and François Martin, “Retrait” of the Artist, in Two Persons, trans. Mira Kamdar (Lyons, France: Editions MEM/Artifacts, 1985), 66, 69
Chisholm’s clown paintings can be further read as offering his clown portraits as testimonials of his past and present experiences. It is worth emphasizing that “a testimonial is more than a confession; while a confession merely declares, a testimonial questions. A testimonial demands that a survivor use the personal voice so that [he] cannot be discredited as passive victim. A testimonial is a position that directs attention from the survivor to the cultural norms that condone trauma.”5 The child-like style of painting and the use of highly made-up, masked clowns closely associated with entertainment, allow Chisholm to further blurs the boundaries between art and art as therapy. In this vein, Chisholm is able to access repressed memories of himself as an individual and as part of society, which require addressing, but also disrupts the voyeuristic pleasures of fetishization and objectification of an individual suffering in silence. In the process, he offers art as a form of de-pathologizing symptoms and behaviors and offers hope through the act of painting to reclaim a sense of control and self-determination in the present.
As an emerging artist, Paul Chisholm faces some of the same challenges as many of his peers in the pursuit of professional success. Among these challenges is questioning how an artist’s work engages in a discourse relevant to the here and now. Yet, despite the heavy context and overtly sexual/political nature, the clown work has been greatly successful with many collectors buying Chisholm’s new body of work. His multilayered clown paintings can be appreciated as Contemporary Art since they offer interpretations and explorations of that which is not seen yet is astonishingly real and relevant globally. Although Chisholm has foregrounded his clown series of artworks with his personal experiences, the paintings’ larger importance lies in enhancing our understanding of how art can represent visual dialogues between identity and self, past and present, personal and political.
5 Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5.