Paul Yore’s delirious Word Made Flesh pulls into Carriageworks

By Fiona Kelly McGregor

Paul Yore’s Word Made Flesh opens at Carriageworks on January 5.Credit:Flavio Brancaleone

In 1988, returning home from three years in Europe, the first thing I noticed when I got off the plane was a series of garish posters advertising safe sex. Mounted along the jet bridge, bearing slogans like “If it’s not on, it’s not on”, the posters were shocking and liberating in their candour. I was not yet queer but my best friend in Paris had seroconverted, and another friend’s brother had died of AIDS. What I felt liberated from was the silence I’d experienced when supporting my friend Lizzie through her diagnosis. There was no public education about HIV; it would be almost a decade before France implemented needle exchanges. By then Lizzie and all but one of her friends were dead.

These posters were probably created by Tasmanian-born David McDiarmid (1952-1995). Along with Melbourne-based Juan Davila, McDiarmid and his some-time partner and collaborator, Peter Tully (1947-1992), are cited as significant influences by Paul Yore, whose immersive installation Word Made Flesh opens at Carriageworks on January 5.

“As far as I’m concerned, those guys kicked the door down and, in many ways, their work is more significant today than other stuff that’s being produced,” Yore avows.

Paul Yore’s Word Made Flesh at Carriageworks.Credit:Flavio Brancaleone

Davila is one of several prominent figures who supported the Gippsland-based artist through a traumatic year in 2013 when police raided his exhibition at Linden Gallery, St Kilda, charging him with obscenity. The charges were dropped a year later, the police ordered to pay Yore’s legal costs. But they did not pay compensation for the pictures they damaged by cutting out the supposedly offensive content. Yore was 24.

Word Made Flesh at Carriageworks is a portion of the eponymous survey show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. It is a triptych of works caged by cyclone fencing, bursting with cacophonous sound and lighting.

You hear it before you see it: bells, chimes and clangs, and beneath everything, a sustained electronic vibration. Walking into the bay, the assault becomes visual.

There is a hearse mosaiced with coloured glass and pippy shells. An American flag bears the words NO WAR. The tyres are spray-painted gold, the hubcaps also mosaiced, the tiny Ford logo intact. The bonnet features Yore’s signature squatting figure, knees pulled apart to reveal its enormous phallus, like a male Sheilagh Na-gig, the ancient Irish goddess still found in some churches, spreading her legs to reveal powerful genitalia.

Behind the hearse rises a geodesic dome and behind that a tower containing videos, resembling a sort of cut-up billboard with its profusion of banners, slogans, and more lights. The effect is delirious.

The installation bursts with cacophonous sound and lighting.Credit:Flavio Brancaleone

Yore doesn’t hear me the first time I come to interview him. He is fixing lights to the dome’s ceiling while a drill reverberates nearby. On seeing me, he descends the ladder, words pouring forth with the nervous abundance of the artwork itself.

“Oh god, technology. I’m a semi-Luddite, you know. I hate it but I can’t get away from it, obviously it has its uses, I mean it’s all through this work. I share a phone with Devon, and I can’t drive.” He also doesn’t drink and is a vegan.

Small, pale, with black-framed glasses and short brown hair, Yore comes across as a complex mixture of austerity, humour, earnestness, rage, cockiness, anxiety and resolve. He takes me to meet the wielder of the drill, Devon Ackermann, his partner of 15 years. Co-curator of ACCA’s Word Made Flesh, Ackermann here is “only helping … I’m always in the background. We’ve collaborated in the past but not with this. I mean, we share everything, so if Paul needs a hand, why not pick up a drill?”

He tells me the story of the hearse. Acquired on Gumtree, barely roadworthy, a permit was obtained from Vic Roads to drive it from Essendon to ACCA. Halfway there, they were pulled over by a police van. Six officers surrounded the hearse. “They let us go eventually, but the threat of cops to people of colour and queers is real.”

Shortly after taking off again, the hearse broke down and had to be towed.

Flanking the dome’s entrances are sentinel-like constructions: Ronald McDonald, a wonky stack of tyres, little plastic animals, a clownish face on a big banana, all clashingly bright, daubed in paint, studded with buttons and sequins. Dildos sprout from every surface. Sometimes the objects are personal, such as a sports trophy won by Yore’s brother.

“I see the work as flattened terrain,” Yore says. “You might just find a bottle top: it’s all the same. These phalluses are made of plaster, using dildo packaging as moulds. The LED lights were made by a company I worked with. I use a lot of found objects, from the side of the road or op shops. Occasionally I buy stuff.”

‘I have a complex relationship with masculinity. Our entire system is dominated by disgusting men.’

Some of the dome’s triangular components are placards from climate change protests, Bunnings logos visible on the back. Others are crocheted blankets, found and made. Most famously refined by Buckminster Fuller, the geodesic dome also conjures ancient architectural forms like igloos. The allusions proliferate.

“You could use it in space stations. At one point it had a very utopian association and was taken up by hippies who built them out of trash. I also embraced it because of religious architecture – basilicas. Or Plato’s cave as a foundational myth of Western philosophy … grottos, pleasure domes from the baroque era. It’s also a contemplative space. The idea is that people might sit in here, the quilting forming a matriarchal womb-like space.”

Yore considers the tower the most modular, carefully designed work he’s ever made. With its industrial shelving and pre-fab shiny floor, “it carries the texture of neoliberal society”.

The videos inside splice gay porn with political figures: Trump, Scott Morrison, a winking Putin and gyrating Bin Laden.

“When I was 13 and realised I was gay, 9/11 happened, so it was a very formative moment for me. I think that anti-terror legislation from the Howard era laid the groundwork for a lot of the current curtailing of protest. So I often put these historical moments in my work. I also see the Debordian cycle, other towers like Babel … the idea of language as phallic.”

The explicit gay content is what most obviously connects Yore to McDiarmid and Davila, along with Catholic upbringings. As with many queers of his generation, Yore regards the ’90s with nostalgia for its strident politics. While the death sentence of HIV has receded, issues such as climate change and capitalism are more urgent.

Paul Yore with his ACCA show.Credit:Scott McNaughton

During Yore’s annus horribilis, he did a workshop with the Australian Tapestry Network that was transforming a large Davila canvas into tapestry. Davila was a frequent visitor and became something of a mentor, for both technique, “and as provocateur”.

Back in the dome, beside the slogan ALL MEN ARE PIGZ, Yore rails against “acceptability politics”.

“I found a great passivity in my generation. I looked at my peers at my private boys’ school and thought, You’re a f—ing moron, what are you doing? I read some full-on stuff, like the Una bomber text, Gandhi, the S.C.U.M manifesto … As a man who f—s other men I have a complex relationship with masculinity. Our entire system is dominated by disgusting men. The Church, the State, the corporate sector, the military, colonisation.”

When I return a week later, Word Made Flesh is fully installed. Yore has applied his trademark black nail polish and is posing for the photographer behind the fencing, ring-laden fingers hooked through the wire.

Inside the dome are hay bales to sit on. Kinetic water sculptures palliate the din. Attached to the hearse are keyboards with a seven-chord screwed down. What’s a bit more dissonance when the level is already off the charts?

I’ve invited friends to visit the work with me. While Yore and Ackermann sit politely blinking behind their matching black masks, my friends walk through with incredulous smiles.

We go into the tower where the soundtrack is more rhythmic but so loud that you have to shout to be heard. “Oh god,” one friend laughs, “This is horrendous!”

“So much fun!” the other says.

In the flashing lights, we start to dance.

Paul Yore’s Word Made Flesh is at Carriageworks until February 26.

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