WORD MADE FLESH

• Rex Butler

Paul Yore had them, like any number of other objects in his work, in the palm of his hand. They were surprisingly middle-aged and middle-class like me, as though young people don’t really come out to hear people speak live any more.

It was the weekend after the opening of Yore’s show WORD MADE FLESH at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), and he was in conversation with Nick Henderson, a volunteer member of the Australian Queer Archives. Yore speaks assuredly and with great analytical intelligence. He’s also a contemporary style icon with his glasses, piercings and the best haircut I’ve seen on anyone in ages. (If Alpha60 ever want to replace that photo of Jean-Luc Godard at the back of their shop now that he’s passed away, they could do worse than Yore.)

Yore after about three or four questions was in full rhetorical flight, and in response to one old-school romantic—and, of course, this was especially striking given the large crowd who had turned out to see him—insisted that he was nothing more than an anonymous “cultural worker” filling a pre-existing role, effectively constrained in what he could do or say. So far, so boilerplate cultural Marxism, of the kind they used to teach at art schools (even as recently as 2010 when Yore graduated from Monash).