Crazy Yates 

Photographer and filmmaker Paul Yates turns hardship into art.

By Brita Brundage 
Published 01/03/02 


Ten minutes into our interview, Paul Yates asked nonchalantly, "Do you mind
if I take off my hair?" "No, of course not," I replied, before the question
even registered. 

Off came the dark mop, revealing a forlorn-looking green Mohawk underneath,
curling in every direction. "Can I take off my tie?" he asked. "It's warm in
here." 

The midday sunlight was pouring into his small studio space in Stamford's
converted Yale Lock Building.

Even though it was December, my sweater, too, was beginning to feel
confining. Then again, I was sitting under a huge canvas covered with the
black and white liquid light photographic image of Yates' dead mother in a
hospital bed, taken minutes after he'd pulled her life support.

"No problem," I answered.

As I watched, Yates removed his entire suit, revealing a bright yellow shirt
and green nylon pants underneath.

"I had to make sure you were OK before I became myself," he said.

Yates is incredibly self-aware. He can trace his photography and film
interests back to age 8, when his mother bought him a Kodak model 110
camera, which he assembled from 168 pieces. "The first picture I ever took
was in the mirror, in the bathroom," said Yates. "It's amazing to me how
prescient that was." From his self-explorative films to his piles of
photo-booth images, Yates has always made himself the central image of his
work. "Almost everything I've done has had a very strong note of
self-portraiture." 

His first film came the same year, when Yates, armed with a Super-8 camera,
made movies featuring his mother. He filmed her walking through the back
yard, had her stop and snap her fingers and then walk out of frame. The
effect, which Yates discovered early on, was similar to Elizabeth Montgomery
disappearing on the TV show Bewitched.

"Instantly, I was trying to manipulate film," says Yates. "It wasn't
conscious. It was just what I wanted to do." At the time, he was living with
his younger brother and mother in a tiny rented house in Darien, across from
Shaw's and Grand Union. "It was the most nurturing environment."

But two years into her new advertising business, his mother began drinking.
"About a year after she started drinking," said Yates, "she was not herself
anymore. She was insane."

Out on drinking binges, his mother left the two boys to fend for themselves,
weeks or more at a time. She was arrested, in and out of clinics, to no
avail. 

"She couldn't be helped," said Yates. "She just would not stop." When his
mother, who the boys had begun to think of as "the creature," pulled a knife
on her oldest son, the event truly signaled the end. The younger brother
left for his grandmother's, the mother was sent to a dry-out facility and,
later, to a hospital, and, soon thereafter, Yates was on the street.

The liquid light painting Yates made of her at death, would be indicative of
his work to come. He spent several hours filming her in her hospital bed,
and then several more hours in a darkroom coating the canvas and applying
the negative with a bristle brush. Liquid light is a technique that involves
both artistic delicacy and photographic sense. The resulting image, in this
case, is muted, fading from view with his mother hardly there, lost in a sea
of blankets and tubes.

Even if his youthful environment had not seen such radical changes, it was
clear that Yates thought differently--experimenting with photography and
film when other kids were dipping into substances. Yates was straightedge
before the trend and hasn't touched a drink or smoke to this day.

"I thought it would hurt my mind," he says. "I was really concerned about
keeping my intelligence." In a way, Yates' rite of passage occurred inside a
photobooth machine.

The three-shot, typically sentimental photos were his canvases. He began by
manipulating his expressions from pensive to distraught to goofy. Then he
altered his positions, stretching and flexing his arms, wearing clown
makeup, masks, covering his head in shaving cream, ketchup and mustard.
Several of these shots he's now had blown up to life-size proportions.
Pre-photobooth, Yates was already a punk, rejecting the social norms of
partying and Van Halen for thought, creativity and the Talking Heads. Behind
the curtain, he found his own punk way to make art.

"I already took self-portraits [with] every roll of film," said Yates. "With
the photobooth, I could still take self-portraits and elevate this medium to
a fine art...because I'm a punk rocker and I can say that it is, and who can
say that it isn't?" While changing in a Paris photobooth in 1985 (after a
friend gave him a plane ticket), Yates had a revelation--nudity. From then
on, he'd do shots of his unzipped pants, penis half-exposed; he'd invite
girls into the booth for sexual poses revealing breasts, open mouths, naked
torsos. With his half-girl, half-boy look and wide emotional eyes, Yates is
a master of transformation.

Nudity is not only provocative, but, as the artist learned, it can also be
risky. In a Boston bowling alley where Yates made a nude photo set, he says
his pictures were confiscated, he was arrested and threatened by a police
officer. 

"He threatened to shoot me," said Yates. "He was having a homophobic
reaction. What if I was in that machine having sex with a guy, who cares?
What if I had my hand down his pants or his were down mine? I would have
been beat up, at least. So it's dangerous to be an artist."

While Yates sees his work as a challenge to standard ways of thinking, he
struggles with the notion of nudity, or anything else on a canvas, as
threatening. 

"Even if you're trying to be shocking, so what?" says Yates. "You put it on
a canvas...If you're going to be shocking, go to the mall and blow your
brains out. That's a real shocking thing. No one's doing that."

While he was living between the streets, friends' houses, train stations and
the like, Yates couldn't risk carrying a camera. He also didn't have money
for film or development, hence the plethora of photobooth shots. But when he
started attending SUNY/Purchase in Westchester, N.Y., on scholarship several
years later, Yates jumped back into film. Almost without realizing it, he'd
developed a fascination with the surreal. For him, surrealism was the
essence of punk--it stripped ideas to their core, looking at them in a new
way, just as punk was a distortion of everything rock. As Yates explained,
"You don't even need to know how to play the guitar, just hit it and yell
what you mean, and you'll be more understood than people who have symphonies
behind them and play arenas. And they were."

Yates' first film exploration into surrealism came 15 years ago in Geranium.
Done almost entirely in black and white, Geranium features Yates and the now
world-famous DJ Moby in a series of patched-together clips. They sit at a
bar, alcohol is poured, they are in a field with one in ghost attire, one is
falling over, one is spitting up liquid, there are legs in a tree and one is
on the ground with a rope pulling the other down. Behind the dreamlike
sequence, music plays, haunting and eerie behind this rotating, dreary
world. The film clearly grapples with alcoholism, with despair and with
death and with failed hope--all captured simply in repeating images and
objects. 

At the same time he explored his symbolic, expressive side, Yates became
interested in the other extreme--documentary film.

"I became interested in finding my father, because I hadn't," he said.
Called My Father's Son, the film captures each moment of the encounter from
the car trip to New Hampshire with a shaved-headed Yates looking serious
behind the wheel, punk music blaring, to the initial knock on the door and
meeting his father's new wife and son.

"I thought, 'It actually shows him more of me, that I'm coming with a
camera,'" said Yates. "It's a little bit of a way to hide but I'm also
recording my own voice...anyone watching it is going to be totally aware of
what I am doing." 

The resulting film is often awkward. The father, who is tanned and
consistently apologetic, always seems uneasy around his first son. The
father wants to relate, casually, but the event feels more like a necessity
for all parties--the father forced to fill the silence with anecdotes about
Chinese food and high school classes. Toward the end, the father is teasing
his new son, Mark, and the mother joins in, all while Yates is filming them.
Watching it, we feel his detachment. It is like he and we are looking at the
life he never had. 

Yates has managed to step outside his own life just enough that he can
capture its human essence without losing his emotional attachment. After
Yates lost four friends in three separate drowning incidents in the early
'90s, he incorporated water in his works. A fast-moving video for Moby
entitled Hymn shows city streets and bubbling water rising around the
rapidly twisting DJ. Yates' surrealist senior thesis film called Space Water
Onion involves futuristic crewmembers trapped on an uninhabited planet. In
the black-and-white film, one member returns acting strangely and they kill
him. The female member awakens on a spacecraft with the two remaining men,
all in white suits, and they learn that the life-support system is down. It
is filling the ship with water instead of oxygen and they must resolve
themselves to approaching death. The three dance, bobbing slowly. In a
poignant, beautiful moment, their faces hover above the water line, serene.
Underneath, subtitles read, "We have found grace." Then, they are swimming.
The film not only allowed Yates to graduate but also won him awards at the
Hamburg Hiroshima Film Festival and The Onion City Film Festival in Chicago.

As he's placed distance between himself and his past, Yates has allowed his
less serious self to develop. His close friendship with Moby throughout his
turmoil offered him the opportunity to tour worldwide with the DJ as his
cinematographer. Yates' film for the documentary Modulations, the first
definitive history of electronic music, showed his comfort within many
factions of the cultural underworld.

"The electronic/rave scene was the second-coming of the punk rock movement,"
said Yates. "No specific dress code, almost no drugs initially, dancing for
eleven hours...you achieved a different state of consciousness."

Even through Moby's sell-out express ride to fame (licensing all songs on
Play for commercial use and appearing on MTV's Cribs), Yates and he remained
close. Moby appears in nearly all of Yates' films and music ventures.

Then came Porno. This is the latest feature-length film that Yates has
written, directed and shot and, unlike past projects, it's a comedy. Porno
isn't even that heavy on the nudity. The film is set in a porn store on
Christmas Eve and examines all the characters that pass through its doors.
Porn star Dyanna Lauren, whom Yates is also documenting, sings in the film
with a goofy-looking Moby playing guitar behind her while wearing two dildos
strapped to his head. Over the year that the film was shot, however, Moby's
fame grew and he wanted out of the Clerks-like in-store comedy, afraid it
would smudge his now sacred image. Yates balked.

"I said, 'Moby, this film doesn't hurt you. No one's going to see it anyway.
They don't know who you are, by the way. You're not that famous. No one's
going to think, 'He wears dildos on his head in this comedy, I'm not going
to buy his records.' If anything, it's going to help you."

The film was made legally with a producer and, as the rift between them
grew, Yates refused to cut Moby from Porno. At the time, Moby was using the
value of Moby-related items on Ebay as a gauge of his popularity. Yates sold
Moby's eternal soul through the online auction; bidding started at 5 cents.
The auction closed at $41.

Porno has already been shown to positive reviews at the Silver Lake Film
Festival in Los Angeles and the former sex high-rise Showworld in
Manhattan's former Times Square. In February, the film will be shown as part
of the Director's View Film Festival in Stamford. Needless to say, Porno is
not going away and Yates is seeking a distributor. Early in 2002, Yates also
plans to release the music he made two years back with his punk band, The
Pork Guys, featuring Moby on drums and his friend Tarquin on bass. With
songs like "Seven-Inch Sellout," the album will be called If You Don't
Masturbate You're An Idiot. His newest film work runs the gamut from, as he
says, "a dance-song with bizarro finger puppets" set to the original tune
"Hey Moby!" to another full-length film which he recently dropped off at
Miramax called Ravers. In Ravers all the characters take drugs which do not
cause inebriation but, instead, induce multiple effects like seeing in
slow-motion or crossed sensations (a character might touch something hot,
for instance, and taste something like peaches). Only one drug, called God,
is detrimental. For three days, the characters are completely high, but they
know that in 10 years they will die. Still, they take God.

As far as fame goes, Yates would simply like to have enough money to
continue his art. And buy a house. "Fame is a western cultural disease," he
says. "It hurts more people than it helps."