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Dan Pillers: Damaged Goods
By Marke Bieschke
Bay Area Citysearch.com
The first thing that strikes
you as you walk into this communal art space is a skewed sense of
peace. Large and open, it invites you into an atmosphere that lift
developers would kill for. And indeed, when you turn the corner into
San Franciscan Dan Pillers' latest installation of "Fagart"
(all work form the 90's), you're struck by the feeling you've
wondered into someone's private interior. Neatly arranged to summon
the spirit of all the neurotically anal gay furniture arrangements
and faggy clichés that have come before it, the room is almost
a tribute to Feng Shui in its proportions.
Against one wall are tow
lovely foyer tables, one with a mirror above it. Hanging glass curio
boxes decorate the other walls, as does a large painting. Perfectly
placed throughout the room's middle are an instrument case, a bundle
of sticks, a striking polished silver trash can overflowing with
stuffed cloth, and a large cloth, cone lying on its side. All done in
exquisitely crafted natural materials, the room's warm
post-minimalist layout hints both at gay aestheticism and the looming
threat of bourgeois loft development.
But look closer and the veneer
of middle-class comfort begins to peel away. The previously
harmonious air begins to reverberate with lyrical allusions and a
sense of deep loss. Within the curio cabinets and spilling from the
trash can are voodoo doll-like poupees - labeled "Widow,"
"Bound," "Tattooed," and "Wired"
according to their visual predicament, most stained with shit - or
semen-like substance. In the instruments case, displayed like
clarinet components (skin flute? Tromboner?) is a screw-apart
Louisville Slugger lying like a patient cobra within the case's
velvet lining. Its entitled "Bash Back."
Large wooden sticks against
the wall engraved with the Braille for "masturbation" (it
will make you go blind) and "faith" (as in the blind
variety) echo the bonfire-sized bundle of sticks (ontologically a
"faggot") that dominates the installation's center. A
running metaphor throughout the show (and Pillers' work) is
name-calling - a collection of curios containing stick, stones and
bones underwrites the word "FAG" (and curiously calls the
Russian witch Baba Yaga to mind). Another bit of
childhood-referencing wizardry is Pillers' "Life Is A Game,"
which frames scissors, paper and rock.
The supreme pieces of the
show, the tables carved from clear fir, balance each other perfectly.
The one with the mirror above it supports a pail of bones and is
engraved with the words "You Will Never Amount To Anything."
The other supports framed portraits of gay lovers and fading
bouquets of roses, and is engraved with "Silver and Gold."
It's called "A Tribute To Love." The tables put fate and
insecurity on the one hand, and the power and pain of love on the other.
Pillers' is a sensibility
formed of anger and grief in the time of AIDS. One of his harrowing
earlier pieces is a "before and after" photo album, with
huge number of friends blacked out. He insists his work be called
"fagart," because "as a gay man I cannot create
anything or do anything for that matter without doing it the way a
fag would." But there any hint of self-indulgence disappears.
Whereas most AIDS-related art traps itself between mawkish
confessional sentimentality and a sense of the artist capitalizing on
his or her grief, "Damaged Goods" strikes a chord in the
viewer of simultaneous grief and beauty that transcends the politics
of personal deconstruction. Pillers' work has been called
"powerful, unnerving and confrontational." I would also add "sublime."
Marke Biesche, “Dan Pillers: Damaged
Goods” (Editor’s Pick), BAYAREA CITYSEARCH.COM, February
18, 2000. |
