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Critic's Choice
'Damaged Goods'
Through Feb. 19, Space 743
by Sarah Coleman
The San Francisco Bay Guardian
The "damaged goods"
in Dan Pillers' one-person show are not damaged in themselves -
mostly they've been given this label by an unimaginative world.
Pillers, an artist who's been an uncompromising AIDS activist
throughout his career, conveys his outrage about AIDS and gay-bashing
through a range of media and refers to everything he makes as
"fag art." Many of his works feature small cotton figures,
all with sewn-red buttons for hearts - they look like a cross between
voodoo dolls and stripped-down Raggedy Anns. Spewing out of
trashcans, scrawled with homophobic epithets, or hanging limply from
a rail, the dolls are symbols of the shitty treatment accorded gays
(thankfully, in the pieces Self and Bound, the dolls get to indulge
in some sex-play). In other works, Pillers riffs on the child's chant
about stick and stones: he literally takes sticks, stones and broken
bones and forms them into sculptural triptychs, sometimes adding a
word like "FAG" into the mix (the implication: words do
cause lasting pain). Pillers is clearly interested in words and he
has a good sense of humor: one sculpture, composed entirely of large
sticks tied together, plays on the fact that in medieval times, a
bundle of sticks was called a "faggot." While some of the
pieces here seem a little over-designed, Pillers does a good job of
dissecting the daily business of being gay in a homophobic culture,
and he lays it all out with unswerving visual flair.
Wed - Sat., noon - 5 pm., 743
Harrison, S.F. (415) 7770980.
Sarah Coleman, “Critic’s Choice
/ Damaged Goods” , THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN, Vol.34 #16,
1/19-25/00, p.84
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