Making the Blue-Collar Waxworks

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Manhattan, the world's most realistic sculpture

Duane Hanson's exhibition of sculpture, which opened last week at New York's Whitney Museum, may not be the most aesthetically intriguing show in town. On that level, it is numbing. But it is bound to be the most popular. When Hanson's work was shown in Des Moines last winter, 98,000 people flooded through the turnstiles to see it. The reason is obvious enough. Everyone loves an illusion, and Hanson is an expert illusionist. His lifelike, life-size figures are cast in polyester resin and fiber glass painted to look like real skin, clothed in real garments and provided with genuine glass eyes. The craftsmanship is meticulous, not to say obsessive. It produces not images but model people--androids without the electronic guts. Each plastic scalp is the sum of myriad transplants; thousands of strands of fuzz are pricked into the cold, immobile forearm; the pigment on the skin replicates flesh down to the very last pore, zit, shaving nick and burst vein, while every T shirt and pair of overalls displays exactly the right degree of grunge, wear and spattering. Consequently, the presence of these figures becomes almost hallucinatory. "Speaking likenesses" that cannot speak but cannot, at a glance, be readily told apart from their spectators, they lean against the Whitney's patrician white walls or sprawl on its carpet with the air of social intruders. One reacts to them first as people, because of their verisimilitude; then, after one's gaze has gone by them--social protocol discourages staring at people as sculptures are stared at--the double take happens, and because they are in a museum they are reclassified as "sculpture." Finally they turn out to be neither.

They are, in fact, waxworks.

But they are waxworks of a superior kind. At 53, Hanson has taken his craft beyond the limits of Mme. Tussaud: one can get within two feet of his Man with Hand Cart, 1975, and the only thing that demonstrates the wrinkles and veins are not real aged flesh is the figure's immobility. Astutely, Hanson generally reinforces the illusion by preventing the figure's eyes from meeting one's own--nothing gives the game away quicker than a glass eye that cannot blink. His work belongs in the context of photorealist painting, but it incorporates more illusions than painting can. The great period for waxworks was the 17th to 18th century, when the favorite court artist of the next-to-last Medici, Cosimo III, was a Sicilian named Gaetano Zumbo, whose fiendishly detailed wax tableaux of plague-rotted bodies are still preserved in Florence. Hanson's proles, drunks, junkies and bulgy housewives do not reek of mortality like that, but they have a quotidian sourness about them, and their smell of perplexed defeat is as alluring to the sentimentalist as the moist gaze of a Landseer dog.

Born in Minnesota, Hanson studied sculpture with Carl Milles at Cranbrook Academy, then went to Germany where he worked in stone, wood and clay. He returned to the U.S. in 1960, settling in Florida in 1965 and teaching at the Miami-Dade Community College. Also in the mid-'60s, inspired by George Segal's white plaster casts of live models, Hanson developed his own more lifelike figures and more dramatic tableaux."I think I must be a romantic," he says. "But we have to deal with the harsh reality of our industrial society. I'm interested in portraying the emptiness, the tragic side of life."

What actually emerges is not tragedy, but a repetitious pathos. Tragedy depends (at the very least) on relationships, but none are set forth or implied in Hanson's work.

What one gets, instead, is a parade of specimens. Its origins lie, equally, in Pop and social realism. Pop supplies the hard cool surface, social realism the interest in underdogs -- an interest, however, which rapidly dissolves in voyeurism.

The "unsparing" statements about American reality for which Hanson's work is customarily praised have been made over and over again by photography: only the switch into another medium, sculpture, is novel. There is also, of course, the exquisite irony that collectors who would never dream of having a real construction worker in their living room will pay up to $35,000 to display the fiber-glass replica of one by Hanson: these effigies have the same relationship to social reality as a stuffed rhino does to the veld.

They are stock characters. It does not take a very penetrating eye to notice that some Florida tourists resemble wizened monkeys in floral shirts, or that some American housewives are fat, glazed by the tube and bloated with junk food. But such is the level of Hanson's social perceptions; all his art can do is count the details without furnishing any credible in sights. Like most "documentation" art, it is gratuitous, in a sprawling kind of way.

This would not matter so much if the sculptures had any aesthetic relationships to sustain them as fiction, but they do not.

Nowhere in Hanson's work, once the first frisson of encounter has worn off -- as, inevitably, it does -- can one feel that an organizing, selective imagination has been intelligently brought to bear on its raw material. Instead we are offered a basic theatrical package, a quick jolt to the sense of reality which, unlike the pleasures of more organized or complex art, fails to renew itself. It all ends up as Norman Rockwell in 3-D and grimy jeans, minus the period optimism: not contemptible, but not the stuff of which anything but il lustration can be made . Robert Hughes

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