One of the curious features of 20th century art is the importance placed on surprise. Art is expected to shock or jolt us. Duane Hanson always did a good job of that. Even if we know his work, we can’t help but be startled when we get off the elevator on the third floor of the Whitney Museum and see two people sitting at a table: the heavyset woman in the house dress eating a sundae and the earnest, casually dressed man who looks across at her.
They are statues, of course (the man is Hanson, himself), but rendered in a super-realistic mode and wearing actual clothes. Not only that, but they are sitting out on the gallery floor, with no barriers or lines to enforce the separation between art and spectator. The woman has a handbag next to her, with supermarket tabloids that you could pick up and read if the guards would let you.
The irresistible impulse when you see this kind of art is to go up for a close look. Are there veins? Downy hair on the arms? Little cracks in the lips? It’s almost disappointing when you find the inevitable signs of fakery: the hair that looks like a bad wig, the flesh that, despite all the careful painting, still betrays its fiberglass hardness.
There are about two dozen of these figures in this retrospective, the first since Hanson’s death three years ago. He emerged from the pop art movement of the Sixties and specialized in so-called ordinary people. “Ordinary” translates into lower-class or working-class types – waitresses, construction workers, house painters, bargain shoppers – who are unattractive, coarse, and look a little slow on the uptake.
Quite a few are overweight, and Hanson seems to have delighted in rendering their sagging guts, their flabby arms, gigantic rear ends, and grotesquely lumpy thighs. Their clothing is ill-fitting, loud, and mismatched. The archetypical Hanson creation is a tourist in a loud Hawaiian shirt, camera dangling around his neck, gawking at some sight with dimwitted awe. Or, a female shopper with bad hair, bad clothes, bad figure, carrying a bag with the slogan “Famous Designer Clothes/For the Woman Who Knows.”
Mocking the vulgarity and cheapness of American culture has always been a favorite occupation of pop artists, although Hanson did it in a rather obvious and heavy-handed way. He never had the cleverness or irony of other pop artists. He lived far from the New York scene, in South Florida, (which explains his keen familiarity with bermuda-clad tourists and trailer-park types) and so was that odd specimen, a provincial pop artist.
His earlier pieces in this genre, those from the Sixties, drew on another, minor chord of the pop art movement, America’s love affair with violence and sensationalism. His bloody motorcycle victim with its twisted arms and legs harks back to AndyWarhol’s silk screen images of car wrecks. Likewise, for his “Gangland Victim,” a mutilated, weighted-down body presumably dredged from the river, and “Abortion,” a sheet-covered body. They look a bit too earnest to be pop, but these were the pieces that first gained Hanson recognition, not surprisingly through that time-tested avant-garde seal of approval: censorship. A Miami gallery banned his “Motorcycle Accident,” as “too grisly.”
He settled into his niche, and exploited it for several decades, simply repeating the same thing over and over: molding his figures from live models, casting them in fiberglass, painting them, and dressing them up in the model’s own clothes. It was a tedious business, a single figure often taking as long as a year to complete.
We might be able to admire Hanson’s art purely for its trick-of-the-eye verisimilitude, except the illusion isn’t really all that amazing. A Hollywood special effects team could probably run circles around him, using all kinds of tricks, such as latex for flesh and little motors to blink the eyes. Hanson, who aimed his work at museums, limited himself to more traditional, permanent materials like fiberglass and bronze.
In any case, Hanson always maintained that he wasn’t interested in illusion for its own sake, that that wasn’t the point. “My art is not about fooling people,” he said. “It’s the attitudes I’m after – fatigue, a bit of frustration, rejection. To me there is a kind of beauty in all this.”
It’s odd that he doesn’t mention humor, which seems the primary impulse behind his work. But this insistence on an attitude of despair creates a weird contradiction and adds a layer of eeriness to a show that already has the ambience of a wax museum. No matter how ridiculous or buffoonish these people look, all wear morose, forlorn expressions. They stare blankly into space, or down at the floor.
At this point, you can’t help but be reminded of the sculptor George Segal, who, like Hanson, cast figures from life and aimed for a mood of alienation. The chief difference is that Segal eschewed realism and left his figures in a chalky, unpainted state.
What Segal understood and Hanson never did was that realism, especially ultra-realism, turned this mood into something embarrassingly maudlin. We accept the existential despair of Segal’s ghostlike people, sitting at diner counters or waiting in line, because their abstract, anonymous quality makes them stand for Everyman. But when that figure becomes such a real and specific person – a weightlifter pausing on his bench, a contemporary cowboy leaning against a wall, or an obese man riding a tractor lawnmower – their downcast eyes and forlorn expressions don’t make us feel their humanity more deeply. The mixed message confuses and irritates us.
We don’t want to see the man on the lawnmower looking so dejected. Everything else in this sculpture tells us that this is parody, caricature. If anything, we want to see this guy mowing his lawn with a little gusto, proud of his mechanical steed.
The most ridiculous example of this confused message is the sculpture of the house painter. The hapless fellow has just put a meandering swath of shocking pink paint to the wall, and, somehow, painted his own shirt front as well. He stands, staring out into space, looking as if his dog just died, and all we can think is, “Hey, pay attention to what you’re doing.”
The only sculpture endowed with any vitality or alertness is the one of Hanson himself. The trim, craggily handsome man sitting out by the elevator doesn’t look at all depressed. He gazes benignly, sympathetically at the stout lady in front of him. Is he demonstrating the correct attitude for viewing his art? Or, is he simply the creator admiring his creation?
No matter. It’s no fun being in a room full of dejected statues when we don’t have a clue as to their problems, unless it’s a poor wardrobe or a dissatisfaction with lawn mowing.
Perhaps, we think, they are like that disillusioned astronaut in the movie “Toy Story,” and they have just found out that they’re not real cowboys, or policemen, or waitresses at all – just statues. Or perhaps they’re unhappy because they sense that they’re not even real works of art. Only imitations of that, too. Just replicas of people, made for an assortment of wrong and conflicting reasons.
The Whitney Museum of American Art
1999
