Duane Hanson

A Hanson security guard. Don't ask
him which way to the restroom.

As artists, when we think of Realism, we usually think of perhaps Andrew Wyeth, maybe Norman Rockwell, or someone like Richard Estes. An artist we don't often think of was perhaps one doing the most realistic figures imaginable. And, as an indicator of just how parochial we are as painters, this man was not a painter at all but a sculptor. His name is Duane Hanson, and I defy you to come up with an artist that carried realism to any greater extreme. If you go to a Hanson exhibit, don't talk to the security guard. He's a Hanson sculpture himself.

Even up close, Hanson's Woman Eating,
1971, gives a whole new meaning to Realism in art.

Hanson was born in 1923 and drew his greatest influence from the Pop sculptor, George Segal (not to be confused with the actor by the same name). Segal is remembered for casting his life-size sculpted figures from live models, clothes and all, in plaster, then setting them up in realistic settings to make some point regarding social ills, ironic comments on the loneliness of urban society, or human foibles such as our willingness to waste half our lives standing in lines for even our most mundane needs.  Segal's figures retained the ghostly whiteness of his plaster as they lolled about his realistically reconstructed environments. In a sense, Hanson's figures are the exact opposite of Segal's. They are cast not in pale plaster but in polyester resins and fiberglass, painted with oils, and dressed in real clothes from K-Mart, seated or standing not in constructed tableaus but in the same, real environment in which the viewer also exists.

Drug Addict, Louisiana, 1975, Duane Hanson

Forget your elongated, department store mannequins in dramatic, stylized poses, primped to outlandish lengths in the pursuit of "human" perfection. These are real people, warts and all, sporting real human hair, with glasses correcting the vision of glass eyes, fat, tired, scarred, and so human the security guard's handheld radio actually beeps and hisses with human voices. Hansen hit the art scene about 1963 with harsh, super-realistic figures such as a girl dead from a botched abortion, or homeless derelicts, or work such as Gangland Rape (the title says it all). While his work definitely made a visual impact with a raw statement of artistic outrage, it was not living room art...not even work deemed fit for art galleries or museums at the time. Hanson ended up teaching at a Florida community college to make a living. As he grew older, he and his work both mellowed. His figures became no less realistic, but they made more subtle comments of the human condition, underscoring the tedium of our daily lives, or highlighting the hopelessness of the daily "grind." His work was still painted illusion, but one which carried realism to such extremes that, short of androidal annimatronics beyond what even Disney has yet managed, it is as real as art gets.

No, it's not the cleaning woman waiting
for the show to close in order to tidy up. Like
the security guard, she's part of the show.