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拍品专文
‘My images don’t get near what you see in real life. The world is so remarkable and astonishing and surprising that you don’t need to exaggerate. What exists out-there is just mind-boggling.’ (D. Hanson, quoted in Duane Hanson, Sculptures of the American Dream, exh. cat., ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen, 2007, p. 77).
‘The subject matter that I like best deals with the familiar lower and middle class American types of today. To me, the resignation, emptiness, and loneliness of their existence captures the true reality of life for these people… I want to achieve a certain tough realism which speaks of the fascinating idiosyncrasies of our times’ (D. Hanson, quoted in Duane Hanson, Sculptures of the American Dream, exh. cat., ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen, 2007, p. 77).
In Security Guard, Duane Hanson turns his tenderly compassionate and uncompromisingly ruthless gaze upon the mediocrity of society. The Security Guard stands exhausted, worn down by constant demands on his attention, alienated by streams of peering visitors. Isolated in a blank solitude, his gaze downcast, he remains lonely in the midst of the crowd. Hanson’s depiction misses no details, lending this work an astonishing, magnetic realism: the Security Guard is bespectacled; he wears a rumpled uniform, studded with insignia, his tie askew; he cradles his issue walkie-talkie. Created in 1990, this work is a poignant example of the artist’s late practice, in which Hanson’s scathing portrayal of the stereotypes of Middle America is softened both by his devotion to the particularity and fragility of the human body, and his empathy for the heavy burden of everyday life.
Hanson’s first life-size, realistic sculptures were executed in the late 1960s. With the civil rights movement, women’s liberation and the Vietnam War protests raging around him, Hanson created sculptures such as War, and Policeman and Rioter, both from 1967. These works did not shy away from raw, graphic depictions of violence and death, challenging the narrow conventions of American morality. By 1970, though, Hanson had moved away from the antagonistic and confrontational, turning his focus instead towards the insidiously disquieting cast of overworked, overwhelmed, overlooked Americans. Shoppers and tourists, joggers and photographers, blue-collar workers and homemakers, are all depicted in moments of passivity and inertia. Fatigued, like Woman with a Laundry Basket, 1974, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, and despondent, like Woman with Dog, 1977, in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, they step from the side-lines to occupy, for once, the centre stage. Their tired silhouettes simultaneously evoke disdain and sympathy in the viewer: they represent both their personal failure to reach the American dream, and that dream’s degeneration into glorified consumerist banality. ‘The subject matter that I like best deals with the familiar lower and middle class American types of today,’ Hanson explained. ‘To me, the resignation, emptiness, and loneliness of their existence captures the true reality of life for these people… I want to achieve a certain tough realism which speaks of the fascinating idiosyncrasies of our times’ (D. Hanson, quoted in Duane Hanson, Sculptures of the American Dream, exh. cat., ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen, 2007, p. 77). In this, Hanson’s work ties closely to the concerns of Pop Art, to artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, who similarly sought to expose the dark side of post-war America by magnifying and repeating the consumer products which surrounded them.
The Security Guard gains dignity and gravitas through his association with the tradition of life-size, realistic sculpture. Cast in bronze, a material loaded with art-historical connotations, he takes his place among the ranks of imposing monuments, solemn memorials and devotional images. Hanson’s sculptures are created by casting a live model limb by limb, a painstaking process carried out in the artist’s studio. The resulting mould is then filled with polyester resin, fibreglass, or, from 1979, bronze. Each cast is then painstakingly hand-painted with oil paint, giving it its life-like skin tone and its myriad imperfections, complete with veins, moles and receding hairline. Hanson takes as much care over the attire of his sculptures: they wear specially sourced clothing, often pre-worn and stained, and clutch accessories which root them to their occupation and profession. A magnificent study in illusion and disillusion, in Security Guard Hanson captures a verisimilitude which, by evoking surprise and wonder, empathy and disdain, blends comedy and tragedy in one form. Coaxed into life by the artist’s skilled and patient hand, the Security Guard rises from his modest background to the task allotted him – to represent, with pride, the vagaries of twentieth-century America.
‘The subject matter that I like best deals with the familiar lower and middle class American types of today. To me, the resignation, emptiness, and loneliness of their existence captures the true reality of life for these people… I want to achieve a certain tough realism which speaks of the fascinating idiosyncrasies of our times’ (D. Hanson, quoted in Duane Hanson, Sculptures of the American Dream, exh. cat., ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen, 2007, p. 77).
In Security Guard, Duane Hanson turns his tenderly compassionate and uncompromisingly ruthless gaze upon the mediocrity of society. The Security Guard stands exhausted, worn down by constant demands on his attention, alienated by streams of peering visitors. Isolated in a blank solitude, his gaze downcast, he remains lonely in the midst of the crowd. Hanson’s depiction misses no details, lending this work an astonishing, magnetic realism: the Security Guard is bespectacled; he wears a rumpled uniform, studded with insignia, his tie askew; he cradles his issue walkie-talkie. Created in 1990, this work is a poignant example of the artist’s late practice, in which Hanson’s scathing portrayal of the stereotypes of Middle America is softened both by his devotion to the particularity and fragility of the human body, and his empathy for the heavy burden of everyday life.
Hanson’s first life-size, realistic sculptures were executed in the late 1960s. With the civil rights movement, women’s liberation and the Vietnam War protests raging around him, Hanson created sculptures such as War, and Policeman and Rioter, both from 1967. These works did not shy away from raw, graphic depictions of violence and death, challenging the narrow conventions of American morality. By 1970, though, Hanson had moved away from the antagonistic and confrontational, turning his focus instead towards the insidiously disquieting cast of overworked, overwhelmed, overlooked Americans. Shoppers and tourists, joggers and photographers, blue-collar workers and homemakers, are all depicted in moments of passivity and inertia. Fatigued, like Woman with a Laundry Basket, 1974, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, and despondent, like Woman with Dog, 1977, in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, they step from the side-lines to occupy, for once, the centre stage. Their tired silhouettes simultaneously evoke disdain and sympathy in the viewer: they represent both their personal failure to reach the American dream, and that dream’s degeneration into glorified consumerist banality. ‘The subject matter that I like best deals with the familiar lower and middle class American types of today,’ Hanson explained. ‘To me, the resignation, emptiness, and loneliness of their existence captures the true reality of life for these people… I want to achieve a certain tough realism which speaks of the fascinating idiosyncrasies of our times’ (D. Hanson, quoted in Duane Hanson, Sculptures of the American Dream, exh. cat., ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen, 2007, p. 77). In this, Hanson’s work ties closely to the concerns of Pop Art, to artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, who similarly sought to expose the dark side of post-war America by magnifying and repeating the consumer products which surrounded them.
The Security Guard gains dignity and gravitas through his association with the tradition of life-size, realistic sculpture. Cast in bronze, a material loaded with art-historical connotations, he takes his place among the ranks of imposing monuments, solemn memorials and devotional images. Hanson’s sculptures are created by casting a live model limb by limb, a painstaking process carried out in the artist’s studio. The resulting mould is then filled with polyester resin, fibreglass, or, from 1979, bronze. Each cast is then painstakingly hand-painted with oil paint, giving it its life-like skin tone and its myriad imperfections, complete with veins, moles and receding hairline. Hanson takes as much care over the attire of his sculptures: they wear specially sourced clothing, often pre-worn and stained, and clutch accessories which root them to their occupation and profession. A magnificent study in illusion and disillusion, in Security Guard Hanson captures a verisimilitude which, by evoking surprise and wonder, empathy and disdain, blends comedy and tragedy in one form. Coaxed into life by the artist’s skilled and patient hand, the Security Guard rises from his modest background to the task allotted him – to represent, with pride, the vagaries of twentieth-century America.