'Real People’

Press, 15 February 1989, Page 49

'Real People’

“Real People” Life-like sculptures by Duane Hanson at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery until March 11. Reviewed by Pat Unger. People, it seems, never tire of looking at themselves or, in the case of “Real People” by Duane Hanson at the McDougall Gallery, of looking at people who look like them when they are not visiting art galleries. “People” — supermarket shopping, going through the motions of working at a boring job or on the tourist circuit, or just being old and depressed — strike poses that are amazingly real-to-life. Which is not strictly true. An actor at the opening function, presented as a Hanson model sleeping in a deck chair, was so real that any shallow breathing observed was dismissed as merely a trick of perfect illusion. When she left the exhibition space to mingle with the “real” people, however, she immediately appeared to be a typical American in polyvinyl, not a “real” New Zealander. Powdery skin and a pancake made-up look at the edge of hairy areas is the only give-away. And of course the generalised air they all have of being frozen in a time frame of resigned inactivity.

Through these sculptures, Hanson mythologises the dreary and celebrates the ordinary. Some may feel that such ordinariness is not “art” but by isolating in a gallery space these people “... who can’t keep up with the competition,” the artist successfully heightens, in visual terms, their ",.. lives of quiet desparation.”

He also keeps in touch with those who seek non-elitist art and who enjoy feelings of empathy that such figures arouse. Hanson’s skill in presenting these

“disturbingly realistic” images is unquestioned. After photographing his models to find their most natural position, he makes many casts of body parts. The final work, usually in polyvinyl or polyester resin, is clothed painstakingly to enhance each sculpture as an individual statement and as a type. The fat “Tourist,” the bowed “Man with handcart,” the disorganised “Photographer,” a dazed “Drug addict” and the “Man on the park bench” are no longer the movers and shakers of life. The anaesthesia of fatigue and disillusion has overtaken them. They are tableaux-in-mid-stare for those who wish to reflect on such human states.

Controversy has always surrounded Hanson’s “people.” In the late 60s and 70s he explored such questions as abortion, war, society’s derelicts, road accident victims and other indignities with typical super-real detail. But now he rejects “sensationalised” works concerning social alienation and he also abandoned the idea of incorporating movement.

His present work has refined what his media does best, that is to capture, in museological time, the passivity of ordinary people, silent on the edge of life’s great events. Whether these sculptures are “art” is still being debated. They are not contemporary nor are they fashionable. They are neither similes or metaphors for life nor are they magnifying mirrors to distort reality. But they do capture the visual essence of life’s under-achievers (a,mark of failure in American society). This allows the works to rise above the common-place and enter a better world, that of a space, if an argued one, in an art gallery.