Art: Making the Blue-Collar Waxworks

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.