Lady With Shopping Bags

'It may be that in order to get to the heart of Hanson's ambition we need to re-contextualise his art historically, judging it not within the confines of photorealist painting to which it bears only a tangential and coincidental resemblance, but within 20th century figurative art as a whole. Like Alberto Giacometti in his attenuated reformulation of the human body in bronze, or Francis Bacon in his sleight-of-hand manipulations of paint into powerful evocations of flesh and physiognomy, Hanson sought above all to convey through his art an immediated and uncanny evocation of human beings. Most modern artists, from Picasso through to such great reinventors of the anatomy as Bacon and Giacometti, have sought to disentangle the sensation of a human presence from the mere recording of appearances, so as to confront us with that stripped-down sensation in all its elemental intensity, judging this to be the most direct path to a form of realism that could be felt in the bones and irradiated through the nervous system. Hanson's solution, by contrast, was to follow that initial visceral shock of recognition with a second jolt of astonishing surface resemblance. We are caught off-balance as surely as by a boxer's vicious right hook followed by an upper-cut in quick successionHanson's presentation of the work of art as a surrogate from reality, combined with his devotion to the human body in all its particularity as the form through which experience can be most vividly expressed both anticipated and influenced the work of much younger artists during the past decade. Charles Ray's pseudo-mannequins, Robert Gober's eerily lifelike desembodied body parts, the portraits in porcelain by Jeff Koons, the sexualized monsters created by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Abigail Lane's disturbingly naturalistic wax figures and the waxwork self-portrait of Gavin Turk as Sid Vicious are amongst the most striking of the many examples that could be simulationist tendencies and for art centered on the body. Although he seemed to take remarkably little notice of art-world fashions, preferring to focus entirely on the patient realization of his own project, it must have been both flattering and reassuring to him to witness so many instances of younger sculptors working in a mode so closely related to his own as to approach a form of homage.' (M. Livingstone, Like Life Itself, Duane Hanson, London 1997)

Paying homage even further back art historically, on can look at the sculptor Pygmalion who carved an image of a woman, became enamored of her beauty and successfully entreated the gods to give life to the stone. The myth of sculpture's embodiment of its models - even where those models are creatures of fantasy - holds the promise of tangible fulfillment.

Realized in 1972, Lady with Shopping Bags seems to capture this power; the power of ultra-realism that not merely mimics the visible but gives the most fierce possiblity of life to ideas, especially ideas that are disturbing and normally repressed. Through the infinite details of this sculpture, Duane Hanson is able to define behavior patterns and assigned value to the lower-middle class shopping American type: the "lady" of a certain age, dressed with everyday clothes identifying her class position, her two hands occupied with many bags. Yet the reality frozen into the sculpture is altered by its artistic transformation. The balanced relationship of Hanson to artistic criteria and reality illuminates and exposes an uneasy closeness. Indeed, the details such the woman's thick stockings falling on her plastic boots slightly opened, the intense expression in her eyes of fatigue mixed with loneliness have an aggressive effect, embarrassing, even strange, although these details are familiar. It is here where Hanson's talent is linked: Lady with Shopping Bags is not a merely extraordinary mimesis of a character, it leaves room for mass-consumerism criticism. Hanson admitted to exploring social issues in his work, illustrating the resignation, emptiness and loneliness of suburban existence.

This love-hate reaction to American life allows the viewer to experience the duality which exists within; Hanson's work offers a taste of the hint of protest against the consumer-oriented society yet also reveals the artist's intrinsic belief in the specific and powerful energy that drives America.