ABSTRACT
Duane Hanson (1925–1996) is well-known for his hyperrealistic life-size sculptures. His main subjects are the common, everyday middle class Americans. Hanson paid particular attention to labourers and the elderly, who are often overlooked. In his later years he also focused on racism and poverty. He especially favoured working in polyester resin and fibreglass as materials for his true-to-life sculptures. Hanson copied every little detail of his selected models and completed the finished sculptures with real clothes and consumer goods as everyday accessories (e.g. a FILA T-shirt, Coca-Cola bottles, a chocolate sundae, a copy of the Soap Opera Digest magazine).
Hanson’s interest in daily life is influenced by pop art. He is also particularly interested in sociology. He transforms ostensibly banal and trivial everyday consumer goods into iconographic material, but he also takes a critical attitude to consumer culture and the marginalisation of certain groups. He draws attention to the solitude, despair and frustration of the middle class. The impersonality and alienation of modern American life is thus visualised in a vivid and powerful way. Provocatively, Hanson wants to show that art does not have to be “on a pedestal, beautiful, far removed from everyday living”. As he wrote in 1982, he wants to support a social change “by making the viewer become aware of something in life that was always there, but was unnoticed”. In my chapter I would like to analyse the sociological aspects in Hanson’s aesthetics from the perspective of visual culture. Special consideration will be given to Hanson’s attention to everyday life, which is fundamental to his realistic sculptures and his humanist and democratic attitude.
