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拍品专文
‘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’
–Duane Hanson
‘Astonishing as Hanson’s brilliantly observant sculptures may be in their conception and execution, in their trompe-l’oeil realism and in the pleasures accorded by their obsessively visual attentiveness, what seems to matter most in the end is their power to affect our understanding about life itself’
–Marco Livingstone
Executed between 1983 and 1984, at the height of Duane Hanson’s practice, Jogger is a masterpiece of hyperreal sculpture that demonstrates the artist’s fascination with the relationship between art and life. Meticulously observed in unflinching and uncanny detail, the work presents a man clad in sportswear seated upon the ground, massaging his ankle with his sock and shoe flung to one side. His digital watch and the plaster on his left knee heighten the impression that he has over-exerted himself in the quest for fitness. Poised as if on the verge of springing to life, he invites the viewer to observe him in intimate proximity, down to beads of sweat on his forehead and the individual hairs on his body. Coming to prominence in the 1960s, Hanson’s practice combines disarming sculptural realism with piercing social commentary. Fascinated by the mundane routines of everyday American life, he selected ordinary, working people – typically overlooked by history – as models from which to make his casts. ‘For Jogger, a doctor friend of mine volunteered for the mold-making sessions’, he explained. ‘His body type fit perfectly with the idea I had in the back of my mind for a long time’ (D. Hanson, quoted in Duane Hanson, exh. cat., The Saatchi Gallery, London, 1997, n.p.). Created at the dawn of a global obsession with sportswear, body image and exercise fads in the 1980s, the work speaks directly to the artist’s fascination with our culture of consumption. For Hanson, activities such as overeating, alcoholism, compulsive shopping, excessive sunbathing and obsessive self-improvement indicate a need to fill the void of emptiness left by the consumerist bustle of modern life. Faced with our own reflection in Jogger, we are prompted to contemplate our experiences of isolation in an increasingly impersonal society.
The idea of art imitating nature has deep historical roots. Pliny the Elder wrote of the famous competition between the painters Parrhasius and Zeuxis, where birds flocked to eat the latter’s convincing painted grapes. Ovid’s Metamorphoses famously recounts the story of the sculptor Pygmalion who carved an image of a woman, became enamoured by her beauty and successfully entreated the gods to give life to the stone. Driven by his quest to maintain an honest connection to ‘real life’, Hanson spent much of his career in a makeshift studio in suburban Florida, away from the art world centres of New York and Los Angeles. Whilst his early works aggressively confronted issues such as suicide, abortion, racial unrest and homelessness, from the 1970s Hanson shifted his social commentary to the banalities of daily life. Unnervingly real in appearance, his sculptures strike a profound connection with the viewer. His figures gaze downwards or upwards, unable to engage, yet in doing so prompt a deep sense of melancholic empathy. Transcending illusion, his sculptures become poignant reflections of the human condition, whose influence resounds in the later work of artists such as Charles Ray, Ron Mueck, Jeff Koons and the Chapman Brothers.
–Duane Hanson
‘Astonishing as Hanson’s brilliantly observant sculptures may be in their conception and execution, in their trompe-l’oeil realism and in the pleasures accorded by their obsessively visual attentiveness, what seems to matter most in the end is their power to affect our understanding about life itself’
–Marco Livingstone
Executed between 1983 and 1984, at the height of Duane Hanson’s practice, Jogger is a masterpiece of hyperreal sculpture that demonstrates the artist’s fascination with the relationship between art and life. Meticulously observed in unflinching and uncanny detail, the work presents a man clad in sportswear seated upon the ground, massaging his ankle with his sock and shoe flung to one side. His digital watch and the plaster on his left knee heighten the impression that he has over-exerted himself in the quest for fitness. Poised as if on the verge of springing to life, he invites the viewer to observe him in intimate proximity, down to beads of sweat on his forehead and the individual hairs on his body. Coming to prominence in the 1960s, Hanson’s practice combines disarming sculptural realism with piercing social commentary. Fascinated by the mundane routines of everyday American life, he selected ordinary, working people – typically overlooked by history – as models from which to make his casts. ‘For Jogger, a doctor friend of mine volunteered for the mold-making sessions’, he explained. ‘His body type fit perfectly with the idea I had in the back of my mind for a long time’ (D. Hanson, quoted in Duane Hanson, exh. cat., The Saatchi Gallery, London, 1997, n.p.). Created at the dawn of a global obsession with sportswear, body image and exercise fads in the 1980s, the work speaks directly to the artist’s fascination with our culture of consumption. For Hanson, activities such as overeating, alcoholism, compulsive shopping, excessive sunbathing and obsessive self-improvement indicate a need to fill the void of emptiness left by the consumerist bustle of modern life. Faced with our own reflection in Jogger, we are prompted to contemplate our experiences of isolation in an increasingly impersonal society.
The idea of art imitating nature has deep historical roots. Pliny the Elder wrote of the famous competition between the painters Parrhasius and Zeuxis, where birds flocked to eat the latter’s convincing painted grapes. Ovid’s Metamorphoses famously recounts the story of the sculptor Pygmalion who carved an image of a woman, became enamoured by her beauty and successfully entreated the gods to give life to the stone. Driven by his quest to maintain an honest connection to ‘real life’, Hanson spent much of his career in a makeshift studio in suburban Florida, away from the art world centres of New York and Los Angeles. Whilst his early works aggressively confronted issues such as suicide, abortion, racial unrest and homelessness, from the 1970s Hanson shifted his social commentary to the banalities of daily life. Unnervingly real in appearance, his sculptures strike a profound connection with the viewer. His figures gaze downwards or upwards, unable to engage, yet in doing so prompt a deep sense of melancholic empathy. Transcending illusion, his sculptures become poignant reflections of the human condition, whose influence resounds in the later work of artists such as Charles Ray, Ron Mueck, Jeff Koons and the Chapman Brothers.