Word: hansons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Born in Minnesota, Hanson studied sculpture with Carl Milles at Cranbrook Academy, then went to Germany where he worked in stone, wood and clay. He returned to the U.S. in 1960, settling in Florida in 1965 and teaching at the Miami-Dade Community College. Also in the mid-'60s, inspired by George Segal's white plaster casts of live models, Hanson developed his own more lifelike figures and more dramatic tableaux."I think I must be a romantic," he says. "But we have to deal with the harsh reality of our industrial society. I'm interested...
What actually emerges is not tragedy, but a repetitious pathos. Tragedy depends (at the very least) on relationships, but none are set forth or implied in Hanson's work...
...unsparing" statements about American reality for which Hanson's work is customarily praised have been made over and over again by photography: only the switch into another medium, sculpture, is novel. There is also, of course, the exquisite irony that collectors who would never dream of having a real construction worker in their living room will pay up to $35,000 to display the fiber-glass replica of one by Hanson: these effigies have the same relationship to social reality as a stuffed rhino does to the veld...
They are stock characters. It does not take a very penetrating eye to notice that some Florida tourists resemble wizened monkeys in floral shirts, or that some American housewives are fat, glazed by the tube and bloated with junk food. But such is the level of Hanson's social perceptions; all his art can do is count the details without furnishing any credible in sights. Like most "documentation" art, it is gratuitous, in a sprawling kind...
Nowhere in Hanson's work, once the first frisson of encounter has worn off - as, inevitably, it does - can one feel that an organizing, selective imagination has been intelligently brought to bear on its raw material. Instead we are offered a basic theatrical package, a quick jolt to the sense of reality which, unlike the pleasures of more organized or complex art, fails to renew itself. It all ends up as Norman Rockwell in 3-D and grimy jeans, minus the period optimism: not contemptible, but not the stuff of which anything but il lustration can be made . Robert...