Fairground attraction | 18 June 2015

Gianlorenzo Bernini stressed the difficulty of making a sculpture of a person out of a white material such as marble. Imagine, he said, that someone we knew well whitened his hair, his beard, his lips and his eyebrows, and, were it possible, his eyes. Would we recognise him? This is not a problem encountered by the 20th-century American artist Duane Hanson, whose work is on show at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in Kensington Gardens.

Hanson (1925–96) took every possible step to make his figures mimic reality in skin, hair, clothes, accessories and surroundings. In comparison, the resemblance of waxworks to their models is much less convincing. Hanson’s creations can engender a rare type of uncertainty. Is that person over there a human being or a piece of art?

Of course mostly it’s clear enough which is which, despite all Hanson’s efforts. Total immobility is a bit of a clue. Certain details even he could not get quite right: the hair, for example, always has a shop-mannequin look. Nonetheless, one has flickers of doubt.

Approaching the middle-aged ‘Man with Hand Cart’ (1975), I wondered for an instant whether he was a weary worker paused halfway down the gallery (and I also looked twice at the black-clad woman in the corner, until she blinked and revealed herself as an attendant). Even standing close to ‘Queenie II’ (1988), an overweight cleaning lady pushing a plastic bin loaded with mops and bottles of polish and detergent, it’s possible to imagine she’s a person frozen in time by some Harry Potter-ish spell. Everything — from her clothes to the expression of desolate boredom in her eyes — is so right.

This raises the question, what’s the point? Hanson’s art leads you to muse on the justification for making such perfect facsimiles of a commodity that’s in plentiful supply.