Enter the twilight zone between lifelike and lifeless with Duane Hanson

Here's an art exhibit that really makes your hair stand on end. "Virtual Reality," a collection of life-sized mannequins by the late sculptor Duane Hanson, is as creepy as a carnival haunted house and as funny as a hall of distorting mirrors. On display at the Portland Art Museum through Aug. 26, the show brings together two dozen pieces of Hanson's sad, Edward Hopperesque people - the corpulent man on the John Deere mower; the bored, sharklike car dealer; the tired old woman slumped on a folding chair - and drops them into a stark white and otherwise empty gallery space. There they form their own silent world, a snapshot of America in the 1980s and 1990s, when Hanson's career was at its zenith.

A Minnesota native, Hanson did most of his work in Florida, gradually settling on his technique - casting live people with fiberglass resins and auto body filler, and later working in painted cast bronze - and his bleak, if humorous, vision of society. That vision was not always welcomed. It also was not always as moderate as his late work would be. When he created a politically charged sculpture of a pregnant woman titled "Abortion" in 1965, Hanson was condemned by the art establishment in Miami.

"This we do not consider a work of art," a critic at the Miami Herald said, fuming. Miami-Dade Community College, where Hanson taught art, kicked the sculptor out of its studios.

By 1990, though, Hanson was recognized as a leader among a group of artists, including Edward Kienholz and George Segal, who used lifelike representations of the human figure in their work. "Mannequin art," the genre would come to be called. Examined closely, Hanson's sculptures on display in Portland would fool nobody. The skin is just slightly wrong, the expressions hollow. He is at his least convincing, somehow, in depicting children and dogs. And yet it is the slight error, the tiny disparity between sculpture and reality, that gives Hanson's work its tremendous force. His sculptures are like giant, lifeless clones of people. They are battery-dead automatons, caught at random moments in their lives.

The giant creep factor you experience upon looking at his work comes exactly from this fact. These are not people so much as photocopies of people. You can't stop flinching as you tour these galleries. Unlike a wax museum, where statues of the rich and famous are cordoned off not only by ropes but by their celebrity appearance, Hanson's people stand around in the same gallery space you walk through. They look the same as you. You walk into a new room and you want to nod hello.

That museum guard over there - now, is he a real museum guard or is he a statue? How about that work crew? That old couple on the bench?

Hanson died in 1996, the victim of cancer brought on by the dangerous resins with which he worked. He literally gave his life for art. No matter. You can find him here in Portland. That guy in the plaid shirt, sitting at a table, sipping a Coke and looking at the old woman across from him - that's Hanson, in a rare 1979 self-portrait, which was inspired by a photograph of him sitting across from one of his sculptures. The work leads you down a wonderful hall of mirrors. That's a statue of Hanson sitting across from a woman.

Or is it a statue of Hanson with one of his statues?

July 29, 2001