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9 4 Y W H E N D I D A R T B E C O M E M E A N I N G L E S S ? H I R A M P O W E R S ’ S G R E E K S L A V E A L E X A N D E R N E M E R O V When did art cease to have any direct relation to lived experience? When did it become a thing unto itself, set aside, autonomous, lit up with the glow of its internal illuminations? To put it another way, when did it become the sign of the aesthetic experience, socalled , a realm beautiful and sacrosanct and apart, meant to compensate for all that was crowded, dirty, and wanting in the social world it was forsaking? One candidate for this title – the original meaningless work of art – is Hiram Powers’s famous Greek Slave, first completed in 1843 and soon reproduced by Powers in several further versions, including one at Yale. To say so is to praise Powers, not to bury him. The sculpture, at the time Powers made it, was still within shouting distance of the social world it abandoned. That social world was only just then beginning to seem something the work of art should escape rather than refer to. Consequently, The Greek Slave still contains haunted echoes of social cacophony within the marble smoothness and meaningless perfection of its nascent isolation. Those echoes, let me say tendentiously, I take to be not those of slavery and certain questions of gender and sexual display, all of which I see as part of the storytelling didacticism of the work only. Instead I find 9 5 R H I R A M P O W E R S , T H E G R E E K S L A V E , 1 8 4 9 – 5 0 . Marble, 65 in . high. Yale University Art Galler y. 9 6 N E M E R O V Y these echoes in The Greek Slave’s more material, physical properties – chiefly in the way the sculpture invites us to imagine space, in particular the social space around itself, as alive and vivid and bustling and yet also annulled, blank, and muted in the quietude of the sculpture’s own rounded blankness. How does this work? Consider first two episodes, each very strange, in which Powers imagined his sculptures as in the world yet also vividly set apart from it. In one of these accounts, from the 1850s, he described a recurrent dream he had as a child. The dream featured ‘‘a white, female figure’’ standing upon ‘‘a pillar or pedestal’’ across a river in the countryside in Vermont, where Powers (1805–73) grew up in the town of Woodstock. Powers described the scene in the dream as taking place below his cousin Thomas’s house on the opposite side of the Quechee River. Separated from the sculptural woman by this river ‘‘too deep to ford,’’ Powers never can get close to her. Years after his childhood vision, he regarded the dream woman as a prototype for The Greek Slave – so much so that when the sculpture itself came to Woodstock as part of its lengthy 1847–49 tour of the United States, he regarded it as a fulfillment of the dream. The second imaginary scene involves another of Powers’s sculptures of a nude woman, California, of 1850. As the art historian Charles Colbert recounts in an Art Bulletin article of 2000, Powers told a potential buyer of the work that he hoped the sculpture could be placed at the spot where gold had been discovered in 1848 – at Sutter’s Mill, in the remote region of the Sierra foothills. This remark, which Powers repeated many times in later years as a fond if ungranted wish, is strange: Sutter’s Mill would have been populated only by miners living in tents and log houses. As Colbert writes, ‘‘One can only imagine how the men of this remote and rudimentary community would have greeted the arrival of Powers’s nude figure.’’ The isolation of the sculpture in...

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