IN 1998 THREE white men in Jasper County, Texas, kidnapped a black man named James Byrd Jr. They beat him unconscious, cut his throat, and coated his face in black paint. They dropped his pants down to his ankles, then tied him to the back of their pickup truck. Then they drove two and a half miles, dragging Byrd's body over the rural Texas pavement of Huff Creek until it began to fall apart. The road was littered with body parts – head, skin, and right arm. The rest of his torso was the first thing to be found.
Two years later white visual artist Christian Marclay created Guitar Drag, a video installation included in his solo retrospective that has been making its way across the country this year. Marclay tied an electric guitar to the back of a pickup truck and dragged it over rocky gravel for two and a half miles. An amplifier on the truck bed broadcast the sound of the guitar being torn apart by the road. We hear dissonant scraping and scratching as the guitar bounces up and down, its parts flying off little by little. The video is hard to watch and hard to listen to, even if you don't know what it references, even if you don't know the guitar is a stand-in for Byrd's body, that the noise represents his body's ragged dismemberment.
| Continue "Sound bodies," Josh Kun's Frequencies column for the San Francisco Bay Guardian
posted in articles on December 4, 2003 1:25 AM | t (0)
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