segunda-feira, junho 30, 2008

Sound Art



"In 1998, 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 and tied him to the back of their pick-up truck. Then they drove two and a half miles, dragging his 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 DJ/visual artist Christian Marclay created Guitar Drag, a video installation included in the solo retrospective that has been making its way across the country over the past year. Marclay tied an electric guitar to the back of a pick-up 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 refers to, 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.
Guitar Drag is both a reminder of Byrd and a reminder of what so few in our remix-obsessed age ever remember. Sound is never fully disembodied; what we hear always carries history with it."


Excerto de:
Sound sculptures - "Christian Marclay's Guitar Drag" BY JOSH KUN