E-Mail This Article to a Friend Sound sculptures Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag BY JOSH KUN

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. It took Marclay — an artist whose medium, sound, is something you can’t see — a while to arrive at this point. He’s always been drawn to sound’s objectification, its thingness, but not necessarily to its social contexts. "A silent representation of sound, as in a painting or sculpture, intrigues me," he has said, "because its muteness underscore’s sound’s intangible nature." He has collaged album covers to give Stan Kenton the stockinged legs of a Rockette and to construct two-dimensional Frankensteins that are part Michael Jackson, part Roxy Music, part soul singer Sidney Barnes. He has created a pillow made entirely of tape from Beatles cassettes and built a towering black column out of phonograph discs.

In his stunning four-screen display Video Quartet, Marclay excises quick shots of musicians and singers from hundreds of films and edits their strums and solos and plucks and choruses into a jagged audio-visual symphony. The longer you watch it, the more you believe that all sounds — and all images of sounds — are equal once they are recorded and transformed into things (tape, discs). Ella Fitzgerald is Frank Sinatra is Harpo Marx is Holly Hunter (at the piano in The Piano).

But Guitar Drag refuses one final connection: they are not James Byrd Jr. Jonathan Sterne reminds us in his new The Audible Past (Duke University Press) that everything is not everything when it comes to sound — there is a unique history embedded in reproduced sound itself. Sterne’s sense of sound history centers on the body: he writes of cadavers’ ears, medical examinations, and embalming methods in addition to Bell and Edison. Previous accounts of the telephone and gramophone, he says, have missed a crucial point: they were all developed to replicate the "tympanic" structure of the human ear. Which leaves all histories of sound as histories of bodies. The long-standing idea that voices coming from a turntable are "disembodied voices" ignores the presence of the ear in the machine, the body that haunts all sound.

Guitar Drag’s portrayal of that haunting comes at the very moment in the history of recording technology when it is needed most, when thanks to samplers and Pro Tools, everyone is a remixer and a universe of sound is up for grabs. In the past few months alone, Ennio Morricone, Astor Piazzolla, and Charlie Parker have all gotten the remix treatment (Ennio Morricone Remixed, Astor Piazolla Remixed, and Bird Up: The Charlie Parker Remix Project, respectively), their original recordings taken apart and recombined by strangers. When Red Hawk "produces" and "constructs" Parker’s "Now’s the Time (No Time like Now)," dipping its sax undulations in beats made of molasses, what becomes of the original? Is the Parker track simply autonomous, raw material for a new composition? Or is Parker still there, reanimated by being remixed, his black body still blowing a horn in 1945 to announce a new era of black liberation? In Marclay’s Guitar Drag, Byrd can live on only in his absence. What we see and what we hear as the guitar comes apart in Jasper County is what we don’t see and what we don’t hear: a real body on its violent way into a past that, as hard we might try, can never be remixed.