History, noise, violence: Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag
History, noise, violence: Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag
This chapter both points to the limitation of the human voice in communicating the horrors of racialized violence, and suggests an acoustic model of thinking about history. In an in-depth examination of Marclay’s performance installation Guitar Drag (2000), the author listens to the different cultural forces reverberating within the ‘noise’ of the dying/destroyed instrument in Guitar Drag. These historical reverberations, powered by a shared legacy of violence enacted upon raced and classed bodies (and their parts), are amplified through an examination of seemingly disparate objects and events, including Billie Holiday’s performance of the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit, lynching photographs in the James Allen collection, and the ear phonautograph invented by Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Blake.
Keywords: violence, racism, noise, anti-lynching protest, dissection, sound reproduction technology, vibration
Manchester Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
