"This Guitar Has Seconds to Live": Guitar Drag's Archaeology of Indeterminacy and Violence

In 2000, sonic and visual artist Christian Marclay produced a video installation entitled Guitar Drag. The video features a single activity as its primary action: a pickup truck dragging a loudly amplified electric guitar across a rural landscape. Upon first glance, what we find here is an inscrutable work that in its relatively unadorned visual style seems little more than the straightforward documentation of a sonic art event. Like much rock and roll, the work is simple, loud, unpretentious, and affecting. However, in its underlying interaction with a variety of cultural registers, Guitar Drag is a multivalent artistic meditation on a range of seemingly unrelated aesthetic, historical, ethical, and ontological problems.

This essay presents an archaeology of Guitar Drag, in the form of an inquiry into its associations, its referents, and its cultural precedents. Ultimately, it connects the destructive and indeterminate artistic strategies of this video to a constellation of other works, performances, and historical events that share structural resemblances and, in some cases, related philosophical purposes. Included in this web of reference is a range of texts and actions that exhibit tendencies toward the use of caustic violence (often directed toward extremely dissimilar ends)—in anarchic performance art, rock-and-roll music, and racist hate crimes—and engage in an interplay between contingency and human presence that interrogates their ontological and historical limits.

Figure 1.

Christian Marclay, Guitar Drag (2000), © Christian Marclay. Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery.

By pulling a screeching, wailing electric guitar behind a pickup truck, Marclay created a sonic work using the timbres of rock and roll, but compositional methods derived from the innovations in indeterminacy that were initiated by avant-garde classical composer John Cage. Structurally, Guitar Drag, like many of Cage's works, is a conceptual project that reframes considerations of historical indexicality and authorship within an unusual art event in which control, chance, and intention are forced to interact in atypical ways within the predetermined limits of a sort of aesthetic field experiment. In this sense, the work is an investigation into the possible aesthetic and conceptual resonances between a planned but inexplicable act of brute violence on an inanimate object; the uncontrollable, abstract, unpitched sound that it produces; and a multivalent web of artistic and cultural associations that underpin it. In its performance strategies, its sensory impact, its artistic referents, and its political subtext, Guitar Drag foregrounds a variety of vigorous historical encounters between violence and chance in popular culture, fine art, and American history throughout the later half of the twentieth century.

Guitar Drag: An Allegory of Destruction in Art and Popular Music

Guitar Drag begins as an unidentified man methodically secures an electric guitar—a red Fender Stratocaster—with duct tape and a piece of rope to the back of a pickup truck and then plugs the instrument's cable into an amplifier on the bed of the vehicle. He starts the truck's engine and drags the amplified guitar behind the vehicle as it speeds across grass, dirt and, most noisily, asphalt. The soundtrack features two aural registers: the abrasive clamor that screeches from the amplifier as the guitar is jerked and bounced violently across the terrain and the atmospheric growl that is produced by the motion of the pickup truck and the guitar's wooden body as it jerks and bounces across the ground. In its exhibition, the video is installed on a playback loop in a dark gallery space, and the sound is aggressively loud.

When one walks toward the room in which the video plays, the sound can be heard from a distance; the audio component of the installation envelops the spaces that adjoin its projection. The artist described the exhibition conditions as an imperative: "It has to be a projection, it has to be loud. . . . It has to be a physical experience; you need to feel it through your body. It's not a pleasant experience, though some people are exhilarated by the sound, its rock quality."¹ Encountering Guitar Drag in a museum...