Besides following an artistic trajectory that connects Marcel Duchamp to Pop Art and Fluxus, the work of Christian Marclay, an American artist born in 1955, has a punk energy that gives it an eminently subversive dimension. The punk aesthetic in his work is remarkably constant—from his first performances in 1979 to his installation Crossfire (2007). This is due to punk’s power and to its rich musical and stage suggestiveness, which he discovered on arriving in New York to study art in 1978, with bands and musicians such as DNA, Mars, Lydia Lunch and Glenn Branca. The Kitchen (under Rhys Chatam’s musical direction), CBGB and the Mudd Club were frequented by punk musicians and by young artists who at the time were excluded from the gallery network. Marclay’s discovery of Sid Vicious in performance at Max’s Kansas City—after The Sex Pistols’ break-up—had a considerable impact. The electric guitar is the sole protagonist in Guitar Drag (2000), a scenario in which the audience, plunged into darkness, comes face to face with an image occupying the entire projection space. The sound of this solid body, dragged by a truck and crashing along the Texan desert ground, is saturated by a powerful amp that makes the instrument scream. Guitar Drag is not a Fluxus performance, even though Marclay was influenced by the movement. It is a body-art performance: a mix of Warhol’s Electric Chair and Car Crash series, and a sacrifice whose rage references the instrument-smashing by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, the Sex Pistols and The Clash. Guitar Drag is a piece of punk-rock informed by the toughness of blues—a manifesto that takes us to a Texas plagued by racism, where crimes continue to be perpetrated, as in the case of James Byrd, an African American killed while dragged by a pick-up truck, in a contemporary variant of Strange Fruit, once sung by Billie Holiday. In Guitar Drag, Marclay turns the electric guitar into a deeply moving extension of the human body.
