«what remains is a corpse, a mass of plastic squashed like old cars ready for the dump»
But they also raise far more nuanced questions about the moral contradictions and compromises inherent in any individual’s participation in society. To what extent, for example, are individual voice and need stilled in order to fulfill obligations to the body politic? To what extent do we remain silent in the face of policies we find ethically repugnant? Such questions are deeply complex and the answers can become, ironically, quite noisy. But ignoring them, which so many do, is to remain truly silent and, at least intellectually, dead. n
ing a sound other than that of its body thudding against the ground. These moral and social issues are expanded in The Electric Chair (2006) a series of paintings and works on paper based on the detail of a sign reading SILENCE appropriated from Andy Warhol’s 1963 eponymous series. By reducing Warhol’s image to this single word and by keeping his title, Marclay establishes an equation between the command to keep quiet and the chair, suggesting not only that silence is the outcome of execution but that it is a killing mechanism itself. It is, however, the living, those who participate in or witness an execution, who are ordered to remain silent. The philosophical implications of this dynamic are enormous. They seem to begin with a comment on the brutality of capital punishment and an indictment of the individuals and the state that look to the death of one person as recompense for the loss of another.
Joshua Mack is a writer living and working in New York. Christian Marclay: 2822 Records (PS1), 1987-2009. P. S. 1. MoMA, New York, until April 5, 2010. Christian Marclay lot 91, estimate £ 6 , 0 0 0 - 8 , 0 0 0 53
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