What Would Neil Young Do?

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What would Neil Young do? That’s the punch line of an anecdote in the Canadian musician’s authorized biography, Shakey (2003). Faced with any tricky business decision — whether to do a commercial or a TV show, say — Young and his manager would always ask themselves: "What would Bob Dylan do?" There comes a day, though, when the torch of cantankerous rock-star integrity must pass. Says the manager: "Years later I’m managing Bob, and some decision came up, he turns to me and says..."

"What would Neil Young do?" is also a phrase that a lot of people took away from the Frieze Art Fair in 2006, since it was printed, in large serif caps, on an eponymous give-away poster by the British artist Jeremy Deller — a work designed, he says, to tap the social dynamism of fairs by getting an encouragement of idiosyncrasy out to a big audience. It was perhaps offered up with slightly malicious intent, too, since Deller esteems Young’s happily self-sabotaging tendencies; the man fans call "Neiler" was, after all, surreally sued by Geffen Records in the 1980s for making music not representative of himself (Geffen lost). To that end, Deller confessedly wishes that "lesser talents would do that and then never recover." Regardless, to judge from the decadelong quiet swell of artworks — from practioners as geographically and tactically disparate as Sam Durant, Tim Lee, Melanie Schiff, and Deller himself — referencing or paying sideways or full-on tribute to Young, it’s a phrase increasingly booming in the crania of contemporary artists. Why? Most obviously, Young is a creative type who visibly enjoys — to echo the title of his 1989 album — freedom. Last year he released Chrome Dreams II, a sequel to an album he recorded but didn’t release 30 years ago. "He rocks, he’s a folkie, he did all those bizarre records in the ’80s: punk, rockabilly, techno, heavy metal..." says the LA-based Durant. "He’s pro-gun but in other ways very liberal," adds Lee, a young Vancouver artist who was born in Seoul. "He was anti-Vietnam and a big Reaganite and anti-Bush. You can’t really encapsulate his political ideology. And every album he does seems like a reaction to the last one. And he does sloppy things and perfectionist things." Young publicly changes his mind, yet his very waywardness is consistent. He’s also a living symbol of sorts. Deller, who notes that Young’s "been around a long time, and come to represent the times he’s witnessed," has used the musician as a marker on several occasions, not least in "Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and Me." That curatorial project, for the Aspen Art Museum in 2008, was intended, Deller says, as "a visual representation of a song [Young] wrote." Spinning off from a line from 1978’s delicate ballad "Pocahontas" (referring to buffalo slaughter and Native American rights), Deller’s show ruminated associatively on American history, its embedded brutalities, and its people’s drawn-out divorce from their natural landscape. Accordingly, it moved from ledger-book drawings by Native Americans through ’60s-era photojournalism of Black Panther rallies (featuring Brando campaigning for civil rights) and recent photographs of US military exercises in California’s Mojave Desert.

This coupling of Young with compassionate militancy — which his 2006 song Let’s Impeach the President suggests hasn’t paled over time — is what first attracted Durant, who used Young’s music in a body of work he describes as a "constellation of American violence and culture," made between 1997 and 2000. The spur for Upside Down and Backwards, Completely Unburied (1999) was the fact that Young had written Ohio — about the killing of four students by the National Guard during an anti-Vietnam protest at Kent State in 1970 — just shortly after Robert Smithson completed his Partially Buried Woodshed, a structure cracked under tons of mounded dirt, at the same university. Durant’s artwork — which deftly synthesizes the events — is a scale model of Smithson’s sculpture containing three CD players, synchronously and cacophonously spooling out the Rolling Stones’ "Gimme Shelter" (memories of Altamont); Nirvana’s "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; and the Neil Young song "Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)" (which, heartbreakingly for Young, Kurt Cobain quoted in his suicide note) from the 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps. Durant connects that last title to "Smithson’s obsession with rust and decay." Indeed, the whole of Durant’s piece hitches the older artist’s cosmic formalizations of entropy to the specific drift of the US into brutality (and, from this historical vantage, the reversal of its, and Young’s, ’60s ideals), with the musician doubly referenced as both mourner and involuntary chronicler.