A conversation between Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson

and Jeremy Deller

 

Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson
Let’s talk about Neil Young. You have made work about or with musicians before. Can you tell me about your interest in music in general, and Neil Young in particular?

 

Jeremy Deller
I imagine that my interest in music is the same as everyone else’s, more or less. I think most people are interested in music in some way. Being an artist, you are lucky in the sense that you can actually develop and expand upon your curiosities. You can work with musicians or people who are in the music business. Neil Young is someone that I have been intrigued by for a long time. The way he behaves as a recording artist is often like the way that a visual artist works. He seems to enjoy taking risks and making mistakes with his work and doesn’t seem too bothered by the critical reaction—in fact, I think he likes to provoke it. He is also aware of the limitations of what he is doing, having none of the 1960s idealism of the possibility of changing the world through a song lyric. I think a comparison can be made between the making of a concept album and the making of conceptual art, but this brings up a larger question about rock music as an art form.

 

HZJ
You recently made a work titled “What Would Neil Young Do?”.

JD
Yes, it is a poster stack. You can take a free poster wherever it is exhibited. It was originally made for an art fair, which is a very good place to do something like that. So many people attend art fairs, and this way they end up getting something for free after having paid thirty dollars to go. They do not go home empty handed. And it was really an idea that came out of seeing the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” I just thought, “Well, what would Neil Young do in a certain situation, what path would he take, what would his opinion be?”

HZJ
The idea was to employ Neil Young as a type of ethical barometer.

JD
Yes. I was wondering how he would react to things, whether his decisions would be the right decisions or not.

 

HZJ
This exhibition is very much informed by a specifi c song by Neil Young, “Pocahontas.” You fi rst heard the song when you were in a really beautiful American landscape.

JD
Yes. I was teaching some students from the California College of Art in San Francisco, and we took a 700 mile road trip through Yosemite and to Bodie, a huge ghost town on the Nevada border. It was ridiculous because we didn’t have insurance on the van and the drivers weren’t insured. The whole thing was really stupid, but we went through Yosemite as a group and someone was playing a Neil Young album that I didn’t know at the time and this song came on. It was a revelation for me, listening to this song and looking at this sublime environment. The song contrasts the beauty of the American landscape with the ugliness of man’s deeds upon it. In my mind, it is really about that contrast. That is what got me thinking about the American landscape and how its depiction is open to interpretation.

The way I experienced it was very American, in a vehicle moving through a landscape. That’s basically how we interact with landscape now.

 

HZJ
I love the fact that you have taken that last line of the song, “Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and Me,” as the title for your exhibition, because the “me” becomes an amorphous character. It could be Neil Young, it could be the narrator of the song, and it could also be you. It mirrors the idea of perspective that you are talking about.

 

JD
It could also be the person that is reading or listening to the lyrics, so it is all of us really. I think Marlon Brando is very similar to Neil Young. He is fl awed, in a way, because he put his heart on his sleeve and supported certain causes. This can get a bit messy and controversial, exposing one to accusations of self-interest. I am sure his political activities had an effect on his career. I imagine Neil Young made reference to Marlon Brando in the song because of his interest in Native American culture and their struggle. I am sure many people remember that at the 1973 Academy Awards Marlon Brando did not show up to receive the Oscar for Best Actor for The Godfather. He actually sent a Native American woman, Sacheen Littlefeather, to refuse the award on his behalf, and she gave a political speech about the plight of Native Americans.

The photographs of Marlon Brando that are included in this exhibition were taken at a rally after the funeral of Bobby Hutton. Brando spoke at this rally. I have no idea what he said, but I would love to know. There is one image of him standing with Bobby Seale, and it becomes a kind of landscape of people. We have included another shot of the rally from a different perspective, a longer shot with the landscape of Oakland opening up in the background. Oakland is where the Black Panther movement started. In a way, this is stretching the defi nition of landscape. It is an urban landscape, and it is a landscape of people, reminiscent of an open-air music festival. It is just a sea of people and it reminds me of all of those classic images of Woodstock from the 1960s. In another way, these images speak to a notion of subversion. Brando subverted the Academy Award ceremony, and the Black Panthers subverted the 2nd Amendment.

 

Another photograph in the exhibition comes from the NAACP archives. It is an image, taken in 1936, of a banner that reads “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” fl ying outside their New York headquarters. The photograph contains within it the genesis of the Black Panther movement. Oakland was becoming populated in the 1930s, and increasingly in the war years, by African American labor from the Southern states. The shipyards urgently needed labor in the run up to World War II, and mass recruiting took place in the South, obviously with the promise of a new life in California. I imagine that the parents, uncles, and grandparents of the fi rst generation of Oakland Panthers came from the South, and grew up with the ever-present threat of arrest, imprisonment, or lynching. Their stories of life in the Southern states would have had a huge effect on their offspring from an early age. So in simple terms, the reason why the banner was made is the reason the Black Panther movement gained such support. Some of their early actions were performances, and if white students had done them they would be studied at art school.

 

HZJ
The banner presents a striking contrast to the way that information is communicated now. The idea of hanging out a fl ag with such disturbing information presented in a simple, textual way, is incredibly powerful.

 

JD
The banner itself is really like an artwork. Five words and that’s it, an incredibly concise statement shown in public, as many artworks are.

 

HZJ
I think that it is also important to point out that one of the devices that you have used in the exhibition is mixing objects that were made to very different ends and in extremely different contexts. Elements of photojournalism co-exist with proper works of art. There are contemporary works and historical works hung together. There are people who have made artworks who really do not consider themselves artists, and yet there are some quite well known artists included in the exhibition. Could you explain your selection in that way?

 

JD
To me personally, art does not exist in a vacuum. Most artists do not just live in their studio and paint in their studio. They are part of the world. I think it is only right to include other elements from the eras when artworks were made—works of photojournalism, for example—to help understand the context. I am also very interested in what would be called folk or vernacular art, and I have organized exhibitions of that type of work before. In this exhibition, I have included artworks made by people who never went to art college, probably did not know what art college was, but they still made artworks.

 

HZJ
To return to this notion of photojournalism, another striking image you have included depicts children visiting a monument to Pocahontas.

JD
The image is a staged photograph of the descendants of Pocahontas posing by a recently erected statue. I thought it was strange that they could fi nd people that were her direct descendants 350 years later, but I suspect they were from the same tribe. There is something incredibly sad about the image, something very poignant about it. It is so municipal and staged, quite well meaning, but entirely fl awed at the same time.

 

HZJ
It is also interesting that they were wearing formal private school uniforms and matching shoes. It becomes this very American perspective that is being imposed on their very looking at the statue. It also takes place in another kind of landscape, a really manicured space like a park, not really the same landscape where Pocahontas would have been.

JD
Well, Pocahontas is buried in London. She died in London and her grave is in London. I don’t know if her remains were returned to her tribe eventually, but I believe there is at least still a gravesite in a churchyard overlooking the Thames. Ideally, any statue of her would be in a really inaccessible place.

 

HZJ
The notion of memorials and monuments crops up elsewhere in the exhibition, most notably in the works by Sam Durant.

JD
Yes. The sculpture is part of a series of works made by Sam that are minimalist, grey copies of monuments erected by Native American Indians to commemorate the deaths of white settlers, an idea that goes against the accepted logic of memorials. It turns the idea of commemoration on its head, which is possibly why it is accompanied in the exhibition by a drawing of an inverted monument.

These monuments exist throughout the United States. It is such a bizarre concept, and you wonder whether the Native Americans were compelled to put these monuments up by the local government as an act of contrition.

The third work of Sam’s in the exhibition is a brochure modelled after United States Parks Service brochures. It is a proposal to remove these monuments from their current locations and install them along the refl ecting pool in front of the Washington Monument.

 

HZJ
A very interesting idea, and again something that specifi cally touches upon a political dimension of landscape, not only because the site is a national monument, but also because of its charged history as a site of prominent political protest. You have included a number of works from different historical periods—something that mirrors the collision of different eras that takes place in the song “Pocahontas”—and put them into dialogue. This show is very political, not anti-American per se, but it has a perspective. Is this perspective more happenstance, or is it ardently felt?

 

JD
Yes, there is a defi nite perspective, but there is also lot of chance and luck in the show. There are images that resonate with other images, and I had no idea that they would be making all of these connections. One image, for example, is the Charles Pollack lithograph of the man at the well. It depicts a solitary fi gure, an African American, at a well that has dried up. Pollock used landscape as metaphor, and obviously the drought is not just an ecological metaphor, but also social and moral. His painting Look Down That Road uses a feature of a landscape (the crossroads) in a similar way. Both works deal with ecological and social crisis in the 1930s, and also connect to the NAACP banner and the migration from the South to centers of industry. This relates to the Paul Chan photograph that depicts a man holding a sign which bears the text, “A country road, a tree, evening,” which is the opening scene setting in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Paul staged Waiting for Godot last November in New Orleans in the Lower Ninth Ward, so again ecological disaster, poverty, and politics become intertwined.

HZJ
But more than fi fty years apart.

JD
Yes, but the story is still the same, just with different clothes.

 

HZJ
We have discussed some of the contemporary artwork, and most of the twentieth-century work and photojournalism included in the exhibition. How does the work from the nineteenth century fit in?

JD
Well, for me personally, the works by George Catlin, Alfred Jacob Miller, and William Henry Jackson are concerned with land in the West, and moreover the value of land. These three artists, in different ways, made a lot of money from portraying the American West. George Catlin, for example, was a celebrated American artist who made a whole series of paintings of tribes in the American West, The Indian Gallery, and those paintings literally toured the world. It seems like a very modern way of looking at art, seeing art, and exhibiting art. All three men were great entrepreneurs, and I think they saw themselves as commercial artists looking for opportunities as well as being fi ne artists, which feels like a very contemporary idea. Before Hollywood or photography there was George Catlin, and he was working in a similar way to a photojournalist but with a pencil and oil paint.

HZJ
I think William Henry Jackson’s photograph of the Mountain of the Holy Cross brings together a number of the ideas in your exhibition. In this case, a landscape photograph of a natural phenomenon that occurred because of the way the snow was melting on a mountainside not only became iconic but also was used as a justifi cation for westward expansion.

JD
Well, in 1870, William Henry Jackson was the offi cial photographer on a Department of the Interior geological survey throughout the West. The survey had gone out with the intention to document land suitable for colonizing and mining. Jackson had heard about the cruciform phenomena on the east side of Holy Cross Mountain—located about fi fteen miles south of Vail, Colorado in the Sawatch mountain range—and went to great lengths to photograph it. This image caused a sensation when presented to the public at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, as curiosity about the unknown West peaked around this time. The crucifi x was interpreted as a sign from above that this was indeed God’s country, a sort of divine blessing for Manifest Destiny. Some of the more zealous went as far as calling it the Mount Sinai of the New World. The Denver Rio Grande Railroad purchased the mountain in 1880 and sightseeing tours were soon organized to view the mountainside. This iconic image has since been reproduced thousands of times, most famously by Thomas Moran. Due to erosion, the cross is no longer visible.

 

HZJ
In a similar way, George Catlin had a rather complicated relationship to Westward expansion.

JD
Yes. The catalogue for The Indian Gallery spells out very clearly the human cost of this colonization. Catlin was sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans. He wrote a catalogue entry for each painting, often detailing how many members of the tribe were still alive after contact with white settlers, with much of the death due to disease and not just because of warfare. But although Catlin’s depiction of the tribes and customs is on the whole an unsentimental and sensitive response to this struggle, he also gave lectures detailing the economic opportunities available in the West, especially during the Gold Rush era. Thus, he promoted the very push into the West responsible for eradicating the ways of life he sought to preserve and document.

By contrast, Alfred Jacob Miller only once went on an expedition into the West. He accompanied William Drummond Stewart, his Scottish patron and a fur merchant, to an 1838 fur trading event. By all accounts Miller was unhappy with the experience, not least because of the trappers’ harsh manners and lifestyle. His more serene and romanticized paintings proved hugely popular in cities like New York and Baltimore and he recycled this imagery until his death in 1874.

HZJ
To go back to something we discussed earlier—the role of folk art in the exhibition—the Native American ledger drawings you have included are particularly fascinating, especially because the pencil script on all of the drawings is in English.

 

JD
The ledger drawings arose from the captivity of Plains Indians after the wars of the 1840s. Captured and incarcerated Indians were persuaded by their more “enlightened” captors to occupy their time depicting their tribal experiences and achievements. These were often sold as souvenirs to a curious public. Here, art has a therapeutic and also a commercial use. Initially, the only paper source available to the Indians for drawing was ledger books acquired from white traders. There are about 200 books that survive from this era. Koba (Wild Horse), a Kiowa Indian who was held at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, made the book in this exhibition in 1874.

The text is in English because the artist dictated how the drawings depicted experiences related to the tribe’s history and mythology to someone working at the fort. The fi rst drawing in the book is probably the most poignant: it recounts the forced march of the tribe to Florida.

 

HZJ
The relationship between confl ict and landscape exists in other works in the exhibition as well, including several that deal explicitly with the current war in Iraq and the Vietnam War. I am thinking not only of the photographs by An-My Lê, but also the slideshow by Sean Snyder and the two images created by soldiers while in Vietnam.

JD
The works by An-My Lê are images of soldiers engaged in training exercises at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Training Center in the High Desert in California. From the look of it, it could be Iraq, but it is not. It is actually a war game. But it is also an image that could be in an historical western fi lm if you take the tanks out and put in covered wagons. You would immediately recognize that imagery as something out of a John Ford western. It becomes a classic, iconic image of American life and of the Western American desert. Again, we are looking at this very beautiful landscape but the human activity being performed in it is not so beautiful. So here again you see the idea of history repeating itself, of iconography repeating itself.

 

HZJ
So much of the American landscape, these really beautiful bucolic areas, has some kind of connection to the American military. If it were not for the 10th Mountain Division training here in the mountains of Aspen so they would be ready to go and fi ght against Hitler in similar terrain in Europe, Aspen itself probably would not exist in the same form today.

JD
I had no idea about that history of Aspen, so even in this ideal landscape, there is this military history. You can never get away from it really. If you look at a map of California or Nevada, you see huge areas that are off limits basically, and Twentynine Palms is on the edge of one of them.

 

HZJ
While the An-My Lê photographs are of soldiers and their activities, the Sean Snyder work—the only moving image work included in the exhibition—is comprised of photographs taken by soldiers.

JD
The Sean Snyder piece really stretches the idea of landscape, especially the American landscape. Sean found these photographs on soldiers’ personal websites, blogs, and image sharing sites, and put them together into a slideshow that reveals the daily experience of being in Iraq as an American soldier. So even though the images are not of America, they are taken by Americans and hence from an American perspective. Iraq is in our consciousness, it is always part of our daily lives, part of the American way of life now, whether we want it to be or not. So what interested me about these pictures is that there are very beautiful sunsets and very romantic landscapes, but also a number of depictions of the ugliness and boredom of war.

 

HZJ
In addition to these rather casual photographs selected by the artist, an outsider, I know it was important to you to include artwork in the exhibition that was made by soldiers who knew of, and were interested in the premise of, the exhibition. One of the most beautiful images in the exhibition is a very small painting made with some non-traditional materials by a soldier while in Vietnam.

JD
The image was painted by a serving soldier in Vietnam, Joseph Clarence Fornelli, using watercolor and coffee rations, which I think is an ingenious way of painting. It is actually incredibly beautiful, a very sensitively made watercolor painting. I spoke to Joe on the phone the other day and he was saying that he did not go to art college, he was not from a background where art was an option, but he loved making art and he did a lot of drawing and painting when he was in Vietnam. He commanded a helicopter crew so he went through compressed periods of extreme danger dropping troops into different areas of the jungle and then he would have hours or days with nothing to do. During these down times, he would draw and paint and make art. The work is called Dare to Enter and it depicts a glade of a jungle in North Vietnam near the Cambodian border. Joe and his crew would drop the soldiers off here and then the soldiers would head off into the jungle. Maybe all of them would come back, but often that would not be the case. So on its face it is a very beautiful image, but at the same time it is incredibly threatening. It really sums up the idea of the exhibition, the beauty and danger of landscape and man’s use of the landscape. In many ways, I think the song “Pocahontas” is really an allegory for the Vietnam War.

 

HZJ
Using creative activity to fi ll one’s time, especially time spent in distant places, also comes up in Mark Dion’s work.

JD
Mark’s work fi ts in to the exhibition in multiple ways. He is an artist who works conceptually and whose work is also focused on the environment. For this exhibition, he chose to present a selection of his personal journals from the last twenty years. It is really his life’s work, and in much of them he is cataloguing plants or other elements of nature that he is encountering, very much in the manner of a nineteenth century naturalist like Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson. He takes note of where he has been and what he is seeing as a way of charting the environmental challenges that are happening.

In a similar vein the Dave Muller work is charting and assessing the music industry by looking at the most commercially successful artists. The chart comes from the book Rock ‘N’ Roll Is Here To Pay: The History and Politics of the Music Industry by Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo, and Dave has added all sorts of landscape elements to it. The chart is not about who has had the greatest infl uence or longevity. Of course, Neil Young is included here, and also Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. It is instead about the timeline and the environment. It starts off in the 1960s, and then the music industry ends in about 2004 or 2005. The work is timely in the sense that we are basically in the death throws of the music industry, as we know it. The music industry of the 1970s just does not exist anymore.

 

HZJ
Perhaps that is why in Dave’s rendering the entire landscape of the chart is being permeated by different wild plants. The only other contemporary work we have yet to discuss is the painting by Peter Doig. In a way, it also deals with a sense of foreboding in an overgrown landscape. And, out of all of these contemporary artists, Peter is the most keenly interested in landscape.

 

JD
The opening lines of the song “Pocahontas” are about fl eeing a massacre in a canoe, and this painting is called Ghost Canoe, a recurrent theme in Peter’s work. He is a big fan of Neil Young and I am sure that the songs have permeated his art. I know he paints with music on, and I am sure he has been listening to Neil Young when he paints. The thing about many of Peter’s early landscape paintings is that there is an uneasiness about them. Although they are very beautiful, there is an unsettling quality and the song and the painting defi nitely have the same feeling of impending doom. But, you are right, it is one of the few pure landscapes in the show.

HZJ
I think it is important to note that Peter is the one that picked this painting for the show, it comes from his private collection, and he knows the song. In a funny way, it is perfect to end here, because the exhibition is very much about the perspective of the other. Neither you, Peter, nor Neil are American, but you have all made work that deals explicitly with American culture and the American landscape. Thank you all for doing it.