The anti-art-star Jeremy Deller has a very charming way of deflecting attention from himself. "The most important thing is the song," the Turner Prize winner keeps repeating on a call from London, where he lives and works. Deller is referring to "Pocahontas," Neil Young's tragically beautiful journey through America's physical and cultural landscape, from Rust Never Sleeps, which inspired his show Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and Me, opening at the Aspen Art Museum on February 14. Deller doesn't paint, sculpt, or draw. (The Turner was for Memory Bucket, a 2004 mixed-media installation about Texas that depicted George W. Bush's hometown of Crawford and the siege in nearby Waco.) He is a collaborator, an instigator, and, in this case, a proper curator. Deller has long admired Young for his "noncompromising ways" and how "Pocahontas" "travels through time and links eras and wars and conflict." The exhibition mimics that transcendence, mixing photojournalism, sculpture, and painting. Native American ledger-book drawings and a photo by Jeff Blankfort of Brando at a Black Panther rally are featured alongside contemporary works. Somehow, the vast expanse between the photographer An-My Lê's images of U.S. military training exercises—in which tanks creep like spiders across California's Mojave Desert—and the oozing tranquility of a Peter Doig painting is closed. "It's about horror and beauty and the suffering that can happen in these beautiful places," Deller says. "But it's not anti-American." It's an attempt to capture that elusive wonder Young is singing about: "In the mornin' on the fields of green/In the homeland we've never seen."

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