How The Nobel-Prize-Winning Songwriter Turned To Art, With A Bit Of Whiskey-Making On The Side

In May this year, the Provencal winemaker Chateau la Coste announced the unveiling of an unusual sculpture, by Nobel-laureate and songwriter Bob Dylan, to be installed on its well-known art trail winding through the chateau’s vineyards. The new acquisition was a large rectangular work in steel and iron — a kind of giant industrial-age pergola — welded atop a railroad boxcar chassis. With the chassis, the work forms what we could call an open-air rail boxcar manque, pictured below.

Dylan’s piece is full of railroad and agricultural metaphor of the 19th and early-20th centuries. Welded into its lattice is a plow shank, some shards of ornamental cast iron, a Palladian transom, gears, wheels, a ladder or two, a chunk of a railman’s supersized wrench and spike for coupling and uncoupling cars, a scythe (or a mock-up of one), at least one socket wrench for removing automobile tires, all manner of rods, and framing. In terms of artistic forebears, it’s done in the kicked-around, poetry-of-the-industrial style of the iconic American iron-sculptor David Smith.

But in contrast to Smith’s more layered, complex work, the effect of Dylan’s assemblage is that of a surprisingly tidy patchwork quilt (in iron and steel), because he’s framed the tools and architectural remnants so sturdily in panels of fabricated steel. The dimensions of the piece are, by definition, in the unforgiving dimensions of the boxcar chassis. You can walk through the Chateau la Coste sculpture down the length of the boxcar, which is added fun. But arguably most fun detail is that its author is America’s own prolific rolling stone and our most recent (2016) Nobel Prize for Literature laureate. In his characteristically cryptic, bleak, High-Midwest lingua franca, Dylan has entitled the piece “Rail Car.”

That Dylan has chops in the figurative arts is well known. He introduced us to that by making a breezy, blunt but impressionistic oil of himself the cover-art for his eponymous 1970 album, Self Portrait, and over the last half-century he hasn’t stopped supplying himself with album covers, holding art shows, and getting in his Malibu, California, studio to sweat it all out.

Lately — meaning, in the last decade — he’s become a fan of the oxyacetylene torch and the welder’s arc. “Rail Car” is Dylan’s largest metal sculpture to date, but he’s also held exhibitions of his exercises in the genre in London and the States. That some of this output is overtly commercial — meaning, seemingly done to contract, as with the “Portal” piece framing an entrance to the MGM casino in Washington, DC — could come as a surprise from the famously ornery, political author of “The Masters of War.” But his protest era was back then, well over a half-century ago, in 1966, as Dylan was surfing the budding opposition to the Vietnam War.

Far less well known than his art is Dylan’s new bourbon partnership with veteran distiller Mark Bushala. Together they produce Heaven’s Door whiskies, whose name is derived from the Nobel laureate’s gospel-inflected, global best-selling anthem to death and dying, “Knocking On Heaven’s Door,” written for the soundtrack of the 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which Dylan famously had a cameo as a deadly knife-throwing bandit in the Lincoln County Wars. On offer from Heaven’s Door are four “Tennessee Bourbons” and a rye in the premium $50-80 range, with a commemorative box set including a reproduction of a Dylan painting running $500.

The Heaven’s Door releases have garnered excellent reviews from the critics, despite the fact that, other than the always iconoclastic Dylan, no distiller in Tennessee makes “bourbon” per se. They make “Tennessee Whiskey.” But in partnership with Bushala, Dylan is doubling down on that, planning what we can only call a rare foray into hospitality, with a new distillery in Nashville, to be housed in a 163-year-old deconsecrated church in Music City’s hip SoBro neighborhood. Still more commercial than all of that put together are the plans for a sort of Bob Dylan-world boutique hotel alongside the distillery and, not least, a gallery for exhibiting, you guessed it, the bourbon-maker’s paintings and sculpture.

In the five months since its installation, it’s fair to say that “Rail Car” has worked hard and well for the Chateau la Coste, and for its outdoor siting in the vineyards. The work delivers a projection of a town through which Dylan’s metaphorical train is rolling. It could be any town, but it has a strong whiff of the American Midwest, as we might expect from the Hibbing, Minnesota, native.

Since one of the enduring metaphors in the songs written over Dylan’s his six-decade musical career is that of a lifetime spent on the road, “Rail Car” takes on several other layers of meaning. In effect, the maker is telling us the story of every tiny whistle stop by presenting to us an archaeological Baedeker of the structures and tools of the inhabitants. It means that the best way to view “Rail Car” is by definition from the inside, as a passenger on Dylan’s train, because, in the art, you’re seeing the town slide by. It’s a snapshot of the way our vision works from a train. Given the source, it’s a natural story to wring out of a ton or so of iron.