Jack White’s Wretched Art Thoughts Probably Should Have Disappeared, but I’m Glad They Didn’t

The McDonald’s-colored, yellow-roofed/red-bodied plastic Fisher-Price “Little Tikes” Cozy Coupe was one of the most ubiquitous toys of my millennial childhood. Who among us didn’t shuffle along our parents’ driveways like tiny Fred Flintstones, making vroom-vroom noises and trying not to seethe with envy at the luckier kids who got fancy-schmancy motorized convertible Barbie cars? Fuck those kids. The Cozy Coupe offered more extended fun anyway, particularly when I got too old and tried to shove my lanky limbs into it for a gag. Given I’m an adult, and Cozy Coupes now come with gigantic blank eyeballs, according to the cursory search I did while writing this article, I assumed the toy would be relegated to my increasingly hazy memory. Not sliced in half, one wheel dangling like a grotesque injury; drenched in oil-slicked epoxy resin; slapped onto a plywood board; and hung in a swanky, white-walled gallery founded by an artist best known for his sliced and diced animal carcasses.

But that’s exactly what I got, thanks to Jack White. Yes, that Jack White, the bluesy rock musician, guitar shredder, notorious brawler with other aughts garage band members, and the, let’s be honest, lesser half of The White Stripes (I adore distant enigma Meg!). White can now add laughably wretched celebrity artist to his long list of vocations, with his current exhibition, These Thoughts May Disappear, at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London’s Vauxhall, a neighborhood I only know about because of the hot air balloon mishaps and volcanic pyrotechnic spectacles that occurred centuries ago at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (which now feature other spectacles like curious goats and an unbothered alpaca).

White’s Coupe Car at 99°, an early work from 1997, was the only reason I visited the South London gallery after I caught a glimpse of its anti-magnificence on Oliver Munts “I went so you don’t have to” Instagram post about the show and cackled. As a connoisseur of celebrity art crappola, I had to see this mauled Coupe in person. And you know what? It was worth it, if only to lay eyes on his later winking return to the work with a miniature version with a tinier tot toy, titled Mini Coupe. Adorable! Idiotic! Ok, maybe I’m being too harsh with the last adjective. Let’s hear White out, as perhaps he has a more conceptual take beyond hacking at a toddler’s toy. According to the exhibition guide, Coupe Car at 99° derives from White’s prodigious garbage-picking habit. Though only one Coupe made it onto the artwork, White recalls he used to have about twenty strewn in his Detroit yard in the 1990s, a trash tableau that both tickles my synapses and represents a missed opportunity for a photo that may have been a better artistic choice than a smash and glue. Questionable decisions aside, White sees his Coupe as “my foray into pop culture, but it’s a little bit less like Campbell’s soup cans and more about everyday life on the street in Detroit.”

It’s QUITE a bit less like Campbell’s Soup cans, I’d say! At the same time, its sincere stupidity and abysmal, pathetic aesthetic speak to me.

I’ll admit, while writing this, I questioned myself: Is it too easy to lovingly mock Jack White’s art? Am I just adding to a chorus of terrible reviews? Is there a point to wasting precious Filthy Dreams space on this? Yes. Yes. And probably not. But still, like a stinker-loving moth to a reeking flame, I can’t help myself. I ADORE bad celebrity art. In fact, I’d argue viewing bad celebrity art is one of the great joys in life—witnessing a person who excelled in one discipline completely eat shit in another remains a marvel and a thrill. So is the sheer level of complete delusion (and of course, the heavy dash of social access) required to even attempt it. Granted, there are far fewer terrible celebrity musician artists than godawful male actor artists bungling the visual, like Brad Pitt, Jim Carrey, James Franco, and Johnny Depp. Aside: barring Jim Carrey, whose only crime that I know of is being obnoxiously method, I don’t think it’s a mistake that a lot of these he-men actors-turned-artists are also notorious sex pests, abusers, or just dicks. For some reason, though, musician art tends to be better than actor art. I don’t recoil in aesthetic horror over David Bowie’s sickly German Expressionist portrait of Iggy Pop; Marilyn Manson’s spooky watercolors; and Nick Cave’s wee devil ceramics. Hell, I’ll even fight for the sublime kitsch appeal of Miley Cyrus’s Dead Petz-era neon aliens, friendship bracelets, itsy babies, and other dollar store tat-covered bongs. Jack White’s art, though, is an exception—he’s no Miley Cyrus. Though White’s art does feature nostalgic midcentury fixations that also appear in his songs, his execution is not only bewilderingly bad, but also corny as hell! Groan-fest incoming! Jack White is also no Adrien Brody, the master of celebrity art disaster who may actually be a genius. Nothing will ever beat smushing sugary chewing gum onto Brody’s painting, only to watch other spitty globs fall to the floor. Not even banging out an arrhythmic tune on electro bongos using a White-commissioned Ai Weiwei-designed amplifier covered in buttons that spell out “FUCK” or tentatively jamming a button on an adjacent Hirst amp topped with—what else?—a waxy, faux, bloody cow head.

Badass!!! Rock and roll!!!

I should also note that no matter how much White’s thoughts in These Thoughts May Disappear probably SHOULD have disappeared before being displayed in Newport Street Gallery. White’s show was still not the worst I saw in London. That designation goes to the newly opened archival sweatshop, the V&A East Storehouse, a strange maze of metallic gangways lined with a smattering of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection. Sure, there were some fun finds, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s stark, wood-dominated midcentury office made for Pittsburgh’s own department store mogul, Edgar Kaufmann, with a guest appearance by Nefertiti. Yet, the curation skewed heavily toward carved tables and wooden chests; missed opportunities to make the experience more engaging, including numerous drawers presumably filled with drawings that were locked shut (I tried); and leaned toward minimalism rather than the hoard maximalism a museum based on a sprawling collection demands. The Storehouse lacked the chaos and, therefore, the rifling glee of other overstuffed museums, like London’s Museum of Brands or the wonderful research center at Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center. Too clean and too precise, the V&A Storehouse was more successful as an intriguing backdrop for visitors’ selfies than as a true access point to its collection. Not to mention, I’d list the V&A East Storehouse as the absolute worst anyway, simply based on the fact that their employees had to organize to demand bathroom breaks! Let them pee!

There are similarities between the V&A East Storehouse and Jack White’s exhibition, namely the random assortment of stuff. This is par for the course for a museum collection warehouse that allows viewers to gawk, but it’s less ideal for a comprehensive solo exhibition. Of course, a retrospective can offer diversity, but These Thoughts May Disappear, curated by White himself (a self-curated show is never a good thing) and Damien’s son Connor, is a manic hodgepodge of any and all ideas that ever popped into White’s head over three decades. This makes every turn and each new room a surprise. A China-produced replica of a dead tree in White’s backyard that he painted red, now plopped onto Astroturf with some lawn chairs! A drippy bit of epoxy in the shape of Ohio! A reupholstered church pew turned into an amp! A fan that also looks like a machine gun! A chair that pluffs out whiffs of summer baseball games! A turtle made out of a beer can crawling into a pipe! A gym floor tile attached to a spring! A painted nail gun stuck to a board! Stultifyingly bland, blobby paintings! An Eames chair covered in a Damien Hirst spin painting! A photo of sexy nurse Barbie that looks like it came from a mall kiosk! Whatever this is!:

This is not to say there is absolutely no consistency. White offers a few coherent series, starting with the first room that is filled to the brim with a frenzy of 3-D printed reproductions of the same two knickknacks: a beheaded Frozen Charlotte tchotchke with her sweet noggin replaced by a skull (Badass! Rock and roll!) and another 20th-century gewgaw, Ukulele Joe, the lesser half of the Hula Girl/Ukulele Joe Hawaiian duo. A weaker talent for tack might simply monumentalize these bric-a-bracs and be done with it. But White does one better and gives them fresh, painted styles. Ukulele Joe, in particular, tries on so many new looks that it’s as if White is playing with dolls. Take the butch, Village People-esque variations, like the G.I. Joe fatigues green Army Model and the orange Construction Worker Model. There are several narcissistically self-referential Joes too, such as Garage Rocker Model, inspired by White’s red and black White Stripes-era aesthetic, and Third Man Model, recalling the artist’s years as a bi-chromatic upholsterer. I can only hope that the Joker Wine Merchant Model, in which Joe dons the color scheme of a Gotham terrorist who broke out of Arkham to open a winery, foreshadows a forthcoming White era.

As entertaining as I found Ukulele Joe’s costume changes, both Joe and Char’s iterations recall nothing more than the ginormous, cartoonish figurines from art critic-repellent KAWS. While I try to tamp down my reflex repulsion for KAWS’s slick commercialism, it was hard to resist the immediate impulse to stomp straight out of White’s exhibition upon glimpsing his KAWS-ification. Yet, KAWS is not the only artist who clearly did a number on White, leaving him unable to find his own aesthetic. Artists from Detroit’s junk-salvaging, assemblage-driven Cass Corridor movement, like White’s idol and amp collaborator Gordon Newton, loom large, particularly in White’s scavenged and epoxied trash paintings. Take Planet with No Star, a massive un-licked gas station Gobstopper shoved onto a pitch-black sky, or The Famous White Singer, three defunct sewing machines that spell out the title phrase. The exhibition guide explains the latter is “a tribute to the sewing machine factories and the factory system of the music world in the United States.” Profound! Unexpectedly, White’s collaboration with an artist who has, for better or for worse, made it into the art historical canon is the most original in the show—and not necessarily in a good way! Made with Damien Hirst, The Immortals presents ping-pong purgatory: a blown table tennis ball hovers in the air above a table affixed with monochromatic death masks of The Beatles. What did the Fab Four do to deserve this fate?! Still, The Immortals is certainly novel, as one of the worst artworks I’ve ever laid eyes on. I wanted to take it home!

Some critics who have relished taking the piss out of These Thoughts May Disappear have excoriated White’s reductive art historical borrowing. Most biting is The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, who writes, “White’s confused and pretentious idea of what contemporary art is – readymades! Installations! – is at the intellectual level of a 12-year-old who has just visited Tate Modern for the first time.” Geez! Lighten up, Jonathan! Could a 12-year-old make Pig Tails, a painting consisting of three messily spray-painted curly-cue screws? Ok… maybe. Still, I hesitate to go full “I’ve seen it all before,” if only to avoid appearing as aging and cranky as Hilton Als did about the Whitney Biennial. Plus, I have some sympathy for White’s obvious and oblivious appropriation of artistic styles since his music is also grounded in obsessive snatching from his influences, from covers of legendary standards, like “St. James Infirmary Blues,” to his throwback blues guitar riffs to his strict-to-the-level of authoritarian conceptual color schemes. I mean, hey! The White Stripes DID release an album called De Stijl, an art movement still very much present in White’s visual world given the sheer amount of red, blue, and yellow in Newport Street Gallery.

Plus, what primarily stands out in White’s atrocious art is not so much his Modern Art 101 idea mining, but his corny sense of humor that pervades the entire exhibition! From wine-mouthed Joker Joe to the mangled Comfy Coupe, Jack’s got jokes! Like the aforementioned Pig Tails, much of the hokey humor lies in his titles, from the erect construction pylon candle, Construction Site Birthday Cake, to the much more morbid, Hypnotize Children, another black panel embedded with a lollipop with a Tim Burton-esque spiral that looks like it came out of The Grabber’s art studio. The jokes never end in White’s pun-y series, The Pallet Cleanse Corporation, a faux company that reimagines the utility of the oft-cast-off wooden shipping pallets by addressing a range of unnecessary or ridiculous needs, like selling nefarious black plastic apples. Some are formally funny, like Roadside Campfire, which gathers orange construction barricades into a pyramid, which White turns on its side so it juts out from the wall (ART!). However, the titles do most of the heavy hack lifting, like Killer Whale, which reflects the black-and-white colors of orcas and the blue of the sea and sky. Killer Whale is not to be confused with Killer Whales, those same orca shades splattered with a spray of red, perhaps blood from a doomed seal…or if we’re lucky, a super yacht owner. Speaking of the garishly wealthy, White also jabs at his presidential nemesis in The Presidential Model, a white pallet slapped with the same Vegas Versailles gold spray-painted Home Depot plastic schlock that a staffer (maybe sidekick human printer Natalie Harp?) hot-glue-gunned to the walls of the Oval Office. I’ll admit, although I detest Trump art, I laughed. You got me, Jack.

And maybe this is why I can appreciate (have I become soft?) White’s abysmal art while also acknowledging that it’s yet another aesthetic abomination from a famous person who lands opportunities other, more talented artists cannot. I mean, hey, at least he’s trying to have fun with it, which is more than I can say for a lot of shows. Maybe a bit TOO much fun. So much so that I wondered if White’s real repressed desire is not to be a visual artist at all, but a stand-up comedian. He wouldn’t be alone! Remember Madonna’s short set at the Comedy Cellar with Amy Schumer? God help us. Which raises a question: which is worse, the celebrity artist or the celebrity stand-up comedian? Or the celebrity comedy artist?