Jack White’s Visual Art at Newport Street Gallery Shows a Musician Adrift

The gallery space in London sets a specific stage. Jack White’s foray into visual art, housed at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, assembles the kind of high-profile collaborators that signal access. Ai Weiwei customised an amplifier with a rude, button-built expletive. Hirst himself offered a spin painting and a model of a rotting cow’s head. The names are there, the objects are placed, yet the show fails to turn that adjacency into anything with a pulse.

White’s musical legacy built itself on a raw, blues-based directness that made the White Stripes’ minimalism feel vast. That sensibility doesn’t make the jump to canvas or sculpture. A series built around a found early 20th-century statuette, transformed into a character called Ukulele Joe, tries to channel some ghost of American music history. The results are hard, glossy patterns stripped of any real mood. There is a nod to De Stijl, a Mondrian grid turned into furniture, but the reference stays decorative. It gestures without saying much.

The puzzling thing is how the works sidestep the territory White actually inhabits. He lives in Nashville. He paid a significant sum for an acetate of Elvis Presley’s first recording. He reveres Son House and the old bluesmen. An exhibition that dug into that “Old, Weird America” could have been genuinely disquieting. What stands in the gallery instead feels like an empty, bright-coloured rehearsal of ideas that other people have long since worn out.

Art rock, it turns out, is not the same thing as art. The records still carry the weight. The sounds are still there, fragile and powerful when they hit. But in this room, the atmospheric danger that once clung to the music is nowhere to be found. All the volume is up, and nothing cuts through.