Jack White: A Modern case study in imbuing everyday objects with Art

Often described as the 'Willy Wonka' of rock, Detroit's Jack White sits somewhere between mad professor and traditional musician. This began in 2004 when White was in a two-piece band called 'The Upholsterers' while working as an upholsterer himself. After distributing their first single conventionally through a record label with subsequent concerts to promote and perform the material, White decided to shake things up with a radical re-definition of what it meant to record and release a song. White only printed one hundred copies of their second single 'Your Furniture Was Always Dead... I Was Just Afraid To Tell You' and subsequently hid the copies randomly inside subtle holes and cavities he had made, and then covered within the physical pieces of furniture he worked on as an upholsterer.

For me, this immediately recalled some of the methods implemented by Dickinson in the presentation of her poetry, specifically through her 'envelope poems' as well as the fascicles, to a lesser extent. Between the work of both Dickinson and White, there is this idea that art somehow takes on greater value or significance when it is presented, examined, or experienced literally and figuratively through mundane elements of every day life. The reasons for this are ambiguous by definition. However, we might speculate that the inherent irony in appropriating every-day objects in order to construct vast and elaborate meanings, forces us to reconsider our interpretation of the work's content at multiple levels of analysis, thus rendering it thought-provoking. Furthermore, there is an element of surprise here as we would not expect an envelope to provide the medium for philosophical ruminations on the nature of existence - just as we would not expect to accidentally break a table and then find a vinyl recording inside among the splinters and sawdust.

In the case of White's single, two of the hundred singles have been reported to his current record label as having been found. The rest, as stated in the article posted below, are "no doubt sitting in random suburban Detroit living rooms" which I think is astonishing in the sense that it challenges our common understanding of the artist's usual behaviors. Typically, artists and writers seek to inform and influence (as epitomized by such writers as Emerson and Thoreau) but to hide one's own work in this way, circumvents this segment of the artistic process and renders the artistic output private. This too is reflected in Dickinson's 'envelope poems' which we can infer from the medium in which they are presented, are personal and profound in nature but are also intended to communicate meaning, just not in an explicit or large way as we might expect from other writers.

Evidently, the respective motives of Dickinson and White will remain unknown, however their specific and eccentric methods are certainly intriguing and encourage me to reflect personally on my own artistic output while also forcing me to consider the significance of such methods in the meanings they construct in their work.