TMR Creative Collective

By Red, Guest Writer

“I fantasize about a hospital/ the army, asylum, confinement, in prison/ any place where there’s a cot to clear my vision”

– Jack White, ‘That Black Bat Licorice’

Introduction

On July 2, 2014, a group of 40 people were called to an abandoned building in London’s Strand district for what they had been told was a medical appointment with contagion disease specialists Vescovo & Co. After being separated from their belongings and told to change into scrubs and face masks, they all went through different but always perplexing medical tests before being ushered into a smoke-filled room to the sound of an alarm. The general atmosphere of anxiety and confusion quickly turned to euphoria when a white screen fell to reveal rock musician Jack White and his band, who proceeded to play a 30-minute set to the small crowd. White ultimately fell to the floor, convulsing, before being carted away to an ambulance. “We all poured out of the building, still in our surgical gowns, a sudden tide of blue washing onto the pavement outside”, writes Guardian columnist Laura Barton. The event was over, and its audience carried no proof of it but their memories, their scrubs, and a handwritten prescription from “Dr White”.

Jack White (born John Anthony Gillis) is most well-known for his ongoing career as a rock musician that took off in the 2000s with his band The White Stripes. However, White has worked in a myriad of other media including sculpture, poetryand interior design. These other artistic endeavors have spilled onto his musical career, both in terms of recorded (it can be argued that his work with vinyl records is an art form in itself) and live performances. The July 2 secret show followed in a tradition of playing small, unusual venues with little to no publicity. However, it pushed the concept much further, resulting in something closer to performance art than a mere concert.

The Vescovo & Co show stands as a striking example of intermedia performance art. Through it, we bear witness to a novel use of technology in the live music scene; one that does not attempt to make the experience last beyond the moment itself, but rather, to better immerse the audience in it and to create a “larger-than-life” performance. Online and digital technologies were not used to “digitize” and immortalize the event; in fact, most online traces of the event have disappeared entirely, and its memory lives on thanks to fan-run media. White and his team used digital technology to enhance the physical/here-and-now of the event, creating an immersive narrative that preceded the show and anchored it in a physical and digital sur-reality.

Creating a new physical and digital surreality

Behind the few hours of the Vescovo show proper was an intricate online treasure hunt that led fans away from the familiar and cemented the performance in a world of its own; one might even say that the performance started long before the night of July 2. According to attendee Helen Coventry, “[the] Vescovo and Co experience started with a video posted to social media by Third Man Records in June 2014.” The video in question, titled “How to Stop Contagious Infection Part III” was posted on The Wellcome Library’s YouTube channel. By using an institutionally trusted website to post the starting point of the Vescovo rabbit hole, White separated this experience from the rest of his work. The growing alienation from the usual imagery and symbols associated with him helped create confusion and doubt in the participants. Once Third Man (White’s record label) posted the video, the references to what the attendees expected grew more and more obscure; the (now defunct) Vescovo&Co website only featured a small three-vial logo and a blue/white/black color scheme as a tie to White’s intricate self-presentation.

Once the performance went physical, it is clear from attendee testimonies that most felt completely cut off from this familiar world. One of them, Helen Coventry, writes the following:

“When the room appeared to be full, we were asked to give in our papers and all were handed a sample bottle full of liquid from a metal tray. We were told to drink the liquid, nearly everyone was hesitant- up to this point, there was no definite sign that this was affiliated with Jack White and we were all trusting the process probably more than we should have!”

A disruptive and disturbing event

Though Jack White is by no means an underground performance artist, the Vescovo show was arguably an example of performance art in line with the traditions of “happenings”, if we follow Susan Sontag’s definition thereof: “the event seems designed to tease and abuse the audience. […] There is no attempt to cater to the audience’s desire to see everything. In fact this is often deliberately frustrated, by performing some of the events in semi-darkness or by having events go on in different rooms simultaneously.”

If the Vescovo show does not fit the “non-narrative” aspect of Sontag’s definition of a happening, it does check many other boxes by having a (more or less) clueless audience subjected to a decidedly strange and jarring experience. The disturbing nature of the show is best shown through audience testimonials. The fan forum “White Swirl” contains perhaps the most exhaustive documentation of the community’s reactions to the event as it happened in real time. 

White Swirl user Dmdv1 writes that “When they led us out into the street still in our gowns people looked genuinely shellshocked.” Others describe the set design as “really creepy but very cool” and mention that “I was glad I was in one of the later groups as it was all a bit too real – like joining a lunatic asylum. Definite cabin fever.”

The Vescovo legacy: avoiding reification for better mythmaking?

For all its strangeness, the context of the Vescovo performance was still that of a relatively mainstream/marketable rock scene, it being a promotional event for the release of White’s new album Lazaretto. However, the event itself was decidedly not conceived as marketable or commodified, due to its highly secretive and disturbing nature. The artist chose to play on the trust of an already-established audience and see how far they were willing to go.

Though the Vescovo show has receded into relative obscurity since 2014, it is not inconceivable that it should one day be commodified. White is a keen businessman who is known to have professional recordings of nearly all his shows since the beginning of his career. He has released many of them on vinyl or through streaming services years or even decades later. An exchange with David James Swanson, the photographer for the event, let me know that there are a great many unreleased pictures from the Vescovo show that he isnot allowed to share with me at the moment. This may be to keep up the mystique of the event as it happened, to prevent the sanctity of the “here and now” from being spoiled; but it very well may be for more commercial reasons.

Conclusion

Writing about the Vescovo show would not be complete without a retrospective look at its thematic choices in a post-COVID outbreak world. This mise en scene of a world filled with illness, where the threat of contamination hovers above us like a sword of Damocles, has become very real since 2014. Because of this, the surreal nature of the performance has undoubtedly evolved; but in which way? To some, the experience of attending a concert in face masks for fear of contagion is perhaps too real to still appear strange. White himself seems to have acknowledged this (notably in a 2020 SNL performance where he played “Jesus Is Coming Soon”, a blues song dating back to the Spanish Flu epidemic). However, the Vescovo performance also gains an uncannily visionary nature post-2020. Should it ever gain traction outside of the White fan community, it might be interpreted or experienced in entirely different ways, breaking the small world that was so carefully built around it.

Bibliography

Barton, Laura. “Jack White’s Secret London Gig: Surgical Masks, Dry Ice and Disease.” The Guardian, July 3, 2014, sec. Music. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/jul/03/jack-white-secret-london-gig-punchdrunk-theatre.

Helen Coventry. My Vescovo & Co Experience, December 14, 2023.

How to Stop Contagious Infection Part III, Vescovo&Co(1948), 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ICUvVp24I.

Jack White Art & Design. “Jack White Art & Design.” Accessed December 16, 2023. https://jackwhiteartanddesign.com/.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. http://archive.org/details/againstinterpret0000unse.

“Vescovo & Co – White Swirl.” Accessed December 15, 2023. http://www.whiteswirl.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=10526.