In a headnote to an 1886 Supreme Court ruling, Chief Justice Morrison Waite expressed the opinion that corporations are “persons” within the intended meaning of the 14th Amendment. Equal protection under the law would no longer be limited to “natural persons” and the precedent would be cited repeatedly in subsequent cases on corporate rights. Two recent cases, Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) further expanded these rights well beyond their intended scope. The focus of Trout’s exhibition is a series of paintings depicting possible manifestations of a “corporate person”. Trout conflates the acute subjectivity of the aforementioned judicial interpretations with strategies employed in abstract art and uses this association as a point of departure for the work in the exhibition. Each painting’s shaped support is based on one or a number of corporate logos—the logo being the supposed “face” of the corporate body. Consisting of a palette of red, blue, and black, the paintings intersect the visual languages of modernist tropes, corporate branding and national flags. Stock medical illustrations collected online render the corporate body as an arrangement of disassociated parts. In their combination of bodily, financial and political symbols the paintings make visual the latent absurdity that “corporate personhood” has become.
The exhibition also includes a series of framed photos of political cartoons. The cartoons have been altered to mimic the colors and compositions of Kazimir Malevich’s suprematist paintings. Malevich’s suprematism, a movement concerned with “the primacy of pure feeling in [art]”, utilized basic geometric forms in its pursuit of an ideal “non-objective creation”. Much like the abstract artist, U.S. Supreme Court justices, in their extreme redefinition of personhood, have operated from a similarly solipsistic position.
In the video Visually Similar Images Trout feeds jpegs of the paintings in the exhibition into Google’s reverse image search, then scrolls through the content it presents as “visually similar”. Trout’s approach to painting is born out of the ubiquity of graphic symbols in modern society. These colorful, simplistic designs are employed to disseminate information, foster desire, and drive commerce. The lineage of abstract art has been co-opted within these transactional channels; no longer invoking the abstract artist’s ideals, but operating in tandem with capitalism’s pervasive requests for time, money, and data. For Trout it seems impossible for images to exist outside of these mechanisms, leaving few avenues for painting as a socially relevant action. As strategies that distort and dehumanize are now implemented across all media, within our political discourse, and by corporate persons, the subjective gestures embedded within abstract art grow increasingly suspect. If there is still room for the artist, perhaps it lies in engaging those strategies critically.
Ian Trout lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2011.