Changing the Subject: The Art of Tristan Eaton
In the popular imagination, artists are often thought to create for the sake of creating, unfettered by the demands of the market-driven world outside their studios. Though many well-known artists have muddled the boundaries between art and commerce (Jeff Koons comes to mind), the two realms have a contentious relationship. Business savvy artists are often met with suspicious glances, especially in the street art and graffiti worlds. Street art evokes rebellion—even in an age when it’s embraced by mainstream art institutions—and its artists are often measured up to ideals that conflict with the real-world demands of making a living.
Over his twenty-year-long career, Los Angeles-based artist Tristan Eaton has traversed various realms of the visual arts with little regard for their underlying ideologies, whether pursuing fine art, commercial work, or otherwise. He seems to act as a mercenary, grabbing whatever opportunity comes his way without identifying with any particular label.
An art school dropout, Eaton has been working as a full time artist since his teenage years in Detroit. He forged his identity tagging trains, designing rave posters and creating irreverent illustrations for cult humor magazine Orbit. When he was just 18, ©POP Gallery (an influential lowbrow art space) championed his work and gave him his debut show. In the same year, he designed his first toy for Fisher-Price. Encouraged by local painters who juggled fruitful illustration careers, Eaton jumped at the opportunity to apply his creativity to whatever project came his way.
Eaton’s successful design career has grown in tandem with his muralism and studio practice over the past two decades. His endeavors have been lofty and diverse. He has shown at prestigious London gallery Lazarides and painted monumental murals everywhere from Germany to Guam. He has created ads for the likes of Nike and Disney. He co-designed the original Dunny, Kid Robot’s most iconic vinyl toy. His prolific client work has yielded financial stability and widespread exposure. Yet after a ten years of owning and operating his New York-based design company, Thunderdog Studios, Eaton started to feel stifled. In 2012, he relocated to L.A., the city where he spent his early childhood, and began to scale back on his commissions.
“I’m in an in-between phase where I’m trying to live off my fine art,” said the artist with an unexpectedly anticipatory tone during our October phone conversation, his engine revving in the background. He had just gotten back from Paris, where he painted a high-profile, multi-story mural and was on his way to his studio to wrap up a body of work for his first solo show in years, Changing the Subject at Above Second Gallery in Hong Kong.
This was a surprising admittance from someone with Eaton’s breadth of experience. His level of accomplishment in various creative fields seemed to speak for itself. But for Eaton, fine art was a point of vulnerability. He had grown comfortable with illustration. One could judge an illustration’s success according to a client’s demands, he explained. Focusing on his personal work meant subjecting himself to the whims of the precarious art market. While he had always been passionate about his fine art, he had never relied on it for survival.
Furthermore, Eaton’s career had largely been enacted through personas and aliases. From 2008 to 2012, he had been exhibiting in galleries and creating guerilla installations under the guise of TrustoCorp, the nebulous pseudo-corporation [Hi-Fructose Volume 22], just before Shepard Fairey accidentally revealed Eaton’s true identity online. By that point, art world acquaintances had begun to guess that Eaton was behind Trusto’s satirical product design and socially-critical street art. When Fairey obliviously named Eaton as the man behind TrustoCorp in a blog post, Eaton took it as a sign to put the project to rest.
“If I didn’t put all that energy into Trusto, I wouldn’t have arrived in the place where I am now,” reflected Eaton. “I feel like for the first time I’m making work that feels the most like me. It carries a bit of the figurative aspect of my personal work but also carries through some of the graphic visuals and public commentary of TrustoCorp. That wasn’t my intention from the beginning. It was all kind of like, go balls out and see what happens and see where it takes you.”
Now that he’s fully focused on his personal art—and removed from the demands of both his alter ego and his commercial clients—it seems that Eaton has embraced the divergent aesthetics he had previous divided into different creative selves. His latest murals and studio works are like hand-painted collages. Characters’ silhouettes contain a smattering of cartoons, realistic portraits, typography, and patterns that form a cohesive whole despite their disparate origins. Classic movie stars’ faces are juxtaposed with baroque designs and suggestive text. The aggressive satire of TrustoCorp comes across with more subtlety. Open-ended phrases, like the word “CASH” conspicuously floating within an enormous shark silhouette he painted on a wall in Isla Mujeres, Mexico, allow more room for interpretation.
The anonymity of TrustoCorp had afforded Eaton the luxury of making controversial, scathing statements without facing public backlash or legal consequences. The year he started the project, he and his team at Thunderdog Studios were creating advertisements for a bevy of mainstream corporate clients. The post-Bush political climate left Eaton anxious to create outspoken work, but he felt that his livelihood as a designer required a somewhat neutral position.
TrustoCorp enabled him to shed his political correctness. He operated it like a brand, expertly subverting corporate marketing strategies with the knowledge he acquired in the field. He reverse-shoplifted fake products into supermarkets to snap unsuspecting shoppers out of their daze. He distributed posters and street signs around the country and effectively deployed an anti-consumerism propaganda campaigns in major cities nationwide. The moniker enabled him to spit venom at an industry he knew closely from the inside without losing the work that sustained him.
I feel like for the first time I’m making work that feels the most like me…”
“A lot of [my new work] is a puzzle of finding imagery that works together in a cool way that creates some kind of emotion and some sort of harmony. For me, that works out great because I like painting many different styles,” Eaton said. “I like painting realistically, I like painting cartoons, I like painting patterns, I like painting type. Now I can do that
in one image and feel completely satisfied at the end of the day because I can feel like I satisfied all my demons that are normally insatiable. Now I look at one of my walls and I feel like I’ve covered all the bases of what I like to paint.”
Where I wanted to end up from day one was to get to a point where I could be an artist living off my fine art, so I’m doing it now.””
Though they serve different interests, at their core, graffiti and branding operate in similar ways. Repeated over and over, a recognizable tag functions as an artist’s logo. An iconic street style can serve to advertise his or her other creative output and personal brand. It’s no wonder that so many former graffiti writers of Eaton’s generation have forayed into design careers.
But despite their theoretical similarities, street art and advertising ultimately serve opposing goals. Intentionally or not, writing on city walls threatens the power of corporate capitalism. Tags and murals reclaim public space for free expression at a time when seemingly every blank piece of real estate (physical and digital) is devoted to product placement. Now that he has taken a step back from doing commissions, Eaton candidly criticizes the overwhelming nature of mass marketing.
“It’s fucking horrible and it’s pandering and it’s nauseating. I hate advertising,” he exclaimed with a vehement frustration. “I’ve worked with almost every advertising agency out there and I’ve gotten to see how many talented creatives there are within the world of advertising. Sometimes advertising can create great art… Not all advertising is bad. But the way people are today, you have to pander to a short attention span.”
Nowadays, he’ll only take a commercial job on the condition that the company’s ethics are in line with his own and he is granted full creative freedom. After a whirlwind year of painting murals across the globe, Eaton is looking forward to settling down to focus on his painting practice, which he says he has neglected. Later this year, he will have his biggest solo show to date at Library Street Collective in Detroit and plans to release a monograph spanning nearly twenty years of his art.
“All through my career I’ve paid close attention to my gut and always focused on what’s honest and true for me,” contemplated Eaton. “When I want to do something, I work really fucking hard. And that gusto disappeared for me from many areas of my life and it was very, very apparent to me that I had to just focus on my personal work. Where I wanted to end up from day one was to get to a point where I could be an artist living off my fine art, so I’m doing it now.”*
This article originally appeared in Hi-fructose Issue 34, which is sold out. Get our latest issue in print by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
