BENJAMIN EDWARDS  WRITINGS   The Origins of Republic, 2005 
THE ORIGINS OF REPUBLIC

In the summer of 2001 as I was completing work for my first solo exhibition in New York, I began thinking about a more expansive project than what I had done to date. I felt that my paintings and projects were too conceptually specific to time and place to allow some of the deeper questions I had on my mind to come up to the surface. I wanted to explore a virtual world of my own making that could act as a sort of processor and assimilator of various interests that seemed only loosely connected. I thought of this world not as an end in itself, that is, not as a navigable virtual environment, but as a structural means of study to achieve a more cohesive narrative in my paintings. From this point on, my paintings wouldn’t take place in Los Angeles or Washington, DC, but in a fictional, timeless place that I began to call Republic. 

This word had been in the back of my mind since the late ’80s and early ’90s when I first studied Jean Baudrillard’s ideas of the simulacrum and hyper-reality, which led me back to the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic. Suddenly I began to see the built environment (as well as the whole of visual culture) around me as less than real and more like stage sets put up by someone or something. I went about my work as an artist, taking photographs of places while driving around cities and suburbs, and then using them to make paintings of my experiences; but I always had the feeling that as an artist I was only looking at the shadows on the wall of the cave and not at the underlying processes and systems that drove the effects. 
It was later in the ’90s when I began to study the history of utopias that the word “republic” took on a deeper personal meaning. Plato’s vision of an ideal society was the seed that produced a whole lineage of utopias, from Thomas More in the early 16th century to socialists in the 19th century, and then the tragic courses pursued by Hitler and Stalin. However dark the results—no one would ever want to live in Plato’s ideal city—I am continually fascinated by this naively optimistic idea of the perfect society, how it has driven history, and how it still occasionally rears its head in advertising and politics. Do we still believe in progress? How do we value public good versus individual gain? In our rejection of the very idea of an ideal society, what have we lost, and can we ever get it back? 
In the last few years, Republic has taken on a more political meaning for me as I’ve watched the giddy Pax Americana of the Clinton years spiral downward into the dark and fearsome Empire of Bush II. The quadruple tragedy of the failure of American democracy in the 2000 presidential elections, the September 11 attacks, the administration’s subsequent exploitation of that day for political purposes, and the severely misguided invasion of Iraq has led me to seriously wonder what country I’m living in now, and if it can still be called a republic. 
It’s difficult to calculate the impact of a single historical event on a person’s life, particularly one as momentous and far-reaching as 9/11. I remember sitting in my studio poring over plans of cities from history and thinking about how to use them to build my own grandiose and ceremonial city while Ground Zero still smoldered about a mile away. I suspect that my thinking, and thus my work, is like a stiff piece of fabric: flexible enough to accommodate change but resistant enough to hold its own shape. Events like 9/11 and the birth of my daughter in 2002 were forceful enough to alter the form but not its essence. These two events probably further inspired me to want to build something new, but the initial desire was already there. 
Brice Marden once said that he paints what he wants to see. In 1997, I started to see the kind of place that I wanted to build. With Conglomerate I departed from my usual method of merely reproducing a place that I had seen and instead put several places together to form something new. I was inspired by the mega-mergers and corporate consolidation that had begun to heat up along with the US economy, and I had intended to make something familiar but with exaggerated features, as if to extend the phenomenon to its logical conclusion. This new way of constructing a place was akin to a novelist creating a character from a composite of sources, and I found that a vast new space opened up in my work, a space for me to imagine a story of which this newly constructed place was a part. 
Around this time I read something that helped to put this vision in context. In Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, written in 1888, the main character leaves the late 19th century and wakes up in the year 2000 to find the marvels of a perfect, harmonious socialist utopia. The character is subsequently introduced to the millennial codes of shopping: there’s a distribution center that has everything one could think of, there are no signs or advertising because none are needed, and identical distribution centers can be found within a five or ten minute walk from any residence. It struck me that this is the world that Wal-Mart has been striving for: one big, glorious merger to end all mergers. I started to think about how even such polar opposite visions of utopia, communist and capitalist, could end up in the same place, one of perfect uniformity. 
Since this time I have been constantly asking myself what a capitalist utopia looks like? What are the ideal forms and the values of capitalism? The images, styles, and attitudes presented to us in advertising represent only partial vignettes of a larger ideological picture. One can get a glimpse of a perfectly dynamic world and its connected inhabitants by watching cell phone or financial services ads. On the other hand, corporations like Disney sell us the comfort and security of tradition. It’s almost as if there’s some grand scheme to push us forward to drive the economy and then pull us back to make us feel safe, sometimes simultaneously.
What will this capitalist vision look like in 100 years? In 1,000 years? I like to think of the world I’m trying to paint as one imagined from the eyes of an artist as far from our present situation as we are from ancient Rome. Or, perhaps Republic is the city I now live in, Washington, DC, seen through the fantasy of a perfect capitalist, contradictions and all.