The Triumph of Democracy, 2007-2012, oil on canvas, 84" x 252"
Over the last ten years my paintings have explored the world of global capitalism from the point of view of the average consumer. More recently, I have begun to question the place of the utopian spirit in our culture’s political philosophy, contrasting the dominance of today’s world order with the ghost-ideologies that gave rise to it. My paintings now depict a virtual meta-world, a fictional place that can theoretically encompass any city, real or imagined, physical or virtual. I use this world as a vehicle to not only reflect the true world in which we now find ourselves, but to question where we might be going as a society, particularly with respect to the nexus between technology and the concentration of capital and power, both corporate and political.
I created this fictional world in 2002 and called it Republic, in recognition of Plato’s work as the foundation of the very idea of a utopia, as well as an affirmation to myself that, yes, our nation is still a republic. It’s no coincidence that I moved to Washington, D.C. this same year. There are times when my new hometown plays a leading role in this city of my imagination. Sometimes I wonder if Republic is in fact Washington as imagined by a future and distant civilization, long after today’s headlines have become the firm certainty of history.
The Triumph of Democracy was born out of another group of paintings I began in 2007. These are loosely based on The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole. Painted in the 1830s, these works show a fictional civilization’s rise and fall, and they are an early warning to a young republic as it grew from an agrarian society into an industrial one. Cole clearly foresaw our imperial aspirations. Whether or not to accept this narrative is open to debate. I believe no one should adopt a fatalistic attitude about our future as a society. At the same time, the events of the last seven years and the marked shift in mood and confidence cannot be ignored. The question of decline is clearly in the public consciousness.
What is not open to debate is that at the close of the twentieth century and at the dawn of the twenty-first, our world has been in the vicinity of Thomas Cole’s Consummation, the centerpiece of The Course of Empire. One does not have to accept the idea that history has reached its end through the triumph of liberal democracy to see that for all of our flaws we have achieved a pinnacle of civilization. The vital questions to me are these: Are we in decline and can we recover? Though we appear triumphant on the outside, is our society healthy on the inside? If not, can our flaws be cured by our political system, or are our problems deeply structural and perhaps fatal? In The Triumph of Democracy I will leave that for the viewer to interpret and in the political arena for the citizen, not history, to decide.
Benjamin Edwards
December, 2007