Benjamin Edwards

Making one city that takes from everywhere

Because the composition is so complicated and so systematic, we are curious about the process. Could you tell us how you start painting? At first you start with computer graphic images and project them on canvas?

Right. Once I get the digital images made, I use different methods to get it onto the canvas. I use a digital projector and masking tape. I will cover the painting with masking tape, draw the shapes and cut them out. Later in the painting I start using a vinyl cutter. If you trace out your drawing on the computer first, the machine tells the cutter where to cut. It gives you a sheet of vinyl with a complicated stencil that you can put on the painting and remove the area that you want to paint, and that becomes a stencil. So basically it’s a series of layers of shapes that don’t overlap, and each painting has about seven or eight layers in all.

Do you use a soft cloth for the texture here?

I use different textures that I can mix with acrylic, like sand and there is this black powder that’s made from tires. It’s chopped up really fine into powder. I apply that with a big squeegee. Lay the painting down on the ground and pour the stuff on and smooth it out with squeegee to get it nice and uniform. It’s not like you drag the squeegee across in one motion like silkscreen. You use the squeegee like a big palette knife. Actually what I did is I’d have three people put it on the ground, pour the stuff down, and then have three people with big squeegees smoothing it all out. Almost like cement or something like that on a sidewalk.

I’d like to ask you about the image source of Democracity, this exhibiton. You had the image from World Fair(1939) as a reference.

This was a big display, inside of a big sphere, it was a very popular exhibition showing what a future city would look like. This is sort of my take on that vision realized, not necessary in America, but anywhere city, just a globalized city.

Maybe also Tokyo?

Yes, my larger project is to make one city that takes from everywhere, almost as if you could take different cities from around the world and overlay them into one place, including virtual places and real places. So what I’ve been doing is building all this architectures to make a whole city out of it. The way that I make architecture is my assistant and I make three-dimensional computer models of actual buildings that we find, sometimes from satellite imagery. A lot of the buildings for this group of paintings come from Washington D.C. because they were used for a commission project that I was doing for a large painting. But we keep this large archive of buildings from all kinds of different places; in fact, when I was out walking around here I was taking pictures of buildings and I’ll bring them back and make models. We’ll put them into the mix.

You refer to photos of real buildings and also sources from books and Internet?

For a real building what I do is I take a picture of it from… sometimes from all the way around but sometimes just one picture. As long as I know where the building was from, I can go back and find it with satellite imagery. And then you can actually look at it all the way around with satellite imagery and that’s a much better way to look at the building to make a model of it rather than just taking it from the ground.

I see. This time you changed the viewpoint to a bird view.

Right. This is the first time that I used this viewpoint looking down on it. My paintings have always been on the ground looking, on eye level. For these paintings I wanted to see what it would look like. The way I started out the composition is to use very simple cubes. So this composition would start out with cube here, cube, cube, cube… very simple blocks. And I know that there is going to be a road here etcetera. All of them start out with simple blocks. We start filling those blocks in with the actual architecture we’ve made and it is interesting to see how it fills in, what it looks like.

It seems like you are curious about representation of Utopias for postmodern ages.

Well these (World Fair, 1939) are depictions of not a Utopia necessarily but how someone implemented the idea of utopia. Going back to this idea, this was a utopia, someone went ahead and tried to make it but it’s not a utopia. A lot of my paintings are about the disconnect between utopia and just mundane places, the real world. But they are also about a hyper-capitalist, hyper-consumerist type of world that believes that it is fulfilling some kind of utopia at the same time. In America over the last several decades, there has been this belief that we are on a way to some utopia; that we are the model of western liberal democracy or whatever, this belief in the free market and a sort of very frenetic hyper-capitalism. It’s about the idea that society has this belief in technology and progress, things like that. It’s also about just sprawl, an all-over uniformly chaotic, urban landscape.

For the each title, you referred words of Le Corbusier. Like this title (Immense Industrial Undertakings do not Require Great Men) is very cynical, but very interesting.

I think a lot of them are just funny. You come across them in a book, and he has it just by itself in a page sometimes. It’s almost like he is yelling. Everything’s got exclamation points and is very forceful.

Very machismo.

Yes.

The gold building in “Immense Industrial Undertakings do not Require Great Men” is a temple?

No, it’s actually… the form of it comes from the central building of the 1893’s world’s fair, which is a domed structure, but then the parts that went into making it come from the Disney headquarters in California, so that’s where the colors come from. All of the objects that we used to make the headquarter building we transformed to match the form of the dome.

These buildings exist in Washington D.C.?

Some of them do, and some are based on corporate headquarter buildings. So there is the new Bank of America building in New York, there is News Corp., Time Warner, GM, GE, these kinds of major American corporations.

So how do you choose the building?

A lot of these buildings are chosen to make the large painting that came before these. I was trying to choose a mixture of defense contractors and media companies, oil companies, just a grouping of corporations that I thought are sort of to blame a little bit for the mess that we’ve gotten into over the last eight years. Like the media companies were complicit in the lead-up to the war and not really questioning anything, oil companies, obviously, and defense contractors. It’s pretty obvious. That painting was really about the infiltration of the corporate world into government. The corruption involved and the mess of all. For that large painting that I made, I constructed this whole city. These paintings are really about taking the camera that was in that one spot to make that one painting and taking it and looking down on the city from different viewpoints, basically just getting out of the one camera view and being able to look at it from different perspectives. So these paintings and the large paintings are very related.

It’s part of the one big city.

Yes.

So the city is constructed with different areas?

Well this one (Machines for Living), these are all apartment buildings. A lot of apartment buildings are taken from buildings near my studio that have just gone up in Washington built in the last year or so. The composition is sort of inspired by a Le Corbusier image, and it’s almost an exact replica of one of the illustrations in this book. You look down and you see these towers that are arranged in the same checkerboard formation. In the other paintings (The Avenue of Patriots), like this painting over here is based on K St., which I don’t know if you know. It’s a street in Washington D.C. where all of the lobbyists have their offices. Lobbyists are people who try to influence members of the government, they try to get them to pass laws that are favorable to their industries… take them out to dinner, go on golf trips…they work for corporations, and their job is to try to influence members of the government. So in that painting (Worship) there is a tall building in the middle, that’s this building right here, the blue tower.

It’s very monumental.

Yeah. There is actually a good video on youtube about that painting. It’s like a minute and half. It really quickly goes through my process. I should show it to you.