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ART REVIEW; Webs Connecting the Power Brokers, the Money and, Ultimately, the World
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: November 14, 2003
Mark Lombardi was onto something before he committed suicide in 2000. His drawings -- you could call them maps or charts, and they also have some connection with 19th-century panoramas -- track global financial fiascos and related political shenanigans, mostly of the 1980's and 90's. Some drawings are as much as 10 feet wide, rather lightly marked in pencil with arrows and names: delicate spider webs of scandal.
The drawings chart the flow of money and back-room connections, as Lombardi believed he could piece them together from diverse published accounts, involving Charles H. Keating Jr. and Lincoln Savings and Loan; the Vatican bank; money laundering, drug dealing, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Bank of Commerce and Credit International; Bill Clinton, the Lippo Group and Jackson T. Stephens; George W. Bush, Jackson T. Stephens and Harken Energy; the arming of Iraq during the 1980's by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush; and the flow of cash through Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in Italy.
And so on. Let's skip the specifics, which are complicated and can be gleaned from the show's catalog, by Robert Hobbs, the curator. They are not really what make Lombardi's work compelling anyway. Or, to be more precise, Lombardi's art, while scrupulous and eye-opening, is not really about specifics, although it can first appear to be because his drawings look so meticulously made. When you look more closely you realize that the charts are hard to decipher and short on details. This is a failing only for those people who mistakenly expect Lombardi to be an investigative reporter, not an artist.
His reputation was finally picking up before he hanged himself, at 48, and since his death it has picked up further. This show was eagerly anticipated, partly, no doubt, because Lombardi appeals to the political junkies and activists in the art world, but also, I think, because his drawings, which are oddly, almost unexpectedly beautiful, with their refined arcs and plain print, tap into a deeper vein of human experience.
They are examples of how good artists, whether they are painting flowers and squares or making charts of nefarious bank transactions, create their own visual sense of the world, bringing order to life. In a sense, Lombardi was an abstractionist: he abstracted the world, or those parts of it that fascinated him, into charts, which are like states of mind, elegant representations in looping lines and minimalist terms of how certain things may be and also how they may have changed over time. The works conceptually collapse time and space.
The relevance of the art, especially since 9/11, obviously stems from a general sense that the world has come to seem more unsafe, with criminal networks operating in the shadows and often in cahoots with the powers that be. Lombardi's art anticipated this state of psychological discontent and paranoia. Its lack of specifics, the purposeful consequence of condensing vast information, can be seen as a metaphor for the elusiveness of truth that was Lombardi's real subject.
He can be linked to a line of obsessives and outsiders, from Blake to Adolf Wölfli, at the same time owing a debt to political artists like Hans Haacke. I might add that there is a slightly antique look to his work: he is akin to some medieval cosmologist, charting a mysterious universe.
Born in Syracuse in 1951, Lombardi worked as a reference librarian and ran a gallery in Houston while painting abstractions before he hit on his mature style relatively late in the game. He came up with his idea for making charts while talking on the phone with a friend in 1993 about a bank scandal in the news; to keep the names and their connections straight, he started doodling arrows. The charts grew bigger and bigger. He compiled information culled from newspapers and books on index cards, which totaled more than 14,000 by the end.
Mr. Hobbs cites Michel Foucault and his writings about archives of knowledge. I could add Borges and his labyrinth. It is as if these charts could be indefinitely expanded until every one of them were connected and perhaps, in the end, every one of us fitted into them: a network of ties reaching toward infinity, bringing the whole world together in an immense web. Six degrees of separation becomes 60, then six million, then six billion.
Not that the scandals Lombardi charted were hypothetical or their scoundrels theoretical. Just that there is a utopian aspect to Lombardi, a philosophical aspiration. In the 1930's Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, made a flowchart for modernism, a near-maniacal drawing of names and arrows, a utopian vision for explaining the order of things; ingenious, inevitably flawed, its ambition was awesome and poetic.
I happened to be in the Drawing Center when the Lombardi show was being installed and several consultants to the Department of Homeland Security came in to take a look. They said they found the work revelatory, not because the financial and political connections he mapped were new to them, but because Lombardi showed them an elegant way to array disparate information and make sense of things, which they thought might be useful to their security efforts. I didn't know whether to find that response comforting or alarming, but I saw exactly what they meant.
Original article posted here.
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