Wondering at wickedness: Mark Lombardi's sinister and complex drawings ...

[struggle4progress]

... are his indictment of government and corporate intrigue and of a public that can't be bothered to connect the dots
By SARAH MILROY
Friday, September 10, 2004 - Page R27

When the American artist Mark Lombardi was found dead, hanging in his studio loft in Williamsburg, N.Y., back in March, 2000, some suspected foul play. After all, Lombardi, who was 48, had spent the previous seven years documenting the interconnected webs of government and corporate intrigue that thread through the global economy, detailing these relationships in his painstaking and meticulously researched drawings. <snip>

"Homeland Security came to see the show the day before it opened at Cornell University," says the exhibition's curator, Robert Hobbs. "One of the things they found so disconcerting was the evidence of one solitary citizen having amassed so much information. They were very interested in seeing the cards. We have included 1,500 of them in vitrines in the show, just to give a sense of the activity."

Lombardi called his drawings "narrative structures," and a careful system governed the types of lines that he used. Solid lines indicate the movement of influence, dotted lines the movement of assets and red the occurrence of terminal events: deaths, bankruptcies and court judgments. Some of his finished works span up to three metres in length, densely interwoven skeins of lines that link the perpetrators, one to the next. In the work titled George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stevens (c. 1979-90), for example, a bundle of lines flourishes in all directions from the node that represents James Bath (it looks a little like O'Hare on the United Airlines route map), a testament to Bath's central role in brokering the now well-documented Bush-Bin Laden family business relationship.

Another work, from 1996, documents the U.S. sale of nuclear and biological weapons to Saddam Hussein, guaranteed by a $5-billion (U.S.) "agricultural loan." The work is titled Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Reagan, Bush, Thatcher and the Arming of Iraq, c. 1979-90. <snip>

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040910/MILROY10/TPEntertainment/Art

[Logansquare]

1. "Who is James R. Bath?" the focal point of one of his drawings

It's really fascinating--too bad a U.S. paper can't (won't) do an article on his work.
http://www.wburg.com/0202/arts/lombardi.html

[struggle4progress]

2. Nice article! Thanks! eom

[teryang]

3. Lombardi's work is awesome-

...acurately reflecting the human relationships that have caused so much harm to our nation.