The Sinister Beauty of Global Conspiracies

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Sunday, October 26, 2003
The Sinister Beauty of Global Conspiracies
By ELEANOR HEARTNEY
 
Conspiracy theories are a grand old American tradition
— the mother of them all being the speculation
surrounding President John F. Kennedy's assassination.
In the entertainment field, paranoia sells — from the
novels of Tom Clancy to the "X-Files" to an endless
series of Hollywood blockbusters. After pornography,
among the most visited sites on the Internet are those
devoted to conspiracies.

But what if it's all true? The conspiracy industry,
with its mostly unproved if not unprovable charges of
vast webs of shadowy operatives, secret political
alliances and illicit money channels, has been given a
boost by recent events. The Sept. 11 attacks provided
a glimpse into a world of loosely bound international
terrorist cells while inspiring a host of wild charges
about the secret involvement of the United States and
other governments. The Enron scandal uncovered a
network of off-the-books partnerships, and, more
recently, the director Michael Moore announced that
his next documentary, "Fahrenheit 911," would delve
into connections between the Bush and bin Laden
families.

Mark Lombardi would not have been surprised, as can be
seen in "Global Networks," an exhibition of his
delicate filigree drawings that map his version of the
flow of global capital. The show opens on Saturday at
the Drawing Center in SoHo and remains on view through
Dec. 17. In these works, solid and broken lines,
circles and squiggles enmesh the names of
organizations and individuals in webs of often
surprising interconnections. One drawing charts the
workings of the Vatican Bank, in the process linking
its directors to the Mafia and the illegal transport
of firearms.

Another purports to show how Iraq was armed in the
1980's through a secret scheme supposedly involving
the top levels of the American and British governments
and Italy's largest bank, the Banca Nazionale del
Lavoro. Yet another follows the course by which the
Bank of Commerce and Credit, International (B.C.C.I.)
was accused of having become a funnel for a variety of
illegal operations, including laundering drug money,
supporting the Iran-Contra operation and backing
Afghan Mujahedeen fighters.

Lombardi died, a suicide, at 48 in March 2000.
(Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, those closest to
him cite a series of personal reversals.) Since then,
his work has attracted a growing body of admirers. One
of them is Robert Hobbs, a professor of art history at
Virginia Commonwealth University and the curator of
this exhibition, which was organized under the
auspices of Independent Curators Inc. 

[...]

Mr. Hobbs was also intrigued that the drawings showed
only a sliver of a larger, inaccessible reality. "The
drawings exist," he said, "between what is known — the
people, the organizations, the court judgments — and
the unknown, which is what is between them. In that
sense, they are about the difference between the ideal
and the real."

Mr. Hobbs never got a chance to meet the artist. But
after hearing of Lombardi's death, he resolved to do
something to bring the work to a larger audience. This
turned out to be a job of monumental proportions.
Along with a studio full of complex, meticulously
delineated drawings, Lombardi left behind a file of
14,500 index cards with information on the subjects of
his investigations, all drawn from publicly available
sources. His tiny studio also contained hundreds of
books on art, politics, banking, history and espionage
that had served as source material for his charts.

In order to prepare the catalog for this show, Mr.
Hobbs had to tease out as best he could the factual
underpinnings of each work. "In the end," he said, "I
had to produce my own reading of them. I'm just
suggesting one set of narratives, but there are
probably many others."

What kind of artist devotes his life to ferreting out
global conspiracies? Joe Amrhein, director of the
Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has
represented Lombardi's work since 1998. He is quick to
distance Lombardi from the Hollywood stereotype of the
crazy conspiracy theorist. "He was not a paranoid," he
said. "He was not a negative person." Nor, Mr. Amrhein
said, did Lombardi have a political ax to grind. He
noted wryly that "you probably need to have less
understanding about the connections to be political."

Instead, Mr. Amrhein said, "he was just completely
fascinated by connections, how one thing led to
another, how the C.I.A. would back a coup in
Australia, someone would be murdered in Turkey and
things would happen in Indonesia."

LOMBARDI, who had a background in art history and
worked at various times as a reference librarian, a
curator and a researcher, initially conceived of his
drawings as an adjunct to his unpublished writings on
complex events like the Reagan drug war and the
savings and loan crises. Eventually, he realized that
the drawings were the real end product of his
research. At the time of his death, he was beginning
to gain some attention in the art world, receiving
favorable notice for his solo shows and invitations to
appear in important group shows.

Since his death, he has received other kinds of notice
as well. After an article about Lombardi's work
appeared in The Wall Street Journal, several people
called the Pierogi Gallery to inquire about buying not
the drawings but the collection of index cards. And in
October 2001, an F.B.I. agent showed up at the Whitney
Museum, where Lombardi's drawing "BCCI-ICIC-FAB, c.
1972-1991 (4th Version), 1996-2000," which is in the
museum's permanent collection, was on view, to examine
it for information on Al Qaeda's financial network.

Mr. Hobbs suggested that a renewed global awareness
following Sept. 11 has intensified interest in
Lombardi's work. "The real import of Mark's work may
not be understood for years," he said. "He presented
us with the image of a vast reservoir of money outside
international boundaries and limits. He gave us a
picture of something we haven't seen before."

Mr. Amrhein put it a little differently: "His work
shows us that these things are always going on. People
just forget about them from time to time."  

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/arts/design/26HEAR.html

Thanks, Doug.  And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/lombardi.html

http://www.albany.edu/museum/wwwmuseum/work/lombardi/

http://www.11211magazine.com/editor/issue13/air13.html

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