Mark Lombardi: Global Networks

[Dave Monroe]

Artist used arcs, circles to visualize intricate
'Global Networks'
By MARY LOUISE SCHUMACHER
mschumacher at journalsentinel.com
Posted: Jan. 8, 2005

Five weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an
FBI agent tracing the alliances of al-Qaida knocked on
an unusual door: the Whitney Museum of American Art.

At about the same time, another agent investigating
the where abouts of Osama bin Laden called a Brooklyn
gallery.

They wanted to see art.

In both cases, investigators were looking for clues in
the artworks of the late Mark Lombardi. His drawings,
with elegant arcs and precisely drafted circles,
visually map out associations between governments,
banks, politicians, corporations and people.

Contemporary art can provide a leading glimpse into
the contemporary moment, the here and now. Still,
using art for a hot-on-the-trail hunt for terrorists
was possibly a historic first.

"He had foresight in 20 / 20 vision," said Greg Stone,
a New York-based painter and one of Lombardi's
friends.

"He knew he was onto something," Stone said of
Lombardi, who hanged himself in his loft in the
Williamsburg area of Brooklyn in March of 2000 at the
age of 48.

The public is about to have its last chance to see
much of Lombardi's work for some time. The first
retrospective of his work, "Mark Lombardi: Global
Networks," opens Friday at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
It is the final stop on a national tour.

After the show closes here April 10, many of the
delicate drawings, some of them wall-size, will go
into protective storage.

Milwaukee Art Museum director David Gordon and former
adjunct curator of contemporary art Stephano Basilico
saw Lombardi's drawings at Art Basel Miami in 2003 and
inquired about bringing the show to Milwaukee.

The show, organized by Independent Curators
International, was named one of the best art events of
2003 by Michael Kimmelman, art critic for The New York
Times.

A book about globalism

A few years ago, scholars around the world were abuzz
about whether the next Big Idea had surfaced in the
book "Empire," by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

Like theories of colonialism, deconstruction and
psychoanalysis before it, Hardt and Negri's heady idea
of globalism took on the modest task of theorizing how
humans exist in the world. The result: a jargon-laden,
500-page-plus tome that can easily double as a
doorstop.

But Lombardi, on single sheets of pale beige paper,
was able to make such abstract ideas incarnate. They
could be seen.

"He said, 'Look, let's use art as a way to make
visible what is so very nebulous today,' " said the
exhibit's curator, Robert Hobbs.

Nodes - drawn circles with the names of international
crime figures, banks, arms dealers, corrupt officials,
intelligence agents, drug dealers and average people
caught up in various schemes - are connected with
arcing lines that imply associations.

According to the key in the drawings, Lombardi's lines
with an arrow on one end describe "some type of
influence or control," while those with arrows on both
ends describe a "mutual relationship or association."
Short dashes indicate the flow of assets, a corkscrew
line means "the sale or spin-off of property," and, in
some works, red lines reveal fines levied,
indictments, incarceration or death, among other
things.

Like a global weather map on the evening news, swirls
of influence seem to move in natural patterns, with no
central force. The minimalist drawings are visual
shorthand for the otherwise invisible, interdependent
flow of money and power around the world.

"He seemed incredibly perceptive to the time we are
living in," said Hobbs, adding that the terrorist
attacks, the fall of Enron Corp. and other world
events that have transpired after his death make the
artist's insights seem particularly prescient.
Wanted to write

The diagrammatic approach that Lombardi became known
for in the few years before his death did not start
out as art. He was an art historian and curator, as
well as an artist, but he also wanted to write books
about financial and political scandals.

Lombardi craved information and did years of
journalistic research into the U.S. savings and loan
collapse, the Iran-contra conspiracy and other plots.
What he gleaned from public records was recorded on
more than 12,000 index cards.

Figuring out how to articulate what he'd amassed was
constantly on his mind. He scribbled outlines and
drafted charts and graphs, doing them over and over
again.

"He never used a computer.. . . He was the computer,"
Stone said. "His head would tilt back slightly and his
eyes would half close as if he were a machine" when he
talked about the banking and political scandals that
intrigued him.

At some point, Lombardi realized the diagrams were
more than visual archives of information. They were an
aesthetic way to express a worldview.

"I think he would want people to understand that there
is more than meets the eye and that most people don't
connect the dots, figuratively or literally," Stone
said.

People are compelled by Lombardi's drawings to make
connections, to lean in, to investigate.

In one work, an arrow directs the eye from the name
Osama bin Laden to another name, Sheik Salim bin
Laden. Then, it is only two leap-frog-like jumps from
the name James R. Bath to the current President George
W. Bush. Also caught up in the webs are the likes of
Saddam Hussein, Harken Energy, the Vatican and the
Mob.

>From a distance, some of the drawings have a loose
implication of forms, reducing the small oligarchy of
world players metaphorically to things like swarms of
insects, expanding patches of crabgrass, globes or
pyrotechnics.

The connections are the work of Lombardi's busy, if
not obsessive, mind. The conclusions, though, are
elusive and left to the viewer - a good metaphor for
the hard hunt for truth in an era of information
overload.

"The smarter the artist, I find, the more work they
leave to the viewer," Hobbs said.

An online review by art critic Frances Richard also
described this as a strength of the art.

"A narrative emerges. Looking shifts to reading, and
Lombardi's one-two punch lands," Richard wrote at
www.wburg.com.
Beauty at a distance

Using charts and diagrams, the familiar iconography of
the business world, Lombardi also presented his ideas
with an unusual realism and calculated irony.

The discrete bits of data, draftsman-like printing,
various insinuations and flow chart aesthetic give the
drawings an impersonal, hard-cold-facts, tabloid feel.

But, from a few paces back, the drawings become
menacingly beautiful. The spatial relationships are
open, the crisscrossing lines soft.

In the elegance and compositional harmony of the
works, it's possible to find meaning and an intimate
engagement with the workings of Lombardi's savant-like
mind. His modern morality tales have a rhythm and
presence that are unique to him.

"The formalism in his art is not mere accident," Hobbs
said. "The beauty and the idealism it represents and
the conditions of the real world.. . . He is
presenting this dichotomy."

Lombardi viewed, not unlike the conclusions of Hardt,
Negri and others, an emerging set of forces as driving
the worldwide power structures. In his diffuse
constellations of corruption, he describes a system of
forces larger and beyond the control of any single
person or nation.

The nature of that system was very much on Lombardi's
mind in the last period of his life.

"I think he was focusing very much on the way we are
moving beyond nationalism and internationalism to
globalism and the permeability of boundaries," said
Hobbs.

"There is very much a larger point of view here,"
Hobbs said of the artist. "It's a system that goes
beyond any of us and starts becoming autonomous.. . .
It's a force that's yet to be tested."

To take Lombardi's view one step further, that could
mean that there is no one to blame. Malfeasance is
hard to pin down or to end.

"His view of the world was not hopeful, no," Stone
said.

'Hints and clues'

Two weeks before Lombardi committed suicide, Stone saw
him at an opening, and the two men talked about having
dinner that week. It would have to be soon, though,
Lombardi said, or it would be "too late."

The "too late" part of Lombardi's comment was odd,
Stone thought at the time, but he dismissed it as a
missed segue or a misunderstanding. Today, Stone
believes Lombardi had already decided to take his
life.

"That's why I feel so bad about what was happening,"
Stone said. "He was despondent. There were hints and
clues that things were going terribly wrong in his
head and I didn't pick up on that."

Stone insists that Lombardi was never overly obsessive
or manic, as has been suggested by others. He had a
"real cohesive mind that was very focused," he said.

He had a lot to be pleased about, too. Lombardi, a
late bloomer of an artist, was experiencing some
fairly significant art world notice. Some suggested,
in fact, that Lombardi didn't kill himself but was
killed, becoming an unwitting character in one of the
plots he charted.

Stone has questions about the death, too, but has come
to accept Lombardi's suicide as plausible. Lombardi
was troubled, Stone said, because of recent events in
his personal life and because of the weight of what he
knew about the world.

"I don't think he could divorce himself from what was
his focus for so many years . . . the facts of scandal
and disaster," Stone said. "Then when bad things
happen for you personally, they are magnified."

http://www.jsonline.com/onwisconsin/arts/jan05/290964.asp



		
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