Mark Lombardi
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Mark Lombardi (1951 – March 22, 2000) was an American Neo-Conceptualist abstract painter.
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[edit] Biography
Lombardi was born in the town of Manlius, New York, just outside Syracuse, New York. He majored in art history at Syracuse University. He graduated with a B.A in 1974. While still an undergraduate, Lombardi had a job as chief researcher for an 1973 art exhibit Teapot Dome to Watergate- a multimedia collage, all of whose elements focussed on various US governmental scandals; it was motivated by the then ongoing Watergate scandal. Lombardi's work on the exhibition was excellent, and in 1975, James Harithas (the director of the Syracusan Everson Museum) hired him to be a curator at a museum in Houston, Texas, which Harithas had become a director of. Lombardi accepted the job at the Contemporary Arts Museum, and worked there for approximately two years, until 1976. Then, Lombardi became a general reference librarian for the Fine Arts department in the Houston Public Library, where he started a regional artist archive.
These jobs all exposed Lombardi to large amounts of information, and gave him experience in aggregating and collecting those masses; in addition, he had time to conduct research in his own interests. It was around this time he met his future wife, Day Barlow (whom he married in 1980). He would open up an art gallery in Houston, and even have a show for his own paintings in it. The gallery lasted only a year, and Lombardi began devoting more time to other things- including two books, one for the drug wars and another on the neglected and forgotten art genre of panoramas.
In the early 1990s, Lombardi began researching the many scandals of the time, such as the BCCI scandal, or the Harken Energy scandal, or the Savings and Loan scandal; his thousands of index cards began to overwhelm his ability to deal with it. To cope, Mark began assembling them into physical outlines, and then into hand-written diagrams. They were intended to be a tool, to provide focus to his work, but he "...soon decided that this method of combining text and image in a single field (called a drawing, diagram or flow chart, whichever you prefer) really worked for me in other ways as well." This decision was spurred, according to Lombardi, while he was talking with a friend (Leonard Gumport, a lawyer in Los Angeles), about one portion of the Iran-Contra scandal, a one Saudi Arabian Adnan Khashoggi, whom Lombardi described as "the Saudi commercial agent and playboy arms dealer who had figured prominently in the Iran-Contra and had made large investments in the U.S. including in Houston. As Gumport spoke, I began taking notes, then sketching out a simple tree chart, showing the breakdown of Kashoggi's American holdings. Within days, I began making more of these charts, depicting other corporate networks I had researched. I was writing several pieces at the time and found the charts a useful, quick reference to the material at hand."
Initially, as the subject of one of his manuscripts, the primary focus was on the drug wars, but because of Pete Brewton's January 1990 newspaper series about the Houston S&L scandal, in which Brewton implicated the Bush family, CIA members, and Mafia members in a de facto conspiracy to steal vast sums of money, Lombardi shifted his emphasis to the laundering of the ill-gotten loot. Interestingly, the scandals were not a completely abstract pursuit; one of his former classmate's husband was involved, and when he disappeared, the only portion of his body recovered was his jawbone.
After Lombardi divorced his wife in October 1996, Lombardi moved to New York City since that would get him away from Houston, and because his work was going to be shown in a show at New York's Drawing Center, called Selections: Winter 1997. Not least, one of his friends, Fred Tomaselli lived in New York, and had been trying to persuade Lombardi to move to Williamsburg, New York.
While for most of his career, Lombardi was an abstract painter of no particular note (he pursued it sort of as a hobby during his actual career as an archivist and reference librarian), he switched six years before his death to the pencil diagrams of crime and conspiracy networks that he would be come best known for.
After two highly successful solo art shows (Silent Partners, shewn on 20 November 1998 at Joe Amrhein's gallery, Pierogi 2000, located near Lombardi's apartment; and Vicious Circles - a work drawing upon Jonathan Kwitny's book of the same name dealing with Mafia involvement in the legitimate commercial markets - shewn on 14 October 1999 at the Deven Golden Gallery) and a popular group show called Greater New York: New Art in New York Now on 27 February 2000 at the P.S 1 art gallery, Mark Lombardi apparently died of suicide (hanging himself in his Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City studio apartment) in March, 2000, three years after he had moved to Williamsburg. It has been suggested that the strain of recreating one of his masterpieces (the BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972-91, which was destroyed by the sprinkler system in Lombardi's apartment), and of living in New York City, and of the destruction of his car by a taxi, as well as the stress of imminent success, all contributed to what some friends believed to have been a manic-depressive condition and eventually to his suicide.
[edit] His art
His art is structurally similar to the sociogram, a diagram drawn from the field of social network analysis, and to a lesser degree to earlier artists like Hans Haacke; but in Lombardi's historical diagrams, each node or connection was drawn from news stories from major reputable media organizations. The aesthetic impact is unique- the schematics are elaborate and delicate, yet precise and factual spiderwebs of illustrations depicting networks of criminal conspiracies.
Lombardi's drawings purport to document financial and political frauds by power brokers. His 1999 drawing, entitled George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979-90, shows the proven connections between James Bath, the Bush and bin Laden families, and business deals in Texas and around the world.
A major exhibit of Lombardi's art, "Mark Lombardi: Global Networks," was organized by Independent Curactors, Inc. and curated by Robert Hobbs. The exhibit traveled to nine museums over 2003-2005, and has been the subject of several reviews. A catalog of the exhibit has been published.[1]
[edit] References
- ^ Lombardi, Mark; Hobbs, Robert Carleton; Richards, Judith (2003). Mark Lombardi: Global Networks. Independent Curators, 2003. ISBN 0-916-36567-0 . Catalog for the exhibit of the same name.
[edit] Selected scandals
- Chicago Outfit
- Meyer Lansky
- The P2 conspiracy, Michele Sindona, Roberto Calvi
- World Finance Corporation
- Nugan Hand Ltd.
- Gerald Bull, Project Babylon, Space Research Corporation
- Iran-Contra, Lake Resources of Panama and Oliver North
- Global International Airways and the Indian Springs State Bank
- The Banco Nazionale del Lavoro, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the arming of Saddam Hussein
- Charles Keating, Lincoln Savings (a subsidiary of American Continental Corporation)
- BCCI and ICIC
- Harken Energy Scandal, George W. Bush, and Jackson Stephens
- Hans Kopp, Shakarchi Trading AG
- United Press International, and its attempted takeover by Pat Robertson with the aid of Beurt Servaas.
- Jackson Stephens, the Lippo Group, and Bill Clinton; also, Clinton, the Lippo Group, and China Ocean Shipping Co.
[edit] External links
- Hobbs, Robert (2003). Excerpt from Global Networks catalog discussing the influence of Edward Tufte on Lombardi posted at Tufte's website.
- Richard, Frances (2002). "Obsessive--Generous: Toward a Diagram of Mark Lombardi", Wburg.com, Vol. 2, #2, Winter 2001-2002 issue. Reduced version of article included in the Global Networks catalog.
- Lombardi description from the website of the gallery Pierogi2000.
- Lombardi memorial from Pierogi2000
- Smith, Roberta (2000). Mirror of New York Times obituary, March 25, 2000.
- Sociograms
