Notes on... Mark
Lombardi, by Deven Golden
Mark Lombardi World
Finance Corporation and Associates, ca. 1970-84: Miami, Ajman, and Bogota-Caracas
(Brigada 2506: Cuban Anti-Castro Bay of Pigs Veteran) (7th Version),
1999
Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 69-1/8 x 84 inches
Collection of Susan Swenson and Joe Amrhein,
All images this article Courtesy Independent Curators International;
Photography: John Berens
Emotional intent is often
ascribed to a sensitively rendered line, but to what extent can we say
other information - intellect, curiosity, politics - are being transmitted
in that same line? Put another way, how much of the spectrum can touch
occupy in imparting content to a work of art? The question comes to
mind thinking about "Global Networks", the Independent Curators
International exhibition of Mark Lombardi's work at The Drawing Center
in Soho, where twenty-five major drawings by the late artist are currently
on display.
Lombardi, for anybody who
doesn't know, made drawings of conspiracies. Not hypothetical or imaginary
ones, but real ones like Iran-Contra and Charles Keating/Lincoln Savings.
To do this, he pulled together hundred of facts from mainstream publications
like the New York Times, Washington Post, and L.A. Times, cross referenced
them on index cards - he had around 14,000 of them - and then laid out
the schemes using carefully composed flow charts. His medium of choice:
graphite on paper.
In a traditional artistic
sense, Lombardi drawings eschew most of the draughtsman's vocabulary.
There is no shading or cross-hatching, no pentimenti or rendering, no
foreshortening or perspective. It would be hard to attribute any romantic
or expressionistic quality to the artist's marks - quite the opposite,
for their closest visual cousins would be scientific diagrams, power
point presentations, or surveyor's maps. Simplicity and clarity are
the ruling aesthetic.
And yet, Lombardi's drawings
are overwhelming. When viewing the drawings and becoming caught up in
their densely compressed narratives there is a tendency to attribute
their power solely to their content. But the reality is actually far
more complicated, as Lombardi was well aware. In fact, it was at the
root of one of his ongoing struggles that, to an admirer looking back
today, might seem strange: how to make his art work as something other
than a drawing?
Mark Lombardi Charles
Keating, ACC, and Lincoln Savings, ca. 1978-90 (5th Version) 1995
Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 31-3/4 x 46-1/4 inches
Collection of Sarah-Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky
One doesn't have to know
a great deal about the art world to understand the real world factors
that could make this question important to an artist. Unlike painting,
sculpture, or video, works on paper are not considered by most to be
a primary art form. As beloved as they may be by many collectors and
curators, works on paper always have to fight the perception that they
are merely preparatory studies and not complete artworks unto themselves.
True, they often have departments at museums and magazines devoted to
them, but in this way they are also, in a way, ghettoized. One need
only walk through almost any museum to realize how rarely one sees a
work on paper being exhibited in the main galleries. Make all the conservation
arguments you want, it is obvious that in the view of curators, drawing
can't be an artist's main work. At the end of the day, an artist whose
work is restricted to paper faces an uphill battle for recognition.
An ambitious artist, this
was something that Lombardi often thought about. As his dealer (I represented
Lombardi from 1997 until early 2000, when I closed my gallery), we would
often have conversations on the subject of how he might successfully
move his content to another medium. At one point, Lombardi produced
a large proto-type light box that presented one of his drawings in negative
- white lines on black background. It was an interesting failure.
So Lombardi worked on the
drawings. He experimented with the paper, switching from a cool, fairly
standard butcher block white to warm, cream colored Arches for his 1999
show at my gallery. He changed the shape of the chart, moving away from
the primarily linear and time based left to right earlier drawings to
drawings comprised solely of arcs. And he found ingenious and beautiful
ways to form these arcs into fragmented circles, spheres, and even insect
like images, always with the effect of clarifying the underlying narrative.
In Lombardi's cosmology,
the little crooks, cons, and double-dealers revolve in perpetual orbit
around the heavier CEOs, oil companies, and corrupt government officials.
Ask yourself: What the giant, graceful lines forming a globe in a drawing
like "World Finance Corporation and associates c. 1970 - 84, Miami
- Ajman - Bogotá - Caracas (7th Version)," 1999, are curving
around? The answer: international law.
But again, we have to ask
ourselves why? If Lombardi's work was so focused (some might even say
obsessed) with simply creating flow charts of global conspiracies, why
couldn't it be translated into a range of alternate media? Silkscreen,
web site, etched aluminum panel, lithograph - Lombardi contemplated
them all and rejected them all as unsatisfactory. Everything other than
the most basic tools of creation - pencil and paper - seemed to fall
short.
If there is no obvious reason
why an artist's straight forward, if complex, narrative cannot be expounded
upon in any other medium, then perhaps we are missing something essential
about the narrative. Are we missing something about Lombardi's content,
something that the drawing is trying to tell us? Something that Lombardi
as the artist might have been too close to see, though keen enough to
sense hovering nearby and, consciously or not, stay true to.
Mark Lombardi Bill
Clinton, the Lippo Group, and Jackson Stephens of Little Rock,
Arkansas (5th Version) 1999
Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 61-1/4 x 80-1/2 inches
Collection of Janice and Mickey Cartin
As I pointed out at the beginning,
Lombardi's drawings, so devoid of Sturm und Drang is not typical
of most artworks. But they are beautiful, and just as their narratives
are somehow larger than first appearances, so too their beauty is not
confined to their overall design, but inherent in the physical quality
of their lines - the way Lombardi applied the graphite, the way he touched
them. Looking at them, we can sense how deeply Lombardi cared about
the subjects of the work (who was who) and about their purpose (the
shape has to relate to the meaning). However, more than that, more than
anything else, he cared about clarity - he wanted to understand, and
he wanted us to understand, too. Can we doubt that this overarching
desire for clarity is the reason that he shunned expressionistic or
romantic markmaking? It must have been enticing to telegraph his outrage,
shock, anxiety, depression, even, no doubt, his occasional bemusement
at the high level hi-jinks he so carefully, lovingly illuminated- but
he resisted the temptation to do so.
Iran-Contra, Lippo Group,
Palmer National Bank, World Finance Corporation, Charles Keating: we
can be overwhelmed and confused by the information in the drawings just
as we were when we first attempted to wade through these stories in
the daily press. But because they are drawings we can see the care and
precision that went into them. Because they are drawings, a diary-like
product of an individual who struggled to get things right, we feel
not just that we are in intimate, caring company, but empowered as well;
if Lombardi can understand this, then so can we.
Deven Golden,
who is a contributing editor to artcritical.com, is a writer living
in Brooklyn, NY
also by Deven Golden: The
Raw and the Cooked, Roland Flexner and Shirley Kaneda and
Notes on...Karin Davie
