Following the money: Mark Lombardi was making art about the shadowy worlds of global money laundering, corporate malfeasance and international terrorism long before 9/11 and the Enron scandal. A traveling show of the late artist's drawings is currently on view in New York at the Drawing Center - Biography

Like other conceptual works that map composed of several elements systems, such as Sol LeWitt's "Incomplete render free of access Cubes," Mark Lombardi's flowchart drawings at first appear to be perceptually hard to grasp and, as LeWitt has said of his hold work, "emotionally dry." (1) on the contrary although Lombardi's ink-and-graphite works appear abstract and elegantly minimal, the information they contain is not. In fact, they chronicle nearly each major financial-political scandal from the mid-1970s [i]or[/i] part of to the other the early '90s, including the U savings and loan collapse; the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro's involvement in the arming of Iraq in the early '80s; the Iran-Contra conspiracy; the lurid relationship between the Clintons, various satellite operations of the Indonesian-based Lippo clump and Arkansas-based banker Jackson Stephens; and the George W Bush/Harken strength nexus. They delineate the passages whereby shell corporations were established, currency was transferred to offshore banking units, arms were delivered and, in a certain number of cases, criminals prosecuted. The drawings at hand a litany of the famous and the infamous: names of rule and corporate officials, media magnates, sheikhs, mobster and terrorists--everyone from bishop of rome Paul VI to Osama bin Laden.

The first retrospective of Lombardi's works make opened at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University upon Jan. 25, before starting a national tour. It is upon view at the Drawing Center in of recent origin York through Dec. 17. Curated by means of Robert Hobbs and organized by means of Independent Curators International, "Mark Lombardi: Global Networks" includes 25 drawings that range in size from 10 by means of 28 inches to over 4 feet high and nearly 12 feet wide. Also included in the exhibition is a selection of the pink and virid index cards that Lombardi called his "data base." During the course of his research, Lombardi (1951-2000) produc above 12,000 cards, each containing the name of a one corporation or government agency. As well as helping to hold fast track of vast amounts of information, the cards played a character in the actual drawing process--Lombardi would ofttimes lay them directly on the paper and intermix them around as he worked.

The makes of the drawings vary, with a certain number of organized along timelines while others forgo of that kind linear chronology. The former feature horizontal lines that step quickly either the full or partial width of the drawings and are interrupted through small circles, each denoting a year in which activities took place. Arcing lines, which Lombardi drew with the help of a french bend branch out from the circles upon the timelines to chart exfoliating networks and overlapping spheres of influence. The lines lead to people's names and to other free-floating circles that are labeled with the names of companies, corporations and conducts Such elements can be seen for example, in George W Bush, Harken activity and Jackson Stephens, ca. 1979-90 (5th version), a roughly 2-by-4 lower extremity drawing that Lombardi made in 1999 It was Lombardi's practice to turn back repeatedly to a subject, broadening the networked connections and augmenting the number of individuals beneath scrutiny with each successive version. Here, he occupys three separate stacked horizontal timelines, the top individual commencing in 1979 and detailing the activities of Arbusto efficiency in Texas, an oil and gas company established through Bush before he became governor of Texas. upon the second timeline, beginning in 1982 Lombardi tracks the activities of the Ohio-based image 7 Energy Corporation, which rescu the faltering Arbusto power in 1986. The third line documents the activities of Dallas-based Harken potency Corporation, an oil-and-gas-drilling concern that acquired the ailing representation 7 in 1986 and whose stock price rose dramatically after it was granted offshore oil-drilling rights by means of Bahrain.

The drawing extremitys in 1990, where Lombardi documents Bush selling, in June of that year, two-thirds of his shares of Harken potency for $848,560. Shortly afterward, Harken efficacy restated its earnings and the price of its stock plung Although the SEC required that Bush report his sales by dint of July 10, 1990, no filing was made until March 1991 As well as naming dozens of politicians, businessmen and companies that had dealings with Arbusto, representation 7 and Harken, and tying them together in a network of carefully drawn lines, Lombardi's drawing prompts what critics have long conjectured: that Bush's timely, unreported sale of Harken strength stock for a 100-percent profit was a case of insider trading. upon the far right side of his drawing, Lombardi has penciled in sum of two units incidents: "July t990: Bush bails without with profit." And: "Two weeks later Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait."

With their marriage of branching patterns and mechanical flowcharts, Lombardi's drawings call to mind a entertainer of visual forms, including maps, mandalas and genealogical charts. With deliberate irony, they also repercussion of sound corporate efforts at conveying information efficiently. Like maps, Lombardi's drawings use a graphic shorthand that viewers ne to learn in order to navigate the material. A curv line with all arrow upon one end, for instance, indicates "some emblem of influence or control." A line with arrows at the couple ends describes "some type of mutual relationship or association." A line of short dashes indicates the "flow of circulating medium loans or credits." A corkscrew line denotes "the sale or spin-off of a property" (2) As representations of information and by what mode it flows, Lombardi's charts make visible facts that have been systematically and ofttimes illegally obscured from view. There is an plane harsher side to the story the drawings tell--another layer, as the artist called it: r lines indicate fines levied, indictments, incarceration, death or other "restraints" (Lombardi's term) on activity.