Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi

by Patricia Goldstone

Overview

In the fateful month of March 2000, shortly after opening a hugely successful show in New York that unveiled the more nefarious financial connections of Presidential candidate George W. Bush, the hugely ambitious Conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio, an apparent suicide. With museums lining up to buy his work, and the fame he had sought relentlessly at last within his reach, speculation about whether his death was suicide or murder has titillated the art world ever since. Lombardi was an enigma who was at once a compulsive truth–teller and a cunning player of the art game, a political operative and a stubborn independent, a serious artist and a Merry Prankster, a metaphysicist if not a scientist.



Lombardi's spidery, elusive diagrams describing the evolution of the shadow–banking industry from a decades–old alliances between intelligence agencies, banking, government and organized crime, may have made him unique in art history as the only artist whose primary subject, the CIA, has turned around and studied him and his art work. Exhaustively researched, this is the first comprehensive biography of this immensely contradictory and brilliantly original artist whose pervasive influence in not only the art world, but also in the world of computer science and cyber–security is only now coming to light.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619027978
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	728,290
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Patricia Goldstone has been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a bureau chief for Cablevision. She has written for the Washington Post,Maclean's, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Abu Dhabi National, among others. She holds a Master's Degree in Literature from Trinity College in Dublin and is the author of Making the World Safe for Tourism (Yale University Press, 2001) and Aaronsohn's Maps (Harcourt, 2007). She is a national award–winning playwright. She divides her time between New York and Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Essential Mark Lombard! 1

Part 1

1 Kennedy's Child 21

2 Promise and Confusion 37

3 The Big Easy 61

4 The Melancholy Rebel 83

5 The Machine that Makes the Art 103

6 "I'll Have to Tell Neil He's Represented Here" 135

7 The Oldest Emerging Artist in New York 161

8 The Well-Baited Trap 187

9 An Artist Commits a Suicide 205

10 Mark in the Metadata Afterlife: The Ahal Experience 231

Part 2

"The One Continual Drawing in My Head" 263

The Black Eagle Trust 272

1950s: The Special Relationship 287

Operation Gladio 289

The French Connection 296

The Old China Hands 300

The World Anti-Communist League 306

The Pope and His Bankers 311

The Blond Ghost, JMA/VAVE, and the Vietnam Drug Trade 321

The Old China White Hands 328

The Modern Enterprise Network 335

The Big Bang 339

The Halloween Massacre and the Revolt of the Praetorian Guard 346

The State-Within-A-State 347

The Great Texas Bust-Out 360

BCCI, Iran/Contra, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens 371

George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens 378

Jackson Stephens 384

Clinton-Marc Rich - Bruce Rappaport-BNY-Gramm-Bliley 388

Epilogue: The Aftermath of Mark Lombard 401

Index 443

Editorial Reviews

"Goldstone has impressively mined the artist's archives and interviewed many who knew him, dutifully recording all their contradictory gossip." —Kirkus

"This isn't a story about an artist. This is a story about something more deep and meaningful… This book is very well–researched, it's very detailed." —Forward Thinking

"Goldstone is a deft guide to her subject, managing to write up all of his conspiracy research without making him sound like a loon, while also providing a thorough examination of the art scene in Houston and New York." —Bookslut

"The first major book about the artist…" —Newsweek

"Patricia Goldstone has written the first comprehensive biography of the conceptual artist… which is full of details from those who were closest to him: family, friends, colleagues, and past loves. Goldstone weaves US historical records into the course of the artist's life, citing scandals, political intrigue, and economic turbulence along the way." —Artnet

From the Publisher

08/24/2015
The question of who murdered New York artist Mark Lombardi (1951–2000)—if, in fact, he was murdered—is clearly an intriguing one, but journalist Goldstone (Aaronsohn’s Maps) never really gets around to answering it in this meandering, overwritten biography of the controversial artist. Lombardi struggled in near obscurity until achieving some success in his 40s, but he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment in March 2000, having apparently hanged himself. His best-known creations were intricate maps illustrating how one entity influenced or interacted with another, which he used to artfully illustrate the shady banking practices of BCCI and its connections with high-profile banks in Texas as well as the Bush family. It’s debatable whether Lombardi truthfully exposed collusion and conspiracies, though Goldstone points out that more than 20,000 of Lombardi’s notes and citations were seized by the FBI, and the revelation of the CIA’s connection to the Whitney Museum and MoMA—two prominent buyers of Lombardi’s work—is certainly enough to give one pause. Unfortunately Goldstone spends far too much time telling the Rashomon-like tale of the artist, particularly in his later years, as she pursues thread after thread with little analysis or conclusion, resulting in a tangled narrative as interlocked as its subject’s art. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

2015-07-15
A tormented artist's life and death.An interlock search, explains reporter Goldstone (Aaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East, 2007, etc.), is "a type of flowchart used in anti-trust litigation and accounting that involves graphing the relationships between interlocking boards of directors." That construction formed the basis of works by conceptual artist Mark Lombardi (1951-2000), a paranoid, opinionated conspiracy theorist whose mission in life and art was "to connect all the scandals of his generation into one huge interlock," from the Kennedy assassination to the bombing of the World Trade Center. Described by his family as "a hellion and a chronic envelope-pusher," Lombardi earned the nickname "Mighty Mouth" because of his endless harangues. "He not only grabbed your ear, he bent and twisted it," a friend said. The author speculates that Lombardi's obsession with interlocks of banking, politics, the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and foreign potentates stemmed from his being fired from his first job at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. "Forbidden knowledge of the clandestine alliances between master class and underworld gave him a giddy rush of power," writes the author, and "a weapon against the fraternity that had disadvantaged him." Despite his difficult personality, Lombardi found champions: for example, the Texas lawyer and legislator Sissy Farenthold, a "glamorously melancholy society rebel" who pitted herself against Gov. John Connally and his "Gorgon's nest of allied business interests." With Farenthold's help, Lombardi became a fixture of the Houston art scene, and his work came to the attention of the prestigious Drawing Center in New York, which invited him to participate in a group show. Interest from other galleries and museums soon followed. Goldstone has impressively mined the artist's archives and interviewed many who knew him, dutifully recording all their contradictory gossip, but readers may have a difficult time finding sympathy for the author's subject. An exhausting deluge of information about a man many remember as a "natural-born hustler."

Kirkus Reviews