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

This was supposed to be my "L" biography, another artist, one famous as a conceptual artist.  Like my reading of Cornell who only did his little boxes, both of them were unknown to me before I assembled my 2016 alphabetic list.

Mark Lombardi, a good Catholic boy from Syracuse (whose relative was Tarky Lombardi of nYS Legislature fame), eventually an SDSer, eventually a Houstonian, could not draw despite his masters from Syracuse.  Yet he wanted to be a famous artist so his life's work was a series of interconnected webs, hubs of who's who of the political, banking and criminal worlds.  He was an investigator with boxes full of index cards (much like Cornell's boxes of scraps of fabric and paper) but his became a volatile mine of trails of corruption.  Sort of a Jack Anderson with a French curve.

I really can't say this is art.  This is superb investigative reporting accomplished only with names and lines.

What engaged me most about this book is how close it followed The Devil's Chessboard in terms of conspiracies, movement of confiscated gold from WWII, spies, etc etc.  There is not much humor in the book, save for the food fight at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston in 1977 where the Kilgore Rangerettes entertained and Lombardi punched W.

The bushes, from Prescott to Jeb, are not depicted as good politicians, rather as money-grabbing oilmen, interlocked with too many other infamous people.  But it is not just the Republicans who fare poorly from Lombardi's research, so do the popes.

What is unusual about the book is the analytical re-interpretation and verbal restructuring of all the intrigue Lombardi drew into a more classical chronology by the author, Patricia Goldstone, which is easily half of the book's length.  Many she felt this was necessary as she was not granted permission to include any of Lombardi's drawings in the biography.  In addition, most of fhis work is either under lock and key at MOMA or scurried away to private collections in Germany.

Lombardi was found dead in his NYC apartment under mysterious circumstances in 1999 shortly after a successful exhibit and major sales of his art.  Goldstone questions whether it was suicide or murder, but lacks a "French curve" to tie motives and associations together.

It is a book to read during an election year.  The candidates could all become a part of this international banking scandal if  they are not profiting from it already.  Advisers and federal agency heads whose names splatter the news are here in this book.  Voting for someone outside this web is naive, dangerous and probably necessary, damn the monetary crisis and pending worldwide depressions.

Not an easy book to read.

Addendum:  after writing this, Goldstone's digressions on history as a rhizome kept angling through my thoughts and decided to comment on that analogy.  At book club Tuesday night discussing The Boy Kings of Texas, some members did not like the "bouncing around" of  Domingo's memoir, looking for more chronology.  Instead he writes about events in family members lives and their impacts on him as something happening reminds him of a predecessor like occurrence.  Such is the way everyday people explain themselves to strangers ... "did I ever mention when such and such happened to me/my family."  But the me and or my family is a node in an interlock.  People are born, live and die so there is an imposed time dimension to humanity but it those associations and passing on of history, making connections for the future while drawing on a past that is the basis of a human history rhizome without easily perceived beginning or end.  I would like to think it will be an iris rhizome, spreading beauty and pleasure; the Goldstone/Lombardi interlocking rhizome seems more like the underground colony that surfaces in puffball mushrooms.