Frances Richard

My students have a term for discussing art that challenges them stylistically—they don’t mind aesthetic provocations, they say, as long as the subject matter is “relatable.” Cousin to the buzzword “accessible,” this expression, as far as I can tell, means not that a given work is simply rehashing hackneyed and therefore comfortable assumptions (though it can come perilously close to meaning this). The “relatable” artwork at its best, my students insist, is one that keeps a kernel of disturbing familiarity alive within the fiber of its strangeness, an artwork whose experimental or avant-garde quality demands doubling-back upon known territory and alienating that region from itself. The “relatable” work, apparently, makes itself not new but uncanny.

Such works and words are on my mind not because I have been teaching conceptualism (though I have), but because I have been reading the business pages of the New York Times. I confess that I do not regularly read this section, the reason being that I cannot often “relate to” it. Typically, big-business news produces in me a combination of resentment and befuddlement not unlike the stereotypical response of the uninitiated to Dada: It seems outrageous, laughable but threatening, and I avoid it. Yet as the drama of corporate scandal progresses to newly decadent or mannerist proportions, I find myself drawn in; and in following the follies of Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Qwest Communications, Adelphia Communications, Vivendi, Tyco, Arthur Anderson, and ImClone (to name a few), I loop back toward the problem of establishing an artfully deliberate relationship to the fantastical but world-defining spectacle of government and finance. In considering this difficult but necessary endeavor, I find myself thinking once again about the art of Mark Lombardi.

Mark Lombardi (1951–2000) was an artist whose studio practice involved the obsessive tracking of just such mass corporate and political malfeasance. Pursuing his stories through various public-domain sources, Lombardi created exquisitely geometrical, airily complex pencil drawings that trace the connections and chronologies underlying corporate fiascoes like the failure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the looting of the Savings and Loan industry, the internecine duplicity of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro and the Vatican, or the affairs of Bill Clinton’s Arkansas cronies the Lippo Group. Blending pop assumptions with conceptualist technique, and approaching the art/life divide as if it were a panel of mirrored glass, Lombardi made a practice of updating his drawings when new facts in a given story came to light. Were he alive now, he would surely be composing a new version of a small work begun in 1999 called George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, c. 1979-90, 5th Version (1999).

In 1999, George W. Bush was governor of Texas, the ex-baseball-team-owner son of the ex-president, and the Harken Energy Company had quietly dissolved. But Harken is back in the news, and despite the best efforts of the current president and his spokespeople, it has in recent weeks become symbolic of apparent symmetries between America’s first MBA chief executive and the “few bad apples” at the top of bankrupt conglomerates. Oddly prefiguring explanatory illustrations in the New York Times, Lombardi’s artwork diagrams a convoluted series of trades and mergers that resulted in Bush’s 1990 sale of 212,140 shares of Harken at a profit of $848,500 less than two months before the company reported a second-quarter loss of $23 million and lost nearly half its market value. Streamlining the insider-trading aspect of the story, George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens focuses on the machinations of the eponymous financier, who staked Sam Walton to found Wal-Mart in 1970, operated a notoriously toxic incinerator in Ohio, and indirectly contributed $25 million to the moribund Harken. Along with Jackson Stephens, a second important figure in Lombardi’s tale is a shady aeronautics broker named James R. Bath, who served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush and operated as a go-between in Texas oil circles, representing the interests of a Saudi cartel that included Sheik Salim bin Laden, elder brother of Osama.

It is this last detail, of course, that has garnered recent attention for Lombardi from realms beyond the art world, prompting the Wall Street Journal to profile his career as a rare meld between current art and breaking news. However, other aspects of Lombardi’s piece deserve renewed attention. His drawing is interesting for the basic data it exposes—but this, after all, may be gathered from traditional news sources. Rather, the drawing compels because it encapsulates the power of aesthetic representation to articulate what journalism rarely can—the woozily unstable nature of “facts,” their helpless dependence upon the format and context in which they are reported, and the shock of disjunctive recognition one experiences when a gracefully abstract and retinally delicious pencil drawing begins to usurp the function of CNN.

As his defenders have been eager to point out, Bush’s $848,500 profit from the Harken sale is paltry compared to the now-questionable gains realized by WorldCom executives—$35 million for CEO John Sidgmore, $30 million for Chief Financial Officer Scott Sullivan, and $13 million for Chairman Bert C. Robert. Though White House personnel are less apt to stress it, a similarly substantial figure is the $34 million retirement package awarded ex-CEO Dick Cheney by the Halliburton Company—a Dallas-based energy services and construction firm that reported a $498 million loss to its shareholders in the second quarter of this year and, according to the New York Times, was recently accused of “fraudulently increasing its profits through improper accounting methods in conjunction with [disgraced Enron accountants] Arthur Anderson.” But there is also the fact that mandatory paperwork on the 1990 Harken sale “reached the SEC thirty-four weeks late—and while Mr. Bush had signed it, he left the date blank.” Or the fact that the stock was purchased, at the perfect moment from Bush’s financial point of view, by a buyer who 12 years later remains anonymous. Or that the relatively insignificant sum collected by Bush was used in turn to finance his entry into the syndicate that bought the Texas Rangers. This investment of $606,000 “grew to $14.9 million over the next nine years,” and from there the story speeds up considerably.

In Lombardi’s terms, the dotted lines and swooping arrows that comprise his representational code would proliferate into concentric rings, and the densely interlocked events would demand the elaborate compositional precision that he loved. It seems that Bush and his partners moved their Rangers franchise to a new stadium in Arlington, Texas, that had been subsidized, as reported in the Times, by “more than $150 million in taxpayer money. . . . As part of the deal the city would confiscate land from private owners. . . . The syndicate eventually resold the Rangers, for triple the original price. . . . Indeed, his $14.9 million profit on the Rangers financed his entry into politics. . . . One last item: Mr. Bush, who put up 1.8 percent of the Rangers syndicate’s original capital, was entitled to about $2.3 million from that sale. But his partners voluntarily gave up some of their share, and Mr. Bush received 12 percent of the proceeds. . . . So a group of businessmen, presumably with some interest in government decisions, gave a sitting governor a $12 million gift.”

If these news stories are difficult to fully digest in print, try doodling them as flowcharts on a napkin. That, according to art-community lore in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was how Lombardi arrived at the breakthrough that transformed him from an abstract painter into a draughtsman of what he called “narrative structures.” Or, if this information seems ubiquitous in the press, try spending hours carefully aligning it for visual display, translating it via your own painstakingly developed iconography, and copying it, repeatedly and impeccably, by hand. As my students often discover, when information is actively filtered through creative processes, perspective changes. Recall that if we do not construe our own responses to such situations, there are plenty of people in authority whose ideological puissance will fill the vacuum and create our responses for us, and further consider that just thinking about the news may not be enough. Lest the oxymoronic tradition of an avant-garde dwindle to just plain moronic status, we must continually reinvent ways for art and life to interpenetrate. We need all the Mark Lombardis we can get.

Frances Richard is a poet and art critic who teaches English at Barnard College. She is nonfiction editor of the literary journal Fence, and a member of the editorial group at the art and culture journal Cabinet.