Art, Politics: Mark Lombardi - Diagramming the Affairs of State

'I am pillaging the corporate vocabulary of diagrams and charts - rearranging information in a visual format that's interesting to me and mapping the political and social terrain in which I live,' Lombardi told the videographer Andy Mann in February, 1997.

Source: (Mark Lombardi) arts / w b u r g

"A few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI agent called the Whitney Museum of American Art and asked to see a drawing on exhibit there. The piece was by Mark Lombardi, an artist who had committed suicide the year before. Using just a pencil and a huge sheet of paper, Lombardi had created an intricate pattern of curves and arcs to illustrate the links between global finance and international terrorism.

"In other drawings, Lombardi explored subjects ranging from the collapse of the Vatican bank to the Iran-Contra scandal. The results are not only detailed slices of history, but also works of art -- some looking like constellations of stars on a dark night, others swirling clouds of abstract lines and points."

Source: NPR interview with the curator of an exhibit of Lombardi's diagrams/art works. The exhibition catalogue is at Amazon. (The diagrams are still hard to read, even in the catalogue.)

A very useful collection of images, notes and links is at Pierogi2000