Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi
In Conversation with Mark Van Proyen
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 ambitious conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio. The curious timing of Lombardi’s death titillated the art world—museums were then lining up to buy his work, and the fame he had sought was finally within his reach—which fueled speculation about whether his death was suicide or murder. 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, and a metaphysicist if not a scientist.
Lombardi’s spidery, elusive diagrams, describing the evolution of the shadow banking industry from decades-old alliances among 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 to study him and his work. Exhaustively researched, Goldstone’s is the first comprehensive biography of this immensely contradictory and brilliantly original artist.
Presented in partnership with City Lights Books.
About Patricia Goldstone
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 National (Abu Dhabi), among other publications. She holds a master’s degree in literature from Trinity College (Dublin) and is the author of Making the World Safe for Tourism (Yale University Press, 2001) and Aaronsohn’s Maps (Harcourt, 2007). A national award-winning playwright, she divides her time between New York and Los Angeles.
www.patriciagoldstone.com
About Mark Van Proyen
Mark Van Proyen is an art critic based in Northern California. His writings have appeared in Art News, Art in America, the New Art Examiner, Artweek, Art Practical, Art Issues, Bad Subjects, Square Cylinder, and the San Francisco Art Quarterly. His monograph, Administrativism and Its Discontents, was published by SUNY Stony Brook in 2006. He is associate professor of studio practice at SFAI.
Courtesy of the Lombardi Family
