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

Description

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. - Introduction: The Essential Mark Lombardi - PART 1 - 1. Kennedy's Child - 2. Promise and Confusion - 3. The Big Easy - 4. The Melancholy Rebel - 5. The Machine that Makes the Art - 6. "I'll Have to Tell Neil He's Represented Here" - 7. The Oldest Emerging Artist in New York - 8. The Well-Baited Trap - 9. An Artist Commits a Suicide - 10. Mark in the Metadata Afterlife: The Aha! Experience - PART 2 - - "The One Continual Drawing in My Head" - - The Black Eagle Trust - - 1950s: The Special Relationship - - Operation Gladio - - The French Connection - - The Old China Hands - - The World Anti-Communist League - - The Pope and His Bankers - - The Blond Ghost, JM/WAVE, and the Vietnam Drug Trade - - The Old China White Hands - - The Modern Enterprise Network - - The Big Bang - - The Halloween Massacre and the Revolt of the Praetorian Guard - - The State-Within-A-State - - The Great Texas Bust-Out - - BCCI, Iran/Contra, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens - - George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens - - Jackson Stephens - - Clinton-Marc Rich-Bruce Rappaport-BNY-Gramm-Bliley - Epilogue: The Aftermath of Mark Lombardi - Acknowledgments - Notes - Index