The Making of a Movement

A review of: Adam Hochschild, 'Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, Houghton Mifflin, 468pp., $26.95.

Labyrinths

Mark Lombardi's art consists of colossal drawings of networks of power, connecting politicians, capitalists, and corporations into intricate maps, like medieval cosmology or kabbalah diagrams, whose huge arcs and circles linking the small handwritten names are as visually beautiful as they are politically daunting. His most famous work was about the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International, also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals) banking scandal. It linked up the bin Laden and Bush families long before Fahrenheit 9/11, even before the 2000 election and Bush's illegitimate apotheosis as president.

New York critic Frances Richard wrote of this work:

Lombardi's drawings – which map in elegantly visual terms the secret deals and suspect associations of financiers, politicians, corporations, and governments – dictate that the more densely lines ray out from a given node, the more deeply that figure is embroiled in the tale Lombardi tells. ... The drawing is done on pale beige paper, in pencil. It follows a time-line, with dates arrayed across three horizontal tiers. These in turn support arcs denoting personal and corporate alliances, the whole comprising a skeletal resume of George W. Bush's career in the oil business. In other words, the drawing, like all Lombardi's work, is a post-Conceptual reinvention of history painting. ...

After Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI visited the Whitney Museum to examine his drawings for clues they might yield about the conspiracy that gave rise to the catastrophe.

Lombardi committed suicide in March of 2000, for complex reasons, but it's easy to imagine him as a character in a Jorge Luis Borges story dying of Borgesian reasons. For his drawings recall Borges' library of Babel, his Garden of Forking Paths, the Zohar, Zeno's paradox or the aphorism by Pascal Borges loved, "The universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere." Borges' parables and stories are attempts to grasp the infinite complexity of the world, and his version of Lombardi would have died of despair of ever approximating the reach and intricacy of these networks.

Lombardi's work is often regarded as evidence of sinister conspiracies by people who assume that "they" are thus linked up but "we" are not. We are, actually, at least when we try to achieve anything political. Politics is networks, rhizomes, roots, webs, to use a few of the popular metaphors from the increasingly popular studies of complexity. A more cheerful Lombardi might have charted the links that connect Naomi Klein, the Argentina Horizontalidad populist movements against neoliberalism, the Zapatistas, the Yucatan campesinos who opposed the WTO in Cancun in 2003, the internationalistas who joined them, the U.S. campus-based anti-sweatshop movement, the Sierra Club, Arundhati Roy, anti-Monsanto agriculturalists in India and Europe, on to Nigerian activists now shutting the operations of Chevron (based in San Francisco) and San Francisco activists against Bechtel Corporation (also based here), which links us back to Bolivian activists who beat Bechtel a few years ago. (Thanks to the internet, speaking of networks, the global justice movement has been able to link causes and confrontations into an unprecedented meta-community able to act in concert internationally.)

In fact, right-wing think-tanks are probably lining up these affiliations and solidarities right now and portraying them as a conspiracy, as they have before. That's the rule of thumb: When we talk, it's a network; when they talk, it's a conspiracy. The sinister thing about Lombardi's BCCI drawing isn't that all these people, banks, and governments are linked up, but that they're linked up to screw you, me, and the world. That is to say, it's complexity that makes the drawing itself overwhelming, but intent that makes the denizens of the drawing scary.