Mark Lombardi: global networks The Drawing Center, New York.

Traditionally, history painting was one of the best ways for the academically trained artist to demonstrate a grasp of the dialectic of past and present. Mark Lombardi's "Narrative Structures"--a series of drawings begun in 1994 and continued until his death in 2000--radically undoes this genre by stripping it of its representational form and interpreting it instead in terms of structures of power. The Drawing Center's first retrospective of work by the late artist features 25 pencil drawings that explore covert economic and political relationships in the contemporary era. While the visual structures of the drawings vary, each of them employs the same basic ingredients of pencil and ruler, detailing a complex network of corporate crime and illegal government practice. Many of the works are organized along timelines that span the early Cold War years to the present, featuring a web of interconnected lines interrupted by circles denoting the names of banks. government agencies, multinationals. politicians, NGOs. rehgious groups, and state-sponsored terrorists. to name just a few of the incriminated. Dotted lines denote flows of money, loans, or credit; zigzags refer to the sale or transfer of assets; arcing lines signify vague (or perhaps poorly researched) forms of influence or control. In 'Bill Clinton, the Lippo Croup, and China Ocean Shipping Co. a.k.a. COSCO. Little Rock-Jakarta-Hong Kong, ca. 1990s' (5th Version), 1999, a hidden geography of fiscal relationships between Clinton and Asia is mapped out creating a strikingly beautiful study of financial scandal in the modern era. What emerges is a vexing diagram, not only of the totalizing structure of global capitalist modernity, but equally of the necessary incompleteness of any attempt to capture that structure within a single representation.