Who paid the dripper?

Some controversy raised by yesterday's entry made me Google and reread James Petras' eyebrow-raising review of Frances Stonor Saunders' book Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999, Granta). This details the way the CIA sought -- and very largely succeeded -- to steer the intellectual climate of the west away from communism during the Cold War, using a variety of grants, plants and fronts. The result, a covert 'cultural NATO', penetrated right to the heart of intellectual life in Europe and America right up to the Vietnam war. Many of your favourite writers, philosophers and artists were on the CIA payroll. A CIA agent was actually the editor of Encounter magazine. The Abstract Expressionists were financed and promoted by the CIA and, through MoMA, by Nelson Rockerfeller, who called them 'enterprise painters'. I quote Petras:

'One of the most important and fascinating discussions in Saunders' book is about the fact that the CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE) painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA saw in AE was an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism" (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to AE as "free enterprise painting.") Many directors at MOMA had longstanding links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence aesthetics across Europe.'



There's an artist who has made exactly such underhand links the subject of his work. I saw his diagrammatical drawings -- and a video in which he explained his meticulous work process -- at NGBK in Kreuzberg last week in an exhibition called World Watchers. That artist is -- was, for he died prematurely in 2000 -- Mark Lombardi. His drawings might look from a distance like exact blueprints for Jackson Pollock paintings, but on closer inspection they consist not of drips but 'money lines', links and conspiracies. Or, less emotively, how certain shady things are related to other even shadier things in a way that seems somewhat less than co-incidental. How the Bush family is related to the Bin Ladens, for instance. Here's Oliver North, Lake Resources of Panama, and the Iran-Contra Operation, ca. 1984-86 4th Version, 1999:



This drawing alone required a card index database containing 12,000 cards. Here's George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stevens c.1979-90, 5th version, 1999:



Here's an article from Design Observer about Lombardi. Here's an NPR feature. And here's Jerry Saltz in the Village Voice telling us that Lombardi's death by hanging may have come after the mafia started threatening him not to give too much away. For Lombardi was the ultimate 'man who knew too much'.

Lombardi's work may be the Friendster of power. But it's certainly not any friend of power.