Speaking of clear resolute lines, it’s in depicting conspiracies that these are hardest to draw — or rather hardest to justify drawing — since it’s in the very nature of the subject that relations are uncertain, exchanges are veiled, chronologies are jumbled, signs are equivocal, identities are falsified, appearances are camouflaged, and motives are hidden.

In the latter half of the 1990s, artist Mark Lombardi became famous for his drawings of conspiracies and scandals (Iran-Contra, Whitewater, etc), these works finding their place after his suicide in prestigious museum collections. Though the result of obsessive research and a fine sense of craft, they embody perfectly all the contradictions and limitations of that clear resolute line, which illuminates less than it obscures.

If you haven’t seen Lombardi’s work, you can glimpse some on his art dealer’s website. (As with most fine art — that is, art for sale — it’s hard to find readable reproductions online.)

These are meticulous pencil drawings, with lovely arcs and arrows between handwritten nodes, all resolving into clear and very elaborate networks — networks whose shapes are suspiciously pleasing, many of them being nicely rounded spheres that complement the over-all idea of “global conspiracy.”

Looking more closely, you see that lines linking nodes imply a relationship, but give no indication as to its kind (cause? effect? part? whole? byproduct? symptom? accident?). The links nonetheless imply a sinister web of conspiracy, yet a true sense of causality is suppressed; as indeed must follow from the complete absence of chronology (reasoning about cause and effect depends, after all, on events sequenced in time — among many other factors).