Glorious Victory

Diego Rivera absolutely pegged the War Party with this painting, Glorious Victory. The canvas-mounted mural tells the story of the CIA's overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954. It's a painting that probably won't be in demand for display in any national gallery in Washington, D.C., although it should be. Here's the story, courtesy of Mark Vallens and Art for Change.



Here's more on the misunderremembered history:



Who’s to say they wouldn’t do this at home?



It's a good bet Bush and his bosses have been thinking about remodeling America into the Guatemalan model. If you think not: Why would the GOP be doing all they could to destroy unions? Why would they be stacking the courts with Federalist Society statists and right-wing property rights advocates? Why else would they be privatizing intelligence from gathering to wet work? Why would Halliburton be building internment camps across the U.S.A.? They're certainly not public make-work programs.

and you are spot on about Bushco wanting the US to become a 3rd world nation. In such places, the people in power are GODS- beyond the law and basically untouchable.

Think Congress wouldn't enjoy being part of that group?

When the "Continuity Of Government" plan kicked in, no Democrats got evacuated to Mt. Thunder (or whatever it's called).



Thanks for understanding, Hydra. "Next time" this happens, as Sneer observed, the DEMs would like to be invited to safety. As for the rest of us, it's: "Good luck!"

I though the dems got invited to Mnt. Weather, but this sounds like the only people who would be invited are Cheney and his cronies.

...and in these situations, we know what happens to those in steerage.



Here's a bit on the subject:

Know your BFEE: The Secret Government

only wish your zoom had included the bleeding child, Diego included all the effects didn't he?... now for some Goya atrocities of war...Thanks again, great info and truth...

Excellent point, maryf. Wish I could find a good version of the original piece. The bomb close-up was the only detail I could find.

Here's a bit on the Brothers Dulles outfit, "Conspiracies In Action":



Thanks for caring. And a most hearty welcome to DU, maryf!

I find it ironic that this discussion on the "Banana Republic" comes out on the same day as one on the demise of bananas, perhaps the fruit is just plain depressed...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x361160

As an art teacher I search for ways to motivate my students to consider what is going on in the world, Mark Vallens site is a marvelous new tool for me, thanks for that, and for all these other links. The more deeply I can become acquainted with the actions which have brought us to where we are, the better I can help inform others and impel them to action, hopefully. Thanks again for your info, great to share!

I guess the really rich, inherited-wealth guy must've disagreed with Rivera's politics.



Man at the Crossroads, destroyed on the orders of Nelson Rockefeller.

http://www.fbuch.com/crossroa.htm

Thanks for giving a damn. And if I haven't written so already: A most hearty welcome to DU, T Monk!

Another piece to discuss with the kids about how the dominant rule even the art world...(Maybe Diego should have disguised Lenin a little better! that must have really slapped Rocky in the face!)

K&R

That Eisenhower bombface would make an awesome tattoo...

They love Glorious Leader in Guatemala:



http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/15/guatemala-photos-fro.html

With apologies to Don Rivera, his thing'd make a great poster with monkey's mug on it, too.

So many pieces falling into place.

Thank you, Octafish.

It's like a priesthood, but with nukes.







Thank you for the image.



Yes. It's becoming perfectly clear, my Friend!



That is precisely what the face of death looks like.



We must fight to prevent the world these warmongers plan for our children.

I wouldn't doubt that many in the current malAdministration studied at the feet of the architects of this coup. Sure sounds like the neocons. Then again, this may be the single instance where they studied and emulated history, but that would stretch and strain all credulity.

So did David Atlee Phillips, who cut his teeth on PB/SUCCESS. William Blum sheds light on the, eh, fellahs...



Thanks for giving a damn, DCKit! Really appreicate you understanding.

for change

Rivera really did capture the faces of everybody, from Dulles to the murdered children.

Speaking of Capitalism’s Invisible Army, Jacques Vallee talked about a CIA Cuba Project that involved projecting an image of the Virgin Mary or other UP on to the side of a cloud. The thing was supposed to scare the daylights out of the Cuban people and get them think the End of Days had arrived.





Shoot. Everybody knows that’s bushet. That won’t happen until Chimpageddon.

Some pointy-headed patriots just love chaos.



Sorry to be so wordy. It's an art. It's a business. It's for control.

fantastic thread, its a keeper!

A great artist who combined maps and stories in order to document treason, war profiteering, global organized crime and a whole lot more:


Mark Lombardi and the Ecstasy of Conspiracy

Michael Bierut

With the 40th anniversary of the assassination of JFK freshly behind us, our abiding romance with conspiracy theories seems more ardent than ever. And one of the most remarkable expressions of that romance is on view at The Drawing Center in New York, "Global Networks," an exhibition of the work of Mark Lombardi. In an age where we all dimly sense that The Truth Is Out There, Lombardi's extraordinary drawings aim to provide all the answers.



Although Lombardi's work has combined the mesmerizing detail of the engineering diagram and the obsessive annotation of the outsider artist, the man was neither scientist nor madman. Armed with a BA in art history, he began as a researcher and archivist in the Houston fine arts community with a passing interest in corporate scandal, financial malfeasance, and the hidden web of connections that seemed to connect, for instance, the Mafia, the Vatican bank, and the 1980's savings and loan debacle. His initial explorations were narrative, but in 1993 he made the discovery that some kinds of information are best expressed diagrammatically.

The resulting body of work must be seen to be believed — an admittedly oxymoronic endorsement of subject matter of such supreme skepticism. Lombardi's delicate tracings, mostly in black pencil with the occasional red accent, cover enormous sheets of paper (many over four feet high and eight feet long), mapping the deliriously Byzantine relationships of, say, Oliver North, Lake Resources of Panama, and the Iran-Contra operation, or Global International Airways and the Indian Springs State Bank of Kansas City. Because the work visualizes connections rather than causality, Lombardi was able to take the same liberties as Harry Beck's 1933 map for the London Underground, freely arranging the players to create gorgeous patterns: swirling spheres, hopscotching arcs, wheels within wheels.



Detail, Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, ca. 1979-90 (5th version), 1999

Lombardi was indeed an enthusiastic student of information design, a reader of Edward Tufte and a collector of the charts of Nigel Holmes. But if the goal of information design is to make things clear, Lombardi's drawings, in fact, do the opposite. The hypnotic miasma of names, institutions, corporations and locations that envelop each drawing demonstrates nothing if not the inherent -- the intentional -- unknowability of each of these networks. Like Rube Goldberg devices, their only meaning is their ecstatic complexity; like Hitchcockian McGuffins, understanding them is less important than simply knowing they exist.

Lomardi, who was born in 1951 and died in 2000, did not live to see today's historical moment, where his worldview seems not eccentric but positively prescient. His drawing BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972-91 (4th version) was studied in situ at the Whitney Museum by F.B.I. agents in the days after 9/11; reportedly, consultants to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security previewed the current show at the Drawing Center. One wonders whether he would have felt vindicated or alarmed by this kind of attention.

The catalog for the exhibition, which was organized by Robert Hobbs and Independent Curators International, cannot possibly do the drawings justice. But it may be worth it for the extended captions alone, each one of which could serve as an outline for a pretty decent John leCarre novel. And in what other art catalog could you find an index where (under the Cs alone) one finds Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment; capitalism; Capone, Al; Castro, Fidel, and conceptual art? And it is in the catalog that one finds, tossed away almost casually in a footnote, the following fact: "The police report cited suicide by hanging as the reason for Mark Lombardi's death. The door to his studio was locked from the inside." That last detail is an all-too-common device in mystery novels, where it inevitably raises the same question: yes, that's how it seems, but what really happened? Mark Lombardi's work tries, valiantly, to answer that very question.

11.24.03

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000072.html



Lombardi created some absolutely amazing stuff -- works of greatest beauty and deepest truth.

Or caused his demise before it disappeared.

Thanks Der Fishie, for the continuing education.

-Hoot

The Bushes provide a lot of inspiration -- as well as their contacts. The list of possibilities, as we have so amply seen documented over th epast 7 years is nearly as limitless as the Bushiz capacity for evil.

Mark Lombardi was great at making the connections between all the people, events and times understandable. And the finished works were beautiful to see. They preserve stories and the facts that make up a criminal prosecution.

Mark Lombardi @ Pierogi

What could he have been working on? When he died, it was summer 2000. Not much happening besides the U.S. Census. Just on the horizon, however, was Selection 2000. Then came Enron Energy Task Force secrecy, the corporate rip-offs, and the attendant glossing over of Bush's Arbusto-Harken-Aloha Energy Mal-fee-uhnce. One year later: bin Laden determined to strike in the United States. And his work did chronicle the connections between the House of bin Laden and the House of Bush.

Remember James R Bath?

Given that the guy's work chronicled connections between the Bushes and Big Oil, Texas oil, Middle Eastern Big Oil and crooked banking, Mark Lombardi would have been a very busy guy. And going by what he had created, it'd be a hit -- whatever it was. With all that's happened since, imagine what he would have created. Like he did with Poppy before him, Lombardi would have given us a picture of Bush and his treason .

Funny one of the close-up shots includes Mr. Bath. Your list is certainly the fodder from which he drew. (pun intended)

-Hoot

And an artist told the story. Then, he died.

Here's another type of artist, a writer, who, in the summer of 2001, also told the story of the connection between the House of Bush and the House of bin Laden:



That story was filed on July 3, 2001. It spelled out how Bush had been warned that Osama bin Laden was planning to hijack an airplane and use it as a missile -- apparently at the G-8 summit in Genoa. That helps explain why monkey was afraid to sleep at the hotel in Genoa and slept aboard a state-of-the-air-defense-art U.S. destroyer offshore.



Jim Hatfield also died. Like Mr. Lombardi, a "suicide," a few weeks before September 11.

People have no freakin clue! It really harshes my mellow.

-Hoot

I missed the Lombardi stuff yesterday. He was phenomenal, as a lateral thinker and map lover, my admiration for him is quite strong. Whoda thunk this thread would have touched on 9/11 truth stuff? Wish he'd lived through that, many answers may have come through his art, thanks again! Peace, Mary

K&R

You're welcome, Solly Mack!

Here's the work of a real genius, Zbigniew Libera:



Everybody in Europe knows the guy, I hear.



The guy got imprisoned by the commies for drawing cartoons about them.



That was in the late 1980s. Maybe someone should ask Halliburton to explain why the Bushiz gave them contracts to build all those camps in the USA.



Appears to me that the same mindset is coming to America today.



That is, unless more people wake the heck up.

Thanks for being awake and giving a damn, Solly Mack. Hope all is well for you and yours, my Friend!

Toys are us...

Eternally horrible are those photographs from Abu Ghraib. Painting provides another kind of truth that is also unforgettable.



The art of Abu Ghraib

Louis Freedberg
Monday, January 22, 2007
SF Chronicle

AT LEAST two questions hang over the exhibit of Fernando Botero's paintings and drawings on the shameful abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that will open at the main library at UC Berkeley a week from today.

The first is what drove Botero, who typically draws whimsical, oversized pneumatic figures that have enormous popular appeal, to undertake these paintings in the first place.

The second is why they'll be displayed in a Berkeley library, rather than in the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim in New York, or SFMOMA.

SNIP...



"Once in a while something comes along that strikes you in a dramatic way," Botero told me when we talked by telephone from Mexico last week. He pointed out that he has taken on more explicitly political subjects in the past, such as his series on the ravages of the drug trade in Colombia.

He said he wasn't intending to "shock people or to accuse anyone" with his Abu Ghraib depictions. He didn't do them for commercial reasons (they're not for sale). "You do it because it is in your gut, you are upset, you are furious, you have to get it out of your system."

Nonetheless, he hopes that as Abu Ghraib fades from memory -- the prison is slated for demolition -- the paintings will be a reminder of what happened there. "People would forget about Guernica were it not for Picasso's masterpiece," he said. "Art is a permanent accusation. "



The trickier question is why no U.S. museum chose to exhibit them. The only other place they have been shown in the United States was last November at New York's private Marlborough Gallery, which has been showing and selling Botero's work for decades.

Some museums may have had security concerns. Look at what happened to the Copabianco Gallery in San Francisco, which was forced to close in 2004 after it showed a painting depicting torture of an Iraqi detainee, and the gallery was vandalized and its owner assaulted.

SNIP...

Botero's paintings got the cold shoulder here despite favorable reviews in a range of respected publications. In an article titled "The Iconography of Torture" in this month's edition of Art in America, for example, the reviewer said the Abu Ghraib paintings "bear comparison with much of the political art of the modern era ... Like Guernica, Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings are a cry of pain at the pointless suffering inflicted on the victims of wars." The Washington Post's culture critic called it a "remarkable show, and a disturbing one."

CONTINUED...

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/22/EDGC7N728U1.DTL

Thank you for the kind words, bluesmail. I really appreciate you understanding what it's all about.

That such a major living artist as Botero is relegated to the Marlborough (pretty ballsy for a gallery of its caliber) and Berkeley Library (where it will be singing to the choir)is indicative of how fearful and censored is every faction of American culture. This is quite literally tear wrenching art, the tryptich especially to me for some reason, the best I've seen of Botero. "They" say most artists reach their peak at mid life; at 76 Botero is courageously creating works that reach the apex of the purpose of art IMO, to use beauty to illustrate life in all its ugliness, and to inject people with new perspectives of reality and hopefully be inspired to use it as a springboard for action. Viva don Botero!

It seems fitting that these would be displayed there.

-Hoot

which doesn't mean it isn't still preaching to the choir, all the artwork in this thread should be seen by the masses, IMO!!

Great colors.

And a most hearty welcome to DU, bluereality!

¿ Paraguay? ¡Porque no!



Remember Black Adder and the Witchsmeller!



Identified the Great Grumbledook

That proves it!

Nice Round Figures

If you lived in New York City's Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, you might have encountered a tall, dapper Colombian among the hordes of aspiring artists who congregated there. Charming, garrulous and quick to make friends, he might have invited you to his tiny apartment and offered you one of his paintings for a few hundred dollars. He might even have confided that he desperately needed the money to pay the rent. If you stumped up the cash and took the painting home, you're one lucky investor. Works by Fernando Botero from that period are worth about $500,000 these days. "I sold my paintings myself to friends," Botero says. "They would come over after dinner. I was broke."

(snip)

Botero's corpulent characters — comical but keenly observed renderings of rotund ballerinas, families and Latin American small-town types like the ladies in The Gardening Club (1997) — are instantly recognizable. Even acknowledged reproductions of his work sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Two years ago, the British magazine ArtReview compiled a Top 10 ranking of the most highly valued artists in terms of the total value of sales. Botero came out at No. 5, behind artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg but ahead of Dutch painter Karel Appel and Britain's David Hockney. The editors estimated that Botero's paintings and sculptures had sold over the years for more than $57 million. Although a big chunk of those profits went to collectors, millions have been made by the artist himself. Now 73, Botero says he's lost track of how much he's created: "I've painted every day of my life since I was 17," he says, sitting in his Paris studio one recent morning, the sun flooding the room through the skylight.

(snip)

He trained in Europe in the 1950s, and never became part of the abstract or conceptual art movements, instead sticking to the voluminous figurative style he formed in his 20s. Botero says he first became fascinated with "bolometric" shapes while living in Florence in 1953, inspired by Old Masters like Giotto and Botticelli: "I saw that volume gives a sensuality to painting. People say, 'When are you going to do something different?' I say, maybe never. The day I change my convictions is the day I'll do something different. You have to be strong to just follow your convictions and do what you want to do."

(snip)

Botero's plump, comical characters appear even when the subject matter is grim. Central to the exhibition in Rome are some of the darkest images Botero has ever created: 45 paintings and drawings depicting the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq. The canvases — including Abu Ghraib 43, which shows a bruised, hooded detainee tied to the bars of his cell — will be shown publicly for the first time in Rome, and depict agonized, bloodied prisoners being tortured and bound by U.S. military guards. Botero says he was driven by shock at the prisoners' accounts, which haunted him for months. Yet some question even that. "It seems a willed attempt by a comedian to do tragedy," says Robert Storr, former senior curator of paintings at moma and now a professor at New York University.

(snip)

Increasingly distressed about Colombia's drug wars, Botero has created more than 50 works on the violence, including a painting of druglord Pablo Escobar's 1993 death in a hail of bullets on a Medellín rooftop. Botero regards these works as some of his most meaningful, and has donated them to the National Museum in Bogotá. Those paintings also draw criticism, however. "Most people said it was glorifying violence," he says.

(snip)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1071199,00.html

---------------------------------------------

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,462348,00.jpg

Thank you for these further pix, realizing the size makes them so much more impressive, I assumed they were smaller.

When I was at Berkeley, must have been in the late 80s, they put on a huge art display by Guatemalan kids in Dwinelle Hall.

They were all crayon drawings on rough paper -- of helicopters and guns and bodies and blood and no image a child should have to see, let alone, draw.

For the children.

:hug:
:grouphug:

If they had them, Robbie Conal would capture the souls of the BFEE in his work.

Pruneface



Know your BFEE: They Looted Your Nation’s S&Ls for Power and Profit

Know your BFEE: America’s Ruling Gangster Class

Condescenda



Sink the BFEE: Foley gives us Congress. Condi sends 'em to prison.


KillerColin



Know your BFEE: Cheney & Halliburton Sold Iran Nuke Technology


The Crook Nixon



Know your BFEE: Nixon Threatened to Nuke Vietnam

Conal's pretty good at capturing good spirits, as well:



Know your BFEE: Money Trumps Peace. Always.


Please forgive me for the lateness of this: Thank you for all you have done for me, sfexpat2000. I appreciate you caring about what we do, working to make ours a better world, and praying for what may yet come to be.