‘Guerrilla Art’-- His Message Goes Up Against the Wall

Like commandos on a secret mission, artist Robbie Conal and two dozen friends fanned out across Los Angeles just before midnight.

Armed with buckets of glue and paintbrushes, ducking each time police drove near, they crept down darkened streets to reach their targets: a blank construction-site wall, a sidewalk bus shelter, traffic-signal switch boxes on street corners. . . .

Within hours, they had plastered the city with Conal’s latest political message: a color poster of a human skull against a backdrop of military camouflage, labeled “Contra Cocaine.”

About 3,700 copies of the poster--which protests alleged connections between the Nicaraguan Contra rebels and drug runners--were pasted up in a single night throughout Los Angeles and in seven other cities, including Washington.

Art, Humor, Politics

Conal, 42, calls them “guerrilla posters.” Their creation is a merging of art, humor and politics for Conal and his band of would-be rebels. Distribution of the posters is an adventure in civil disobedience for the group, made up mostly of artists and show business folk, many of whom lament being too young to have been part of the ‘60s activism.

The “Contra Cocaine” poster is part of a series by Conal, a Venice-based artist whose satirical caricatures of Jim and Tammy Bakker (“False Profit”), President Reagan and Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III have become familiar sidewalk pin-ups.

Typically, the posters are pasted up in clandestine midnight forays by the artist and his friends--escapades that Conal admits are “not exactly legal.”

“Think of it as urban beautification,” he said. “I feel that the urgency of the issue justifies the temporary littering.”

Biggest Venture

The plastering of the “Contra Cocaine” poster, carried out overnight on a recent weekend, was the largest yet, Conal said, involving more people and posters than ever. It is part of a project to show support for the Christic Institute, a Washington-based, liberal public-interest law firm that is investigating connections between drugs and foreign policy.

Paste-up night began with a rendezvous at the Laurel Canyon home of one of the organizers, where Conal briefed about 20 of his troops on everything from poster etiquette (“Do you cover up a Jesse Jackson poster? There might be better places”) to how to avoid getting arrested (“Hit an area and move fast”).

“If police stop you, they don’t want to arrest you, they just want you to stop,” Conal assured his listeners. “Don’t talk too much; let them talk and be polite. And don’t stop postering. Just move on, go to another neighborhood.”

None of Conal’s followers have been arrested. But it is a misdemeanor in Los Angeles to place posters, handbills or other signs on public property or on private property without the owner’s permission.

Following the Traffic

Conal directed his crews to go where there would be night-time traffic, “like where the jazz clubs are in the Valley,” or where there would be Sunday morning brunch crowds. Park benches are too small for the posters, he said, but traffic signal switch boxes are perfect.

“Like an easel waiting for you,” agreed one of the participants.

Conal urged his followers to hang their posters in public spaces rather than in places where people might get angry, such as on someone’s front door. And he told them not to worry about splattered glue or crooked posters: Getting the image out is the key.

“We are not hanging pictures at the MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art). Part of the charisma is the amateur quality,” he said. “This is not terribly dangerous. It’s a lovely experience, and you’ll have a good time.”

The meeting broke up, and they separated into small groups, each receiving glue buckets and posters from the back of Conal’s Honda station wagon. With that, they were off.

“Let’s be guerrillas!” said one poster-bearer as he charged into the night.

Conal and friend Patty McGuire, a theatrical producer, formed a team that ventured downtown and into East Los Angeles.

First, in a not-so-subtle thumbing of the nose, they headed straight for Parker Center, headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, and pasted up their first poster of the night at the corner of Los Angeles and 1st streets.

They drove on, then slowed at a bus shelter that displayed an advertisement for Sylvester Stallone’s newest movie, “Rambo III.”

“Irresistible!” exclaimed Conal as he emerged from his wagon with a broad grin.

Rambo was soon paired eye-to-eye with “Contra Cocaine.”

Missed the Point

Moving on to Skid Row, Conal saw that his message doesn’t always hit its mark.

“Is that English?” muttered one man as he staggered across the street.

Conal knows that some people may not get his statement on foreign policy, but he hopes that they will at least see the poster as an anti-drug message.

Another man waiting for a bus suggested that Conal had come to the right place. “The drugs are real bad,” he confided.

“I just want people to see it, to see that it’s not the Grateful Dead, to let it build,” Conal said. “People see it where they don’t expect it, they kind of get it, they go, ‘What the hell is this?’ That’s my action. Have them thinking about it.”

After rounding the corner at San Pedro and 5th streets, an area known as “The Nickel” (“Meanest street in L.A.,” McGuire said), they were thwarted. A police car cruised by slowly, circled and came back. Other officers were scattered about, checking out street people and attending to a man wounded in a knife fight.

No posters would go up here.

Conal figures he’s gone on a couple of hundred of these missions in Los Angeles alone and has been stopped by the police 20 times. Once in Washington, police asked for copies of the Jim and Tammy Bakker posters, he said.

No casualties, no arrests were reported after this latest poster paste-up. But the participants reveled later in sharing their stories, calling each other on the phone to compare notes.

One of the crews working the Van Nuys and Burbank areas reported that a man taunted and briefly followed them. In Washington, a man called members of the group “communist pigs” and threatened them with karate chops, according to Lisa Fithian, a full-time political activist who coordinated the poster project there.

But there was support, too, participants said--a cheering crowd at a sidewalk cafe, a cab driver from El Salvador who applauded the effort, honks from passing cars and lots of people who asked for copies.

Poster Excitement

“People get excited when they see a poster at work,” said a 34-year-old Laurel Canyon film maker who covered the Ventura Boulevard area. Although aspiring to be an urban guerrilla, he asked to remain anonymous.

Most of the people distributing the “Contra Cocaine” poster have taken up the cause of the Christic Institute, the sponsor of a $17-million lawsuit against key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal. The institute alleges that the Contra supply network set up by Richard Secord and others to take guns to Central America also trafficked in drugs.

To finance the printing of the “Contra Cocaine” posters, Friends of the Christic Institute, a Los Angeles support group, raised about $4,000 at an event at singer Sheena Easton’s Hollywood Hills home, Conal said.

In the days after the postering excursion on May 22, Conal was flooded with phone calls. He does not sign the posters, but people familiar with his work saw them all over town and immediately recognized them as his. Friends in other cities woke up to see the posters and mistakenly thought he had been in town.

Not Always Admired

But not everyone is delighted by the protest art. The posters often are removed quickly or look as if they were torn down. One man called Conal after the latest mass display to say he likes the art but doesn’t want to see it in the streets.

The Los Angeles Public Works Department receives numerous complaints about illegally placed posters, a spokesman said, and street maintenance crews are often dispatched to remove them.

“We have to take them down, have to repaint, make (the wall) look proper,” said Tyrone Smith, excavation supervisor at a construction site on Wilshire Boulevard. “For the guy who has to do it, it’s a pain.”

Conal, however, has no qualms about the way he distributes his message.

“(A museum) sanctions art as high culture; they control it, they confine it,” he said. “Art should be more public. I can reach so many more people putting it on the streets rather than in a treasure box of culture.

“I’ve always been political. The idea is to make art out of what is most meaningful to you.”