‘Guerrilla Artist’ Robbie Conal Strikes Again

Nine months after Robbie Conal was ordered by the City of Los Angeles to stop putting up his satirical posters on city property and pay $1,300 for their removal, posters by the self-described “guerrilla artist” have re-emerged plastered on walls from Malibu to downtown, virtually next door to City Hall.

This time, Conal and his band of volunteers decided to use “guerrilla etiquette,” in putting up the three posters, titled “Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll.” The black-and-white charcoal prints show a dejected John Tower dressed in a pin-striped suit with the caption “Sex,” a smiling President Bush sporting a baseball hat with the caption “Drugs” and an angry-looking Lee Atwater, the Republican national chairman, with “Rock & Roll” boldly written underneath.

“I told my urban guerrillas to be nice to City Hall and not put them up on freeway overpasses or traffic light switching boxes or anything obviously L.A. City property,” Conal said.

So far Conal has received no complaints from the city, even though he still owes the $1,300.

“We haven’t had any recent problems with him,” explained Dave Torrez, senior street use inspector at the L.A. Bureau of Street Maintenance, after admitting that he had not seen any of the new posters. The posters have been on display on construction sites and abandoned buildings since early Saturday morning.

However, a spokesman for RTD’s Metro Rail Project protested Conal’s work, which had been pasted to the gray-painted plywood walls around the construction site at the corner of Olive and 1st streets, in the shadow of City Hall.

“We object to any signs posted on our fences or any form of graffiti, regardless of content,” explained Greg Davy, a spokesman for the RTD. “The reason is purely aesthetic. We want to keep our sites nice looking,” he said. The construction walls have “no bills” signs.

Marilyn Frandsen, one of Conal’s 40 “urban guerrillas” who helped place Conal’s latest work, said that they made sure not to put the posters on city or private property, putting them only on construction sites that had no restrictive signs. “He wanted us to be careful not to violate any city laws.”

Last October, Conal had a hearing with the city for violating an ordinance by putting his posters on traffic signal boxes or other public utility devices. According to Torrez, Conal was billed for removal costs of $1,307.75 and “agreed not to do it anymore.”

But one recent night Conal and his volunteers packed themselves into 15 cars and fanned out across the city in groups of four. They carried cans of glue, paint brushes and stacks of posters.

“We met at Canter’s Deli in Fairfax at about midnight and Robbie told us where not to put the posters and how to paste them up so that they could be taken down easily,” explained Frandsen, a 41-year-old graphic artist.

By 2 a.m. Saturday morning the “Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll” posters could be seen plastered along Pacific Coast Highway, mid-Wilshire, Fairfax, Melrose, Hollywood, Venice, Santa Monica, Mar Vista, Palms, North Hollywood, East Los Angeles, South Central Los Angeles, Reseda Boulevard, Ventura Bouvelard, Van Nuys and Laurel Canyon.

“They are three separate posters that hang together,” the Venice-based artist, said explaining the design. He and film title designer Debbie Ross conceived the triptych over breakfast. “One is Sex. That’s John Tower. Thats my safe-sex poster, once you see that, you not only don’t want to have sex, but you feel nauseous and don’t feel like eating again.”

“The drugs poster is George Bush, lest we forget his involvement with Noriega. I put a little stuff on his nose--he looks high as a kite.”

“Lee Atwater is Rock & Roll. He played the guitar at the Inauguration with Bo Diddley. Atwater is responsible for one of the dirtiest campaigns in years.” (He was rebuked for circulating a memo which stated that a prominent Democratic congressman was a homsexual.)

Conal said that no specific event led to the poster. “I was thinking about the changeover from the Reagan to the Bush Administration and the chameleon-like character of the new Administration,” he said. “And I just wanted to provide a little surprise in the morning for people going to work and encourage people to think about issues of national importance.”

The 44-year-old artist plans to take his “Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll” posters on a summer tour to Chicago, New York, Washington and San Francisco.

“The City of Los Angeles and I just had a misunderstanding. It was just a lovers’ quarrel,” Conal said of his only run-in with a city. But he quickly pointed out: “I never signed any agreement. My agreement with the City of Los Angeles is based on great faith on their part that I will do the right thing. I’m just trying to be as good a boy as a bad boy can be.”