Drawing a Bead on Gates : Artist Launches Poster Blitz in Satirical Attack on Police Chief

Ready.

Aim.

Fire.

Robbie Conal, the Los Angeles guerrilla artist who has made a career attacking public figures with political broadsides, set his sights this week on LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Early Tuesday morning, a team of Conal volunteers plastered hundreds of construction sights, garbage bins and abandoned buildings from City Hall to Santa Monica with a chilling new image of the embattled police chief designed to resemble a shooting target.

The 22x38-inch photomontage conceived by Conal and artist Patrick Crowley depicts a head shot of Gates with a bull’s-eye superimposed over his torso.

Printed across the bottom of the poster is the chief’s controversial Sept. 5, 1990, quip, “CASUAL DRUG USERS OUGHT TO BE TAKEN OUT AND SHOT,” with the word “SHOT” slashed through. The statement has been altered to read: “CASUAL DRUG USERS OUGHT TO BE TAKEN OUT AND BEATEN.”

“I hope nobody thinks we’re advocating that Daryl Gates be taken out and shot,” Conal said. “Fired maybe. But not shot. Everyone realizes that police brutality is big problem in America, but this image is nothing more than a satirical twist on a concept the chief came up with himself. We just updated it.”

Gates’ job has been in jeopardy since LAPD police officers beat Rodney King, a 25-year-old parolee, after a March 3 car chase in the San Fernando Valley. The brutal episode, captured on videotape by an amateur cameraman, was broadcast repeatedly around the nation, sparking calls for the chief’s resignation from a broad range of critics, including Mayor Tom Bradley.

Gates--who returned to work on Tuesday after a Superior Court Judge overrode a Police Commission decision last week to place the chief on involuntary furlough pending investigation--could not be reached for comment.

Sgt. Ron Tingle, who works in the chief’s office, said nobody in the department had seen the poster.

Crowley and Conal say their disillusion with the police chief predates the King beating by at least six months. It was Gates’ testimony about “casual drug users” last September at the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Drugs that spurred them to create the piece.

“We were sick and tired of listening to the chief of police continually bad-mouth the people he was supposedly hired to protect,” Crowley said. “We started designing it last fall. The King episode only added fuel to the fire. The poster is our reaction to Daryl Gates’ flippant attitude about law enforcement.”

Meeting in Venice late Monday night, about two dozen volunteers squeezed into eight cars with enough paintbrushes and glue buckets to plaster 2,500 posters around town.

By 3 a.m. Tuesday morning, the Gates poster could be seen hanging on street corners in Venice, Hollywood, Hermosa Beach, Mar Vista, Silver Lake, Century City, Brentwood, East Los Angeles, South-Central Los Angeles and downtown Los Angeles.

During one postering pit stop in Santa Monica, Conal and Crowley plastered several Gates broadsides adjacent to movie ads boasting what they called “serendipitous” titles such as “Mortal Thoughts” and “A Kiss Before Dying.”

“I like to put my posters in places where people don’t expect art to be,” said Conal, quickly ducking into his vehicle as a police squad car passed. “I think many of the problems the art establishment has run into . . . stem from the fact that artists have for too long thought of themselves as this untouchable hot-line to the sublime.

“For years, they’ve been walking around with their heads in the clouds, unwilling to get down in the gutter and fight for their right to make art about issues that are important to everybody.”

Conal, a transplanted New Yorker who moved to Los Angeles in 1984, has created 14 poster caricatures targeting public figures such as President George Bush, Secretary of State James Baker and North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms.

In the past five years, his guerrilla teams have conducted hundreds of what he calls “urban beautification” raids across America, plastering in excess of 70,000 posters on buildings in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Chicago, New Orleans, Houston and San Francisco.

The 46-year-old artist said he finances his “non-sanctioned public art” displays by selling paintings and fine art limited editions of each poster image he creates. A hand silk-screened edition of rag paper Gates target prints--riddled with several rounds of .44 magnum bullet holes--went on sale last weekend in San Francisco.

By utilizing an 8-person team of graphic artists, printers and technicians who donate labor or work at cost, Conal said he was able to reproduce the Gates public poster for approximately 75 cents each.

“My poster stuff is definitely not commodity art for corporate collections,” said Conal. “The posters are for public consumption and I’m proud of that. I create these cautionary tales to provoke thought and remind people that unless we hold our leaders accountable for what they are doing history will repeat itself.”

While several of his guerrilla volunteers have been arrested over the years, Conal has only been detained once by federal police in Washington. In 1989, the artist was forced to pay a clean-up fee of $1,300 by the City of Los Angeles to finance the removal of his posters from city property by the Public Works Department.

“Sure, there is an element of civil disobedience in this kind of activity,” Conal said. “But developing a pictorial form that addresses history with critical torque and a sense of humor is something in which I am very much interested. Along with voting, I consider this my way of participating in the democratic process.”