Robbie Conal--Street Art With an Edge

Robbie Conal, 45, Venice-based artist-satirist.

Claim to fame: Creates the “adversarial portraits” that are posted all over Los Angeles and other major cities from time to time, usually at night and in places they’re not supposed to be. Conal (pronounced co-NAL) gained national attention with a portrait of conservative U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), accompanied by the slogan “Artificial Art Official.” It first appeared on a West Hollywood billboard, but was soon ordered removed by skittish billboard company executives.

Background: The son of union organizers, Conal grew up as an “art brat” in Manhattan, sneaking into the Museum of Modern Art. Later, he majored in “psychedelic drugs and cafeteria coffee” at San Francisco State, and graduated from Stanford’s Master of Fine Arts program. A fixture on the Westside art scene, Conal’s first New York opening is scheduled for October at the Jayne H. Baum gallery in SoHo.

Q: Your paintings seem to touch to the nerve. People talk about them, and they stir things up. Why?

A: I think there must be an unexpressed frustration in the general public with governmental policies and the state of our representative democracy. Through the Reagan and Bush administrations, social welfare systems have been systematically dismantled, public education is going down the tubes and our foreign policy has been very aggressive--not always in an aboveboard manner. But the American people are still pretty hip and smart. They know it’s going on, they just don’t seem to have avenues of recourse. I think there are undemocratic structures built into the framework that don’t allow for the kind of accountability and access that people need to change government. A lot of people are cynical about it, but when they see some surprise opposition, I think they identify with it. I think part of it is the mystery of the posters showing up all over the place.

Q: So this is your way of sort of introducing a little accessibility and accountability into the system?

A: Yeah, it’s kind of like my little grass-roots accountability program, and also it’s cathartic for me. I’m just a painter, so instead of just sitting around the studio playing with my crayons all day, I can express some of my anger and frustration, make a joke about it and let off a little steam in the right direction.

Q: How did your politics and your art develop?

A: In San Francisco I wasn’t making pictures that reflected directly on my political consciousness. But with encroaching adulthood or whatever, I thought I’d try to get my personality together and do both. I always had a pretty strong interest in politics. The thing that’s great about art is that it’s possible to make good art about any subject, whether it’s beauty, transcendental truth, a bunch of irises or ugly old white men with suits and ties that control most of our lives.

I found myself making portraits, kind of adversarial portraits, of members of the Reagan Administration. Once I did that I realized that this is art about public issues, and just to have them in art galleries wouldn’t be reaching the large public. Putting images and text together is something that I borrowed from advertising--streamline semiotics, something that we’re surrounded by every day. To turn it around on itself is one of my pleasures.

It took me about five years to put together a pictorial form that I thought expressed my angle on abuses of power by people who were supposed to be representing us. I started painting that way as a way of making cautionary tales, to remind everybody that this is part of our job to hold these guys accountable.

Q: Are you a pioneer in this field? Who are your role models?

A: Every day I go into the studio, I have a whole load of artists from history on my shoulder. The way I put it is on my good days, Goya, Daumier, Max Beckmann, John Heartfield inspire me, and on my bad days they paralyze me. There’s a great tradition of satirical, political art. I think about Daumier taking clay in his pockets into (the French) parliament, making his quick little portraits, and doing one litho a week for a weekly paper. He got thrown in jail for it. They were satirical, political cartoons that were incredibly good. But I don’t think of myself as a cartoonist, I think of myself as a clown who does adversarial portraiture.

Q: Are you a political artist, or an artsy political activist?

A: My art addresses political subjects, but I think it’s a disservice to categorize art as political or nonpolitical. I like to think that I’m a whole human being capable of addressing any range of subjects with my art, and that’s one of my projects--to expand my subject range and address issues of popular culture in the United States and issues of the media. The media literally mediate our sense of history and information, and popular culture does the same thing.

Take a movie like “Mississippi Burning,” representing the FBI as the Lone Ranger and Tonto riding into town to save the Negroes and to save the South from itself--I think that’s a real disservice. I’m not saying that the entertainment industry is dangerous, I’m saying it’s powerful and it needs to be held accountable for what it does, just as much as politicians and bureaucrats.

For instance, I’m sure that Daryl Gates and Arnold Schwarzenegger are lovely human beings. But in terms of their public persona and the way they play in popular culture, there’s a certain resonance to their images: They both seem to believe in killing for peace. And that’s wrong.

Q: How do you plan on taking on the movies and popular culture?

A: I’m interested in taking images of Ozzie and Harriet--the ‘50s popular image of the happy family--and juxtaposing that with McCarthyism. Or taking “The Cosby Show” and juxtaposing that with, say, the race riots in Washington--to show the torque between them. (These are) images of American culture that we produce in Los Angeles--that is our major product and business. I don’t want to be simplistic about it, it’s a very complex phenomenon, but it’s tremendously powerful and an issue that needs to be addressed. It’s an image of the world that we’re projecting and that we’re responsible for. It’s cultural propaganda. It isn’t always accurate and it causes misunderstandings. I think it’s a worthy subject to be sniped at.

Q: You call yourself a guerrilla artist. What exactly do you mean by that? A: It’s a war. I consider my art to be at war, and in the way that I like to fight--not with guns and killing, but culturally, and that’s where my guerrilla postering comes from. One of the tactics of guerrilla warfare is to fight only on your turf and only when you’re ready to fight, because the forces you’re fighting are much stronger and can crush you at any time if you’re not smart. My postering is my line of communication to a large audience. It’s my version of infotainment--alternative adversarial infotainment.

Q: You seem to have a problem with playing by the rules and authority.

A: I have a little problem with authority, with bureaucracy, with people trying to run my life and run other people’s lives. I’m attached to the First Amendment by an umbilical cord. I’m willing to fight for it. The other side of it is, it’s not like I’m hiding, even though the posters aren’t signed, even though we put them up the way we do. The billboard experience (with the Jesse Helms portrait) almost convinced me never to do anything legal again, because I found myself negotiating a deal with a guy with a pinky ring and a cigar, and all of a sudden my art was turned into business with a capital Bucks. I didn’t like that at all, although I think I’m going to have to come to grips with it. I do have surface lusts and billboards are just too tempting. I’m going to have to do some more billboards. And skywriting would be good.

Q: This idea of fighting back with art has taken on a particularly adversarial tone with your taking aim at Jesse Helms for his opposition to the National Endowment of the Arts’ support of controversial artists. Why?

A: Over the last 10 years, the fundamentalist right has declared cultural civil war, and they’re winning. There’s nothing new about Jesse Helms and the conservative cultural agenda that has been kind of sweeping the country. My sense of it is, if we don’t watch out for them, the despots will take over. In fact, in the ‘40s, there was a congressman who thought that abstract art was a Communist plot. Really. He really was afraid that the Communists were infiltrating our cultural production and making this art to break down the traditional American values system. Now we have Jesse Helms thinking that certain kinds of people shouldn’t be allowed to make art that’s publicly funded and certain subjects should not be addressed. It’s just so wrong-headedly authoritarian that it’s terrifying. That hits me where I live. This time it’s personal.

Q: Let’s go into your network. You’re said to have personally organized your own guerrilla army, here and nationwide.

A: One of the great things about postering around the country, for me, was finding out that the United States is not only Los Angeles and New York. I start every poster in Los Angeles and go to New York and Washington. It’s my way of visiting everybody, (although) most of my tourism has been from midnight to five in the morning. I’ve been to L.A., New York, Washington, Chicago, Houston, Austin, New Orleans, San Francisco, San Diego. The posters have been more places, we do send them out to people who poster without me, but I like to go. Most guerrillas we have are in Los Angeles and New York. I’d say we have hundreds in each city.

Q: Who helps you, and why?

A: The range of people we get together is everywhere from high school students to doctors, lawyers, producers and actors, professional people. I always say, what better thing to do than to go out into one of the most dangerous large cities in the middle of the night and spatter yourself with glue? It’s a lot of fun and it appeals to certain adolescent anti-Establishment fantasies we’ve all had. But it’s also a very real thing to be out in the middle of the night in the big city. These are dangerous places. I’m very concerned for them so I give them a pretty good talking to before we go out. I tell them the do’s and don’ts of guerrilla etiquette as worked out between me and Public Works and between me and people in blue uniforms. I started out with friends and then friends of friends, and now we have a waiting list and a standing army.

Q: How expensive is all this?

A: If you want to make money you’d probably be better off going into the stock market or selling coffeepots to the Pentagon. I am a professional artist and I make these paintings and show them in art galleries and the art is for sale--it’s my livelihood. But I also fund all my non-sanctioned public projects with what I make from that. I’m breaking even and I would like to do better. One of the ironies is that when I escaped from the art Establishment, when I went out in the streets instead of just being a gallery artist, the value of the originals started going up, to about five figures. The lithos I sell for much less, to make them available to the public.

Q: The Daryl Gates poster was your first foray into local politics. What was the reaction?

A: I always suspected that my version of thinking globally and acting locally, if I ever got around to it, would be explosive. I found out that, indeed, the closer to home I got with my critiques the more response I got. And it was much more polarized. I mean I’ve seen police in the streets ripping the posters down. I think I’ve upset a lot of people with it, but Patrick (Crowley) and I were pretty upset. I think Chief Gates has a testosterone problem.

Q: What else is in store? Any specific projects?

A: I’m interested in doing a billboard about choice and specifically about the Supreme Court decision to not allow doctors and family planning clinics to mention the word abortion. That really offends me, and I think it’s very destructive. I’m interested in a lot of subjects. There are many categories of power and many abuses of power in our society aside from just political and bureaucratic. I think it’s incumbent upon us to address them. But I’m only one guy--and there are so many bad guys and so little time.