Guerrilla Artist Robbie Conal Comes In From the Jungle : * Lecture: The artist who worked under cover of darkness gets gallery show, city grant. He tells students it’s no crime to make a living from their work.

Ghastly and luminous, the portraits of tele-evangelists Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker fill the stage of a darkened auditorium at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design.

There is Jim, looking smarmy in his blue shirt with little green and purple palm trees. There is Tammy Faye in her trademark mega-eyelashes, blotchy face and crudely applied ruby red lipstick. “FALSE PROFIT,” read the words below them.

“Ah, Tammy,” rhapsodizes artist Robbie Conal from the stage where he is showing the slides of his work to the assembled students. “Now what could I do to Tammy that she hasn’t already done to herself? Not even the gold Gucci dog collar,” he adds, zeroing in on the canine-like necklace that chokes her puffy neck.

Conal, whose street posters blending art, humor and caustic political gibes epitomize a style known as guerrilla art, is hitting his stride these days. The man who was once forced to plaster his posters on walls outside museums because he couldn’t get a show inside is now avidly courted by the art world.

“I know how humiliating it is to get out of art school and make the rounds of galleries with color slides,” said Conal, who graduated from Stanford in 1978 with a master’s degree in fine arts.

Now however, “they say my work is tren-chant, “ Conal tells the students, spitting out the word as though he had encountered gristle in his prime rib.

Conal’s first one-man show in New York opens Oct. 17 at the Jayne H. Baum Gallery in SoHo. The Cultural Affairs Department of the city of Los Angeles recently gave him $10,000 for a billboard called “DOUBLESPEAK” that hovers over Wilshire Boulevard near Hoover Street. Nonprofit groups court his wry graphic style for public service announcements.

And here he is at the art center, taking part in a lecture series that the school sponsors each year with established artists. But unlike many illustrators or designers who work mainly in a studio, Conal can also crack jokes about his run-ins with the police.

In addition, he has perfected pithy denouncements of public figures. For instance, the artist says he was drawn to the tele-evangelists because, like politicians, “these people have a huge power base and also abuse their powers.”

Conal’s message to the young artists is that there’s no reason why they can’t pursue art for both daily bread and sublime inspiration. For students at the art center, which turns out top-line graphic artists, commercial photographers and car designers, this is liberating stuff.

He tells them they can attend the school--which last year was voted the top industrial and graphic design school in the nation by design research firm Wefler & Associates in Evanston, Ill.--and still maintain their street art sensibilities.

When he talks, the 46-year-old artist reveals his academic roots as well as his street smarts. He weaves in references to social realist writer Sinclair Lewis, Berlin graphic designer John Heartfield who barely escaped Hitler’s wrath in 1933, the Joe McCarthy-led Communist witch hunts in the late 1950s and the complexities of the Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s.

As the slide show ends, Conal--whose name is pronounced like the Panama waterway--takes questions from the audience. They are an amalgam of students, professors, commercial artists and members of the non-artistic but merely curious public. Then someone asks one of those job interview-type questions: What does Conal see himself doing five years from now?

The artist pauses for a brief moment, then says he’d like to penetrate television, applying his scattershot street art formula to 30-second video spots--like MTV without music, he says--using words and images to tackle a public issue.

He sketches the scenario for a blurb that might probe the fitness of politicians currently in office: “It could run alongside beer commercials on ‘Monday Night Football.’ Or say you’re watching Roseanne and, all of a sudden, bang, a 30-second thing on Dan Quayle.”

Conal says he also envisions placing a giant condom over the Washington Monument in the nation’s capital “to remind our leaders to practice safe cultural imperialism.”

“My career goal is to be Christo’s evil twin,” Conal confides as the students whoop with laughter at the reference to the conceptual artist known for massive stunts such as the upcoming simultaneous planting of hundreds of umbrellas along Interstate 5 near Gorman and north of Tokyo.

Art center students said they found Conal’s approach toward the art world refreshing. They also appeared surprised to learn that his street art costs little to produce and distribute.

Indeed, the artist said that some of his first efforts with limited color schemes were designed, printed and distributed with the help of volunteers for about $5,000. That’s excluding air fare if the perpetrator intends to fly to other cities to put up his work, Conal hastens to point out.

Conal joked that, for economy’s sake, he buys glue in 55-gallon drums. Since this is a technical crowd, one student wants to know what kind of glue he uses. The answer: a premixed, biodegradable wallpaper adhesive.

Jack Rosebro, a painting major at the art center who hung around after the lecture to buy a signed poster from the artist, said he finds Conal’s work “inspiring.”

“The neat thing to me is that at the same time that we’re having censorship, he’s getting grants and he’s got billboards up,” Rosebro said.

“He is empowering,” added Loyd Oberton, a graphic artist who showed up to hear Conal speak. “He shows the power one guy can have over an entire society.”

During the talk, many in the audience warmed to the special wrath Conal reserved for political figures such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Oliver L. North, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms.

Helms “is trying to control one of the most gloriously uncontrollable of human activities: the creative process,” Conal says.

When the Rodney G. King beating hit the news earlier this year, Conal and artist Patrick Crowley set their sights on embattled Chief Gates with a photomontage poster of the chief with a bull’s-eye superimposed on his chest.

Printed across the bottom was Gates’ controversial statement from last year: “CASUAL DRUG USERS OUGHT TO BE TAKEN OUT AND SHOT.” But the artists crossed out the word “SHOT” and replaced with “BEATEN” in reference to the blows King received at the hands of Los Angeles police officers. Conal said the 2,500 posters he and volunteers put up were meant as social satire. It also sparked controversy across the city as Gates supporters rushed to his defense.

Almost every national political figure has felt the prickly end of Conal’s paintbrush. In “MEN WITH NO LIPS,” Conal took on Ronald Reagan, Donald T. Regan, Caspar W. Weinberger and James Baker III with portraits that bore a meltdown quality.

“Their faces, their flesh is a symbol of the corruption contained within,” Conal said.

In addition to politics, Conal said he derives inspiration from Max Beckmann, Honore Daumier and Francisco Goya, and turns to his wife, film graphics designer Debbie Ross, for graphics ideas, he told the students.

But his real muse, Conal confessed, are the tabloids. He showed students examples of his favorite front pages that scream with sock ‘em phrases, striking images and bold typeface.

The son of union organizers, Conal said he attended art school “all my life,” first as a youngster growing up in New York, later at San Francisco State and then at Stanford, where he was trained in Abstract Expressionism.

Conal then taught at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and a year later “MEN WITH NO LIPS” appeared on the city’s streets, put up with the help of a crew of volunteers, striking under the cover of darkness.

By now, Conal poster plasterings have taken on the air of an old-fashioned barn-raising and his volunteers include high school students as well as doctors and lawyers. After last Tuesday’s talk in Pasadena, they may also include some art center students.

Conal told students he has never been arrested for his forays, but has had “lots of conversations with very big men in blue suits in the middle of the night all over the country.”

And in 1988, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works took action against him for plastering traffic-light switch boxes with his satirical posters. He had to pay the city for their removal and agree to stick to construction site walls in the future.

Then there was the time last year when his 17-year-old models for an anti-gang public service announcement found themselves spread-eagled against a Venice wall by two undercover policemen who mistook them for gang members because they were wearing colors. The police eventually apologized and let the teen-agers go.

Conal told students he will be mounting a surprise Halloween present for everyone in Los Angeles. He doesn’t want to get more specific right now though.

He is also mining the 1950s and 1970s for inspiration. A new lithograph--part of a series of six Watergate works--features Rock Hudson and Doris Day in an ad for the 1950s movie “Pillow Talk.” While they chat on the phone in their respective bathtubs, former Richard M. Nixon secretary Rosemary Woods of “erased tape” fame listens in above with a headset. The lithograph says “Waterbug” in gold script, with “Rosemary’s Baby” beneath it.

Conal said he needs to use humor as a hook to draw viewers to his grim subject matter.

And lastly, he told students, he is proud that his work is instantly accessible to all city dwellers, not hung on a gallery wall for a limited few. “On the street, my art works best as a low-level irritant,” he mused. “It’s always there, squawking at you. Like you’re being bitten to death by ducks.”