Poster Boy

My first run-in with Robbie Conal was on the streets of Chicago in August of 1987, but I didn’t know his name. In fact, no one I talked to seemed to know who was responsible for the ubiquitous black-and-white posters with decidedly unflattering images of the politically powerful (mostly men) coupled with cryptically brief and trenchant captions. It was as if, to use an old Southern saying, they “jes’ grew” on the construction-site walls, switch boxes and boarded-up storefronts of the Windy City.

In my favorite, “Something Fishy,” there was then-Attorney General Ed Meese, looking exactly like the poisonous blowfish many of us at the time felt him to be. Whoever this artist was, he was all right by me.

Water finds its own level, they say, and one year later I found myself, through sheer serendipity, in the role of Conal’s getaway driver when he came to New Orleans to poster the town during the 1988 Republican National Convention. Conal’s guerrilla forays require a certain endurance, as they begin after midnight and continue very nearly to dawn’s early light. Savoir-faire comes in handy too. On two different occasions on our run, we had encounters with New Orleans police officers that could easily have ended with us waiting to make a phone call at Central Lockup. Although we skated, those episodes added an edge of seriousness to the initial exhilaration of the game we were playing.

In “Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a Guerrilla Artist” (HarperPerennial: $16; 64 pp.), Conal provides an autobiographical introduction that charts his journey from his early years as the son of union organizers in Manhattan to becoming the preeminent agit-prop artist in the country. There are chapters on each of his posters and his ensuing adventures in spreading--liberally, and with buckets of glue--his messages across the landscapes of cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. Everything is here:

The “False Profit” diptych of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. The esqueleto in a pin-striped suit in “Contra Cocaine,” which he did for the Christic Institute. His anti-Jesse Helms billboard, “Artificial Art Official,” that raised such a brouhaha when it went up, came down and went up again. His controversial Daryl Gates on a shooting target, after the Rodney King beating.

To borrow a line from James Booker, the legendary mad genius of the New Orleans piano style, Conal’s got “one hell of a nerve.” Somebody say Amen!