Conal’s Latest Tied to Riots’ Anniversary

Before dawn broke on the one-year anniversary of the worst riots in U.S. history, Los Angeles guerrilla artist Robbie Conal had struck again.

Starting at the fire-ravaged corner of Florence and Normandie avenues--the flashpoint of last year’s violent outbreak--a team of Conal volunteers fanned out across the inner city late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning plastering hundreds of boarded-up buildings with a searing image.

The 26-by-26-inch photomontage created by Conal and photographer Alan Shaffer depicts an incandescent black police baton engulfed in gold and red flames, bordered by a caption that reads: “DiS ARM.”

Conal--who has become famous for attacking public figures with political broadsides--created the poster as a memorial to the beating suffered by Rodney G. King at the hands of Los Angeles Police Department officers. It’s also to commemorate what the artist calls the “collective conflagration” sparked by the not guilty verdicts that followed last year’s police brutality trial in Simi Valley.

“ ‘DiS ARM’ is an angry and saddened call for peace and an end to government as a crisis management system that includes law enforcement as a form of class and race warfare,” Conal said Thursday. “An end to government that cuts public education and health and social warfare services for poor people just to balance the budget and makes equal justice the last resort of crowd control.”

Neither Mayor Tom Bradley nor LAPD Chief Willie L. Williams could be reached Thursday for comment. Police press officer Lt. John Dunkins said nobody in the department had seen the poster.

“DiS ARM” was endorsed by an unusual coalition of prominent rappers, graffiti artists, church and community groups who--despite this month’s convictions against two of King’s assailants in a federal trial--believe that problems with police brutality persist.

Among the community groups affiliated with the poster: South-Central activist Michael Zinzun’s South-Central-based Coalition Against Police Abuse, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, the Hands Across Watts gang truce committee and Inglewood radio talk-show host Frederick Jones’ Christian Information News Alert.

“When people ask what was all the hostility about during the riots, it was really just about that club,” said Ice-T, whose violent “Cop Killer” song infuriated politicians and police groups last year. “All the rage we saw go out during the riots last year was really just people in the neighborhood telling the cops to put those sticks down, to, like the poster says, disarm themselves and start treating people like human beings.”

Los Angeles rapper Ice Cube--who co-wrote L.A. rap group N.W.A’s notorious 1989 “F--- tha Police” song--also applauded Conal’s efforts.

“This poster is the best description of what really needs to happen to prevent more riots,” he said Thursday. “It’s beautiful.”

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Not everyone is so impressed.

A spokeswoman for Peter V. Ueberroth’s Rebuild L.A. organization said the group questioned whether Conal’s poster might be sending out the wrong message.

“Some of us have seen the poster and we’re not sure what the artist is actually trying to convey,” said Rebuild L.A. spokeswoman Mabel Solares. “But we really think there are other images that might evoke a better sense of racial harmony, peace and increased tolerance in our community.”

Ice-T and others who endorse the image disagree.

“I don’t think a poster like this incites violence,” he said. “It’s just a way to express the way people I know feel the real problem is. Instead of concentrating a year later on the burning of the buildings, the poster focuses on the true problem: police brutality.”

Previous Conal posters have taken aim at former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Iran-Contra figure Oliver L. North, Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and others.

Conal said it was his dismay last spring over the Simi Valley not guilty verdicts that inspired the self-financed “DiS ARM” project. He and Shaffer spent three days holed up in a Venice studio last summer drenching a police baton in lighter fluid and torching it until they finally captured the imagery they sought to evoke. Conal first introduced the image last fall in an exhibition at Santa Monica’s Koplin Gallery where it was seen in a 6-by-6-foot format.

Meeting in Los Angeles Wednesday night, about 35 volunteers squeezed into a dozen cars with enough paintbrushes and glue buckets to plaster 1,000 posters around town. Conal and troops hung the poster on street corners from South-Central to Hollywood to Santa Monica.

“I think of ‘DiS ARM’ as rap art,” Conal said. “It’s a memorial for our collective conflagration at ground zero, the streets of the ‘hood stripped of hope, many now literally incinerated by a history of exploitation, abuse and neglect.”