Poster <i> Provocateur</i> Lobs an Anti-Nixon Volley : Art: Robbie Conal and his ‘guerrilla’ team plaster Yorba Linda with satirical rendering. But most folks don’t get it.

Poster provocateur Robbie Conal struck again Thursday morning, this time with an anti-Nixon image that seemed likely to enrage a city still mourning its most famous native son. But by midday, few here seemed to have spotted Conal’s handiwork--and many of those who did found it utterly baffling.

Conal, 49, is an artist from Los Angeles known for his satirical posters of right-wing political and religious figures, which he and a group of volunteers affix to construction site walls and other urban sites under cover of darkness. In the wee hours Thursday, he and his “guerrilla” team made their first foray into Orange County, plastering posters of a teary-eyed Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole along Yorba Linda Boulevard and Imperial Highway.

The picture was taken from media images of the Republican from Kansas as he delivered a eulogy at the funeral of the former President. Large letters above Dole’s head read “NOTHING PERSONAL.” Nixon appears with his dog Checkers in a small insert labeled “Richard M. Nixon Memorial Pet Peeve.”

“Dole shed a tear, and personally I feel the same way, but my tear is about Dole,” Conal said about the poster, about 1,000 copies of which were distributed throughout the greater Los Angeles area. “It’s Dole trying to be nice, trying to show some personality and failing. Dole shedding a tear is akin to (Nixon’s) Checkers speech--the height of opportunistic public insincerity.

“With all the hyperbole at Nixon’s funeral and after his death, people seem to have forgotten what a dishonest politician he was,” Conal added. “The evil spirit of his Realpolitik was a toxic waste cloud that surrounded me everywhere. I don’t see how people conveniently forget that throughout his whole career, he set the standard for smarmy opportunism in practical politics and ruined many people’s lives in the process.”

Several posters appear on utility boxes near or adjacent to shopping centers just a block from the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace on Yorba Linda Boulevard. But most people in the shops either said they hadn’t seen them or were unable to identify the figures portrayed.

“They’re kind of vaguely familiar but I can’t really place who they are,” said Shelby Clabaugh, 21, who works at Conroy Flowers in Galleria de Yorba. “I was just curious about who did it and what it means.”

Rhonda Boyd, 34, who works at Yorba Linda Flowers in Yorba Linda Station, said she thought the portrait of Dole “looks like a distorted picture of Nixon. . . . I’m not really into politics, but no message comes across.”

A few doors down, Sandy Kolbo, 51, owner of Yorba Linda Harvest--a gift shop advertising “Richard Nixon Memorial T-Shirts” in the window--was unable to identify the portrait of Dole and she didn’t understand the poster. But she said she would ask the shopping center management to have it taken down. “I think it’s awful. I don’t know why somebody would do that.”

Spokesmen for the Nixon Library & Birthplace didn’t return calls.

Conal has been taking his political art to the streets since 1986 when he couldn’t find a gallery to show his paintings. After organizing poster projects in Los Angeles and New York, he did them in Washington, Houston, Austin, Chicago, New Orleans and several cities in California.

His subjects have included former President Ronald Reagan (“Men With No Lips”) and wife Nancy (“Women With Teeth”); former White House aide Oliver North (“Contra Cocaine”); televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker (“False Profit”); Jesse Helms, the National Endowment for the Arts-bashing Republican senator from North Carolina (“Artificial Art Official”); and former Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates, shown with a shooting target superimposed on his body and his quote that casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot.” The last word is crossed out and replaced with beaten .

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Public reaction to Conal’s work has been heated at times, particularly in response to the Gates poster. But Conal insists that “the object isn’t to alienate our audience. It’s just to distribute my ideas about people that abuse their power in the name of representative democracy.”

He says he instructs his volunteers not to affix posters to telephone poles, merchants’ windows and such public places as libraries and churches. So far, he has never been arrested for defacing public property, although the Los Angeles Department of Public Works took action against him in 1988 for attaching his images to traffic-light switch boxes. He was billed $1,300 to have them removed.

He joked Thursday morning that Yorba Linda was “a perfect town” for postering because there was nobody on the streets when he and his team put up the posters. “(But) it’s pretty bare out there,” he said. “Where there isn’t broken glass and concrete I get a little nervous.”