Art / Cathy Curtis : Fuzzy Was He : Poster Provocateur’s Latest Effort, Lacking the Clarity of Past Works, Is a Dud Locally

It’s been a while since we had a good art scandal in Orange County. So those who got wind last month that poster provocateur Robbie Conal would be plastering unflattering images of Bob Dole, the Senate minority leader, and former President Richard Nixon along the streets of Yorba Linda--of all places!--were waiting to watch the sparks fly.

As it happened, the project failed to ignite. There were very few posters on the streets, hardly anyone appears to have seen them, and those who did registered bafflement about Conal’s message--and even the identity of the people on the poster.

Other posters by Conal have raised community hackles in Los Angeles and other cities--particularly the one he did of then-LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, shown with a shooting target superimposed on his body. Gates’ quote that casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot” was reproduced with the last word crossed out and replaced with beaten .

But the Dole poster was a dud, at least in Orange County. (In Los Angeles, County Supervisor Mike Antonovich eventually denounced it as “visual pollution” and asked that the artist be fined for “illegally plastering posters on private and governmental property.” After nearly five weeks, however, no Orange County official has sounded off publicly on this non-event.)

Actually, one problem with Orange County as a poster site is purely logistic--as could be seen in the days preceding last week’s primary election. To attract drivers’ attention, you really need a billboard, while the few areas with sufficiently dense foot traffic tend to be privately controlled spaces, like shopping centers, which are quick to tear down any handiwork that distracts from the bright, happy world of consumption.

On Conal’s poster, large letters above Dole’s head read, “NOTHING PERSONAL.” The portrait was based on media-disseminated images of the Kansas Republican tearfully giving one of the eulogies at Nixon’s funeral. Nixon himself appears with his dog Checkers in a small insert in the poster, labeled, “Richard M. Nixon Memorial Pet Peeve.”

“It’s Dole trying to be nice, trying to show some personality and failing,” Conal told a reporter. “Dole shedding a tear is akin to (Nixon’s) Checkers speech and makes him heir apparent to the vacated vampire’s throne.”

Whether political or commercial in nature, a poster is a very specific genre that has only seconds to make an impact. Instantaneous recognition is as important as clarity and brevity. As it happened, however, neither I nor several newsaholic colleagues at The Times immediately recognized Dole’s face on Conal’s handiwork.

Even though he is the highest-ranking Republican in the Senate, Dole hasn’t had nearly the media exposure of Conal’s other targets, which include former President Ronald Reagan (“Men With No Lips”) and his wife, Nancy (“Women With Teeth”), former White House aide Oliver North (“Contra Cocaine”) and televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker (“False Profit”)).

Conal’s expressionistic rendering didn’t help, either. Driving by (or even at closer range), a viewer was unlikely to notice a tear leaking from one of Dole’s eyes. Similarly, the images of Nixon and Checkers were too small to read clearly from a distance.

It was also ill-advised to require the viewer to relate a recent event to one that happened 42 years ago. Several younger people I talked to were unaware of the “Checkers” speech, which Nixon gave before the 1952 election, when he was running for vice president. (To defend himself against charges that he was the beneficiary of an $18,000 slush fund set up by California Republicans, Nixon appeared on TV and acknowledged a gift he did receive--a cocker spaniel named Checkers, given to his daughters by a wealthy Texan.)

Most peculiar was Conal’s convoluted reasoning in equating a graveside speech from a longtime friend with Nixon’s famous public pleading. Other than the fact that both speeches were televised, and both men were visibly moved, what is the connection between Nixon’s calculated political gesture and Dole’s low-key remarks?

Now, I’m no supporter of Dole’s, whose positions on abortion and gay rights, the presumed powers of the United Nations and other issues run counter to my own. But Dole really was a friend of Nixon’s, and he was speaking at a funeral, where the deceased’s misdeeds generally go unremarked. (After Nixon’s death, even the media did a 180-degree turn from its Woodward-and-Bernstein days and painted in heroic terms the only U.S. President to resign in disgrace.) Even if the analogy did make sense, though, Conal seems to have forgotten that he was making “people’s art” for the streets, not work meant to be pondered at length by the cognoscenti in a white-walled gallery.

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He once told an art school audience that, although he has been influenced by such politically driven artists of the past as Honore Daumier and Francisco Jose de Goya, his biggest inspiration comes from the tabloids, with their sock-’em images and brief, screaming headlines.

But in “Nothing Personal,” he seems to be using the tabloid form without following through on the utter simplicity of tabloid style.

While it is the great strength of conceptual art to actively involve the viewer in “creating” the work, a street poster has to hit fast and hard. (When Barbara Kruger painted a huge American flag with brief politically themed questions on an exterior wall of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1990, she was well aware of the special requirement of drive-by art.)

Conal, who earned a master’s degree in art from Stanford University, has studied with such respected painters as Frank Lobdell, Nathan Oliveira and Leon Golub, who is known for his huge images of terrorists and their victims. Had it not been for art dealers’ lack of interest in his work, Conal probably wouldn’t have taken it to the streets eight years ago.

These days, however, Conal is represented by Koplin Gallery in Santa Monica and has shown his work in numerous group exhibitions. Four years ago he had a one-man show at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.

Could it be that this acceptance by the art world has caused him to lose the common touch, the ability to function--as he once described himself--as “a low-level irritant”?

Conal clearly adores media attention, and he’s terrific with sound-bite quotes. But it’s also quite possible that his fame has begun to occlude his message.

Maybe his provocations about people he feels “abuse their power in the name of representative democracy” would be more effective coming from an anonymous artist whom no one could accuse of careerism. Even Antonovich’s complaint seemed to be primarily directed at Conal’s track record as political gadfly, not at the content of his most recent poster.

In fact, it was more than a year ago that Conal, who is 49, told an interviewer: “Many young people out there . . . are legitimately more angry than I am, and it’s their turn to take this over.”

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There is also a larger question of whether posters are still an artist’s most effective means of reaching a large, non-specialist audience.

The heyday of the poster began in the 1860s, when the development of color lithography offered a cheap, eye-catching way to capture the attention of the urban public casting about for entertainment possibilities in an era before TV and film.

In France, the witty images of Jules Cheret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec advertised singers and actresses, notably Sarah Bernhardt. Bolstered by the decorative serpentine line of the turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau style, poster art spread to Austria, the Netherlands and the United States. In the ‘30s, suave Art Deco stylization enlivened European posters for ocean liners, household products and cigarettes.

While the appeal of these advertising posters was driven purely by style, political posters at the time of the Russian Revolution offered a heady mix of passionate conviction, lofty theorizing and eye-catching visuals--a vivid mix of typography and design. In contrast, World War I brought out sentimental and paternal (“Uncle Sam Needs You”) imagery on the U.S. home front.

The poster’s last big moment may have been the ‘60s, when psychedelic designs advertised rock groups and simple graphics raised public consciousness about injustices from war to worker exploitation.

Today, when posters have become little more than crass vehicles for marketing and merchandising, other formats may offer more promise for artists hoping to reach ordinary people outside art institutions with political messages that challenge accepted opinion.

The obvious ploys involve infiltrating electronic media (Conal himself has talked about switching into “an attack on prime time with 30-second videos”), electronic message boards and computer bulletin boards.

But no matter what the medium, even the most outrageous artist’s message has to be very clear and very seductive--just like the tantalizing poster images of Gay Paree.