Judging Robbie

The first-ever Sunset Strip Billboard Awards, sponsored by the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, will take place July 13 at the Hyatt West Hollywood Hotel. We talked to the most subversive of its seven judges, Los Angeles guerrilla artist Robbie Conal, who has plastered his provocative posters lampooning everyone from Tammy Faye Bakker to Bill Gates to Kenneth Starr on traffic-light switching boxes and construction-site walls since 1986.

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How do you answer criticism that billboards are an aesthetic blight on the landscape?

If they’re really good commercial art, then they’re aesthetic. I’m an aficionado of billboards. My wife, Deborah Ross, is a movie-title designer, so we’re both kind of arty, and we drive around L.A., like everybody else does. One of our favorites is the Energizer bunny billboards that are an advertising riff on the work of a fine artist, Barbara Kruger, who basically does riffs on advertising.

Has a billboard ever made you swerve?

Oh, yeah. If it causes traffic accidents, I like it.

Have you ever postered over a billboard?

Not personally, but I have a little guerrilla army of very irregular volunteers--your favorite club slime and grunge puppy and out-of-work actors, arty types, a few lawyers to keep us out of jail--and s---- happens.

How do L.A. billboards stack up against other cities’?

L.A. is billboard heaven. In a way, L.A. is public art heaven, sanctioned or unsanctioned, because Angelenos are so superficial in the nicest sense of the word. We pay attention to surfaces.

How would you feel if you ended up on those “Think Different” Apple billboards?

Embarrassed.

In addition to the Sunset Strip, are there any corridors in Los Angeles that . . .

Power corridors?

Yes, power billboard corridors that you like?

Santa Monica Boulevard in Westwood is a power corridor. You can almost touch them there. And let me just put this in: I think that East L.A. and South-Central are incredibly underused as billboard sites.

In terms of impact, how do your posters compare to billboards?

They’re pathetic.

But you’ve done billboards, right?

In 1990, about [North Carolina Sen.] Jesse Helms. I’m doing some posters for a movie that’s coming out in August about Abbie Hoffman, called “Steal This Movie.”

Does doing billboards diminish your reputation as a bad-boy guerrilla artist?

Yes. Absolutely. Ruining my credibility.

What do you say to that?

I say let me design more. Hire me.

So are you selling out?

I’m old. I’ll tell you what, you can ask the LAPD about my credibility.

They would probably say you’re a pain in the butt.

Maybe they think I’m cute. But the last poster I did is “Disbelief.” It’s about the LAPD. It’s actually a sequel to a poster I did in 1993 called “Disarm.” It was an LAPD nightstick on fire.

On a lighter note, aren’t those whirlybirds that keep pigeons off billboards kind of mean?

It’s a mistake. In most cases, the pigeons would improve the billboards.

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He got board

Robbie Conal’s least-favorite billboards:

“Anything mixing Absolut Vodka and art.”

“Anything with skinny, happy young couples smoking.”

“ ‘Judgment days, sleepless nights. Court TV.’ It looks like a rip-off of an Ed Ruscha.”

“The spectacularly ugly campaign for one of my favorite fruits--avocados. Whoever designed that thing deserves some kind of avocado pit award.”