You’ve seen Robbie Conal’s posters pasted on those rectangular gray metal stoplight-switching boxes at intersections all around town. The deeply lined, often grimacing faces of politicians and notorious public figures are accompanied by a sly one or two-word commentary (Dick Cheney wearing rabbit ears, for example accompanied by the legend, “Enronergizer Bunny”). His work is primarily political and satirical and it is therefore more than a little ironic that a rare departure into more inspirational subject matter (a series of portraits of Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King with the legend, “Watching, Waiting, Dreaming”) would be the posters that get him tossed in the pokey.
“It was 2005, in March, I just wanted to go to New York and poster Watching, Waiting and Dreaming,” Conal says, “It was a post 9/11 thing, a karmic reaction on my part. I thought our government’s reaction was so over-the-top. We so overreacted and revenge is such a big deal in our culture and so ugly that I thought, karmically, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we had these heroes of non-violent political and social action looking at us, going ‘what the fuck are you doing, can’t you think of any other way to make change besides bombing the shit out of everybody.’ Gandhi’s watching you, The Dalai Lama’s waiting for us to get hip and Martin Luther King is still dreaming.
“I put up as many posters as we could in L.A. —but Washington D.C. and New York had been hit – and New York is home to me. So I go there to poster with a couple of my crazy buddies, part of the crew who do the New York postering. So we’re going around the West Village, around Houston Street at 1:30 in the morning and one of the guys gets into an argument about putting up posters with some guy who’s just sitting there smoking a cigarette. This happens all the time, but I tell people, ‘Don’t get into an argument about politics on the street in the middle of the night in any major city, much less in the boonies or Cincinnati.’ It came back to haunt us because two blocks later two taxicabs roll up and these guys in plain clothes jump out and it’s Rudy Giuliani’s anti-graffiti squad and they bust us. They haul us straight in to the 11th Precinct, handcuffed with our hands behind our backs.”
. . .
Only a handful of artists have elevated satirical political art to a true art form and Robbie Conal is among the most well-regarded, though Conal claims to be retired, pretty much, except for one last set of posters he is planning to unveil just in time for election season. He probably has more fun drawing fur-perfect portraits of cats and analyzing the latest Yankees game than plotting the graphic fate of the Bush administration. However, as the child of truly Old Left parents, both union organizers in New York City, he is more or less driven to take on the establishment with pencil, paint and printing press.
He has many distinguished peers. David Levine’s caricatures in The New York Review of Books (Lyndon Johnson as a blind, weeping Macbeth is one of the best) can be just as satirically lethal although they lack the more accessible humor of Conal’s work. Shepard Fairey, who acknowledges Conal’s influence, is not so much a satirist as a kind of graphic culture critic, a master of agit-pop, as concerned with examining the medium as the message. Artists like Ben Shahn and Leon Golub also focus on political and social issues, and Conal acknowledges their influence, although they are not really satirists; they create dark social and political commentaries, often as evocative as Guernica, Picasso’s shocking and brutal protest of the bombing of the capital of the Basque people in 1937. [For years, the painting hung in its own room at the Museum of Modern Art, one of the cultural institutions to which Conal was regularly dispatched by his parents, who regarded the museums of New York to be a convenient day care service.] The artist whose work is probably most akin to Conal’s is Klaus Staeck, the German master of political collage and artistic heir of John Heartfield. Conal, in comparison to these guys, is spare, direct and almost always exactly on target. The gnarled faces tell most of the story and one or two well-chosen words drive home the stake. As in Staeck’s collages, Conal’s intent is communicated in a single gestalt – but unlike Staeck’s work, it’s usually very funny, kind of like having ten minutes of Jon Stewart slammed into your brain in a single instant.
It took Conal a while to find his style. As an art student at San Francisco State in the mid-60’s, his work was too strange even for the San Francisco Oracle, which often featured the artwork of his friends. After graduation, just to make absolutely sure he was not, after all, ultimately destined for Yankee pinstripes, he took a slight career zag to Saskatchewan to play semi-pro baseball for the highway-league Lumsden Cubs. He played second base with passion and a ponytail. “We’d play in towns like Disley, Dilke, Pense, Elbow and everywhere we played people would throw ice-cubes at me and call me ‘Mary, ” Conal recalls, “I was the long-haired hippie from San Francisco. Our manager was a full blooded Cree Indian, ‘Don’t call me Chief,’ although, of course, his name was ‘Red.’”
The money was irregular. The base pay was “not much. It depends how well you did. If you hit a double or scored the winning run, there was some money. The funny thing about that team was that, aside from the Chamber of Commerce, our major sponsor was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. There was exactly one Mountie in Lumsden and he loved me. He’d come visit me all the time. I was like his personal pet. ‘I know you’re up to something,’ he’d say. ‘I know you’re probably doing something, but that’s okay, it gives me something to do”
After that strangeness, Conal returned to San Francisco and got a job as a cab driver on the graveyard shift for Yellow Cab. “Nobody would take those jobs because the Zodiac serial killer had just killed a cab driver on the graveyard shift – in his cab – and there was a turf war going on with Luxor, a racist cab company that HATED Yellow Cabs (I got punched out once by Luxor drivers). The only people they could hire were ex-cons and not-dead-yet hippies. ”
Conal’s Bay Area extended adolescence included a spell of house-sitting for gypsies in Richmond, living in an abandoned bakery and then a string of deserted store fronts before he finally decided that if he was going to get serious about art—or just life—he would need an advanced degree. He chose Stanford because two of his favorite artists, Nathan Oliveira and Frank Lobdell, were teaching there. “I actually stalked them until they helped me get into the program.
“The only job I could get (after graduation from Stanford) – wasn’t even a job, it was an artist in residence grant, a pathetic one, but it was administered by the University of Georgia. So I went to there and on the first day the chairman of the department says, ‘You know, we have a visiting lecture program, who’s your favorite artist?’ ‘Leon Golub,’ I told him. ‘Call him up,’ he says, ‘see if he’ll come down and give a talk.’”
Much to Conal’s surprise, Golub, who lived New York, not only answered the phone but actually showed up for the lecture (by coincidence he had a another gig in Atlanta that made it not so inconvenient.) During Golub’s talk a fight broke out in the balcony between two professors in the art department, one of whom thought Golub should have stuck to his abstract work while the other believed his social and political paintings about the Vietnam war were revelatory. Golub was asked to decide the question himself. “I think all my work is equally irritating.” he told them.
After the lecture there was the requisite cocktail party and dinner and the argument threatened to break out all over again. Golub turned to Conal and said, ‘So you’re the guy that got me into this, huh? Where’s your studio? Let’s go.’ So he looks at my work and says, ‘So, you want to know what I really think? ‘Sure.’ I said. He shreds it. Shreds it.
Conal and Golub became friends. Periodically Golub, like some Zen master wielding a painful length of bamboo, would review what Conal was doing and trash it. Eventually Golub saw something that wasn’t totally trash. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You have to point your finger directly at the perpetrator. Don’t fuck around with vague rebelliousness. That’s just style. Who’s the bad guy? Take all that shit you’re doing with the paint and the power you do have and put it into that. Just name names, okay?”
By 1985 Conal was living in Los Angeles and Golub came for another visit. “I was doing these big works, twelve-foot canvases, and Golub says, ‘So, you want to know something? ‘Sure.’ So you’ve got these twelve feet? Throw out three-quarters of it. You’ve got these three guys here, George Schultze, William Casey and Caspar Weinberger. Throw out the rest of it and just put everything you’ve got into the figures. Paint the buttons with the same intensity you paint the faces.’ As a result of that I came down to the most reductionist images– just the heads. No words.”
It was another artist, Erika Rothenberg, who made the suggestion that brought it all together. “She is one of the smartest people I ever met and I was telling her that some of my clients were saying they were interested in buying a particular piece of work (Reagan and two members of his administration) but they weren’t sure if I liked Reagan or hated him. ‘Are you kidding.’ I thought. I mean, it was this ugly black and white painting and Erika asked, ‘So what’s the title of the series?’ And I said, ‘Men With No Lips.’ So she says, ‘Why don’t you put in on the painting? Then they can’t make any mistake about it.” And that was that.
. . .
Sixty days after his arrest, Conal was back in New York to appear before a judge at 100 Center Street. “The prosecutor sent TWO city attorneys. I go before the judge and he’s looking at this file and he says, ‘Mr. Co-nal, you’re a professor at USC in Los Angeles. I gather you are a nationally known fine artist. You have a career. You look like you’re almost ready to retire. Do you have anything you want to tell me? ‘ And I said, ‘Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King.’ And he looks at the city attorneys and he says, ‘Get out of here. Work it out. Get out of my court.’ There was one day of community service and it worked out I had already done that.”
Conal remains unpunished.