Post No Bills
Words: Dawn Dumpert
Photo: Kiino Villand
One day you'll be on your way to work, or walking to the store, and you'll notice a poster on a switch box, or a curious design spray-painted on the sidewalk. Maybe you'll stop and take a closer look, or perhaps you'll just furrow your brow, think "hmmm," and move along. But then you'll see it again, at the corner, or downtown, on a blank billboard off the freeway. It's not a band flier, it's not a lost-puppy notice, and now that you've seen it once, it seems to be appearing with increasing frequency. You want to know what it is, where it came from and who exactly it is that's creating this image working its way into your daily life. For the guerrilla artist, driven by a quest for immediate, unmediated contact with the public at large, that unexpected trill of curiosity and intrigue is pay dirt.
"It's narcotic," says longtime sniper (posterer) Robbie Conal. "There's a kick to it."
It was 1986 when, feeling "really pissed off at the Reagan administration," Conal did his first poster - a four-panel piece mocking the Cabinet and bearing the legend "Men With No Lips," - and set out to plaster LA He was postering a construction site at two a.m., when, he recalls, "these kids came screaming down La Cienega in a Mustang and saw the poster. They started yelling ‘Hey, who's that? That's nasty, where's that band playing?'" Conal laughs, "That did it for me." Since then, the artist has put up approximately 50 posters, nearly all bearing his signature satirical style (black-and-white portraits that render subjects as aged grotesqueries) and skewering everything from Iran/Contra to George W. With the help of devoted comrades, who gather for sniping raids in the dead of night, Conal has seen his work go up not only across the country, but the world. "It's amazing," he says, "how many people actually see it."
Conal and company's industriousness has made the artist, at age 57, one of the more recognizable names in the world of contemporary guerrilla art, but his very specific brand of political postering is by no means the standard. In fact, trying to pin down a definition of the medium is tricky at best - what, after all, distinguishes a hard-working tagger from someone with a more urgent agenda? How does an artist such as Becca, who painted sweetly impressionistic, everyday scenes on LA fences in the mid-90s, match up against someone like KAWS, who swipes advertisements from New York bus shelters, alters them into beautifully sinister comments on celebrity-driven consumer culture and then returns them? For Conal, guerrilla art is a "non-sanctioned form of public address" that's not only illicit, but that offers the artist a direct way to communicate a matter important to them and, thus, achieve "personal catharsis." Which is as good a specification as any - for let's face it, whether the issue roiling inside an artist is political, cultural or personal, he or she must be exceptionally driven to fund and create its artistic expression, then take on not only the task of disseminating it, but the risks inherent in its largely illegal public distribution.
Even a quick look around the airy urban studio the Los Angeles studio of Shepard Fairey will clue you in to the graphic designer's obsession. The 32-year old has done work for such corporate giants as Levi-Strauss, but it's a different sort of behemoth that is the focus of a show currently up in the space. Fairey is the creator of "The Giant," a phenomenon that, since 1990, has grown from a friends-only goof to a pervasive pop icon; myriad permutations of an image based on the late wrestler Andre the Giant - punctuated with the command "obey" - line the walls. If you live in an American city (or Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, Sydney and beyond) there's a decent chance you've seen the stylized visage staring back at you, from a simple stenciled box or even a more elaborate piece in the style of 20th-century Russian propaganda posters.
