Taking Back the Power: An Interview with Robbie Conal

The Reagan-Bush era set many an artist's teeth on edge. During the summer of Contragate, 1987, Los Angeles artist Robbie Conal began wallpapering cities with his satirical portraits of figures in power, including Caspar Weinberger, Nancy Reagan, Oliver North and Margaret Thatcher. Here he talks with L.A. writer Claire Peeps about what inspired him to do it. —Eds.

Speak, Robbie Conal, 1986. Photo: Janice Felgar

At a construction site on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, between posters for new movies and record albums, four familiar faces are glued to the wall with a caption that reads "Men With No Lips." They are Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan and James Baker, all portrayed as haggard and prune-faced men. "What's 'Men With No Lips,'" asks a teenage passerby, "a rock 'n' roll band?"

Around the corner on the traffic light switching box is a companion piece: the four smiling faces of Nancy Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Jean Kirkpatrick and Joan Rivers, with the boldly printed title "Women With Teeth."

A third poster, of Oliver North, appears repeatedly on the wall of a nearby vacant building. Under North's frowning, tight-lipped portrait is the single directive: "Speak." Two passengers in a car point at the poster and, nodding and laughing, they begin to speak animatedly to each other as they drive away.

Since October, these posters have appeared quietly along heavily trafficked thoroughfares throughout Los Angeles—in Venice, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, downtown, Watts, East L.A. They have also appeared from Wall Street to Tribeca in New York City, and on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.—right across the street from the State Department. Because of their unknown origin, some viewers have speculated that the posters are part of a strategy of the Democratic Party to curry favor in the election year. Others are simply bemused by their humorous, poignant messages.

"Authorship is not the point," says artist Robbie Conal in response to the issue of the posters' anonymity. "The primary goal is just to get people to think about people in power—to think along with me."

Conal conceived of the posters as a cost-effective way to take his work out of the studio and onto the street, where he could engage the largest possible number of people in the process of inquiry. Since 1983 he has been amassing a body of paintings of key figures in international politics. Intended as "adversarial portraits," the paintings call attention to the physical manifestations of the pursuit of power on a group of politically successful men and women. More often than not, these physical effects—wrinkled brow, shrivelled lips, squinting eyes, bared teeth—translate into imposing, thickly painted black-and-white canvases ranging in size up to eight feet. Not an easy sell. "I mean," Conal concedes, "who wants a sour Caspar Weinberger on their dining room wall?"

As the series grew in number, and as the early warning signs of Contragate began to unfold, Conal decided to test the waters. He felt increasingly compelled to express his concern about the diminishing accountability of our government representatives to their constituencies, and to express it immediately to an audience both within and without the traditional art mainstream. He selected a group of portraits that were individually the most recognizable, and presented them with a simple line of text to catch the eye of L.A.'s harried commuters. Conal asserts:

There's a large audience outside the galleries. The gallery is for commerce. I think the artist would be foolish not to engage it—it's the system, we're in it. But there's also an opportunity to circumnavigate it, go beyond it, and I think one could consider that a responsibility.

Judging from the popular response to the posters, Conal would appear to be right in his estimation of the existence of a "nonart" audience. The posters have become a public forum for the critique of government policies; graffiti and written commentary are generously and frequently added. Articles about Conal's work have appeared in various daily newspapers. His most recent poster, Speak, is the first that addresses specific political circumstances on Capitol Hill. For Conal, the synchrony of current political events and the evolution of his artistic ideas couldn't be better. "This is going to be my wonderful summer," he says. "I paint with the hearings on. If there's a ball game on, I paint with the ball game on TV with no sound, and the hearings on the radio."

And what will come after Contragate? The elections, he says, pointing out the parallels in the issues of power and accountability. Since the elections are the one time in the electoral process when politicians are directly responsible to their constituencies, Conal believes that we should exercise our rights to exact that accountability. "I think there is a tremendous danger for people, when they get wise," he says, "to become cynical and feel 'there's nothing I can do about it.' I really don't believe that. We need to feel empowered to take back the power that's been taken away from us."

So he paints. As things get hotter in the political arena he just paints faster. Conal thinks he might actually be ahead of Contragate at this point—if his predictions turn out to be accurate. He's also contemplating billboards as another venue for his ideas. The only thing he feels he lacks is sufficient dialogue in the art community—despite the fact that the posters have begun to win him critical acclaim, a one-man exhibition at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica and even a few sales. "I think it would be great if more artists addressed issues like this and didn't feel that this kind of subject was beyond the province of art," says Conal. One scenario, he suggests, might be for a group of artists to pool their resources to collectively produce, say, five posters. Acknowledging the important work of such artists as Barbara Kruger, Leon Golub and Jenny Holzer, among others, as well as the recent success of such cooperative efforts as Artists Call—evidence that political ideas are being explored in art—Conal says he feels optimistic about the future impact art may have on public opinion. Nevertheless, he's still looking for a debate partner on the streets. Any takers?

This article originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Summer 1987.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002