Perry Hoberman

Damn, I'm sorry I'm going to miss this! Back when I was in film school, I was one of "army of volunteers" postering the city late at night.

We got into some "fun" trouble, and my good friends Clay and Marianne wound up making a film about Robbie as their 310 project, which they later turned into a full length documentary. Check it out here: http://www.planbproductions.com/postnobills/

Too bad I can't teleport back from Finland to be there!

Hi Tracy!

Yes, for some reason this PBS documentary (produced by USC students) doesn't seem to make it on the old resumé...

"Post No Bills" seems to have caught a second life on the festival circuit over the last year since I completed my documentary on jazz musician Freddy Cole.

"Post No Bills" will be screened out of competition at the upcoming "Big Sky Documentary Film Festival" on February 20th in Missoula, MT.

http://highplainsfilms.org/festival/selections.html

It also showed at the Westwood Int'l festival back in Oct and we have upcoming screenings in NYC & London...

So, I am glad that the film still has some relevance 14 years since its completion...

This is especially timely given the melee over the Danish Cartoons. Today's NYTimes has a commentary citing the history of reactions to political art:A Startling New Lesson in the Power of Imagery

"Over art? These are made-up pictures. The photographs from Abu Ghraib were documents of real events, but they didn't provoke such widespread violence. What's going on?...What may be overlooked this time is a deep, abiding fact about visual art, its totemic power: the power of representation. This power transcends logic or aesthetics. Like words, it can cause genuine pain."

i truly appreciate the gesture to expand the usual scope of seminar, but this guy's politics is as dogmatic as those he's criticizing. i've escaped from the seminar 'cause i can't bear it anymore. the countercultural ideology he's spouting has dominated the political agenda of the left in the West since the '60s, and is one of the reasons things are as bad now as they are. this guys's poster art generates the mass conformity required to beileve in the fantasy that "the Man is keeping us down". as his boy Shepard Fairey proves with his new 'obey' clothing line, countercultural rebellion is one of the most powerful forces driving consumer capitalism. His 'aethetics of revulsion' perfectly illustrate Pierre Bourdieu point that taste is first and foremost distaste—disgust and “visceral intolerance” of the taste of others, which in turn makes it easy to see how his and Fairey's critique of mass society could help drive consumerism. For more on this read Thomas Frank or Heath and Potter's Rebel Sell.

I thought it was notable that RC spoke when several of our more conservative classmates didn't show up - perhaps they skipped on purpose?

I hadn't considered that someone who was professionally liberal might offend people reaching for more determined progressive politics.

Opting out of the market is challenging, especially when you deal in commodities. Like artists, who make stuff, stuff that's for sale. RC is notable since he obviously enjoys reaching out to the yoots, with his army which spread his posters, help fabricate his art, and promulgate his brand.

Is that so wrong?

I can get behind most of his strong statements; they seem like a natural part of the ecology. So Bush claims that unchecked domestic surveillance of US citizens is okay; someone should make a 1984-themed poster about that. Duh.

What got me was the Condolezza Rice poster - showing her all blinged out, like some kind of gangster rapper.

She may be the apologist of a testosteronal foreign policy, and thereby worth lampooning. But RC has played a kneejerk race card. She's got a big gold necklace - "WMD" - yeah, so...

How about a cartoon that proposes she's a token, puppet of frat boys, NeoCons? Or articulates some sense of her political ambitions?

As it was, the buck-toothed blackface portrait didn't have the political vision of his aged white guy sendups, for example. Maybe black history and Bamboozled are crowding my vision here. As it was, I was left realizing that when you promote distaste (as you eloquently put it Marc, quoting Pierre Bourdieu), you can achieve the distasteful yourself.

All that aside, RC was clearly provocative. And, clearly a grandfather to people like Shepard Fairey. We are getting our MFAs - it is productive for us to see and debate these people with their anti-propoganda propoganda marketing, sold as art. Someday, when school is over, we may take our work into the marketplace. If we choose a popular political side, and infuse our work with that, we might become one of RC's great-grandchildren. Huzzah!

I'm sorry I was unable to make it - Robbie's work was a huge influence to our own poster campaign for IGKTP: A Federal Offense two summers ago. I would have been interested to hear Robbie's thoughts on the issues of expressing yourself in public city-owned spaces. It's a tough line to walk.

However, after spending the last 8 months working with the Army on ELECT (and a lifetime with a family split between extreme left and extreme right), staying in the room when you want to walk out is good practice, especially when the issues feel so heated. Spend that time knowing thy enemy, or unleashing profanities on them, but either way, stay.

So much of the problem with the Left over the past decade is a result of no one being able to agree on the issues. We need more people to step up, stay in the room, and be leaders that unite instead of divide.

In Marc's defense: he actually did stay in the room long enough to ask Robbie an articulate question about commodification, so it wasn't as if he walked out in silence.

But I disagree that Robbie's work is primarily about the 'visceral intolerance of the taste of others'. Actions still count for something - both his and the madmen he's criticizing - so to focus only on issues of style and the mechanisms of co-option will only get you so far.

And I think you're mistaking style for substance when you accuse him of being dogmatic. His presentation might have been over-the-top and showy (at least some of us found it entertaining as well), but just because someone is passionate and engaged doesn't automatically make them dogmatic. I thought his takes on Monica and the Danish cartoons were especially thoughtful, and hardly doctrinaire.

And on the issue of 'fantasy': 'the Man' may not be keeping you and me down in particular, but he's sure digging a deep deep hole as fast as he can for a lot of the rest of us -- poor, black, old, immigrant, etc.

My favorite work definitely was the sticker with Gandhi, Dalai Lama & Luther King. They have demonstrated the smartest ways of dealing with the anger generated by the political injustice. In my opinion, to live the principles and then talk about them is the hardest but the most realistic way.

I don't have much that I feel comfortable saying about this talk. One thing I can say is that, while I am a Liberal, I still felt screwed that it wasn't more balanced. He mentioned that to be a true satirist you have to lampoon all sides, but there was barely anything that I can recall (if anything at all) that was aimed at liberals.

I really enjoyed the energy that Robbie Conal brought to the seminar. I wish we started all seminars with music. I really loved art for their techinical artistic quality, but I have to agree with Mike Brazil that his satirical work wasn't balanced. My favorite sets of works were the 1984 live posters and the trio of Gandhi, Dalai Lama, and Martin Luther King. I also loved what these guerilla poster runs did for the class. It got the whole class to get out and do something adventurous, rather than be stuck in a room, drawing models for hours on end.

Wow, feel the passion, feel the conviction. Not of the speaker, but of all of you.

I found this seminar quite the opposite: jovial, fun, nonsensical.

The dude lost me when he was advocating peace with his grandiose comparisons of Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, while criticizing the current Bush administration and Bush Sr. What about the guy in the middle of those two. Oh I get it, when Clinton bombs Kosovo or launches cruise missiles at Iraq, it’s in the name of peace and therefore only gets a slap on the wrist with Monica pictures. lmao, peace, progression, informing people of the truth. Whatever you say big guy.

Achtung baby! :)

The day after Robbie's seminar, I stumbled on to http://www.mcvideogame.com/index.html It's a free online game with a definate anti-globalist message.

Ignoring any political bias, Robbie had left me wondering about counter-culture in new media. His posters were definately engaging, and the video showed a lot of people really enjoying the postering fun, but it's still a poster - where's the interactivity? How does a Nintendo kid fight the power in his medium of choice?

Being able to publish shockwave games online has made political games viable, as the McDonald's game shows. Of course, I'm not sure how much of a political message I got out of the McDonald's game. I started deriving a sick satisfaction over feeding sick cows to people, which I don't think was the point.

Robbie's posters have to go for shock value, in order to grab somebody's attention as they walk down a street. But an online game doesn't have that luxury. Nobody can acccidentaly pass by the game, which could lead to a situation where the only people playing the game are the people who already agree with the game. Which kind of defeats the purpose of spreading the message. So instead of just existing for shock value, these games have to be somewhat entertaining, too, which mkes spreading a political messsage much tougher. I'm sure a political-game language will be worked out eventually, but for now, it's a tough sell.

mike-
you present two subject here that are (and often are) melded into one.
1) How can interactivity enhance the effectiveness of a political message and increase its relevance to an interactive generation, and
2) How can games become more effective at communicating political messages?

I agree with your assessment of the second, but you glide over the first. Not everything interactive has to be a game, but I think communicating a message through interactivity can help for that oh-so-elusive part of any message: how can we mobilize the people?

The core message of "I'm Gonna Kill the President! A Federal Offense" was a call to action. No matter what your political ideals are (yes, despite the title), so interaction was a huge part of the experience.

Okay, everyone has heard me ramble on enough about that play, and I'm at work, so I'm cutting this short. But could there be a version of a Canal poster in between a passive experience and a flash game?

Whether I agree with the politics of the speaker or not, I have to say it was nice to have a speaker that engaged everybody in a heated debate. I wish we discussed controversial issues more, it seems like academia is really the only safe place left to have such discussions.

I agree, Korba, that the debate was nice and well-structured and it was nice to see everyone involved and engaged instead of just one or two people driving the whole event.

One of my high school friends was a short-term protege of Robbie's, and he and I had an interesting conversation once about how those posters communicate. His major problem with them was that in a drive-by world, especailly Los Angeles which is vehicle-based, most of Robbie's posters were not from an information design perspective as effective as they could be given that on average you were seeing them for three seconds while driving past an overpass. It was hard to figure out what the poster was saying before it was gone and out of your life. That was his beef from an activism persepctive, and I semi-agreed.

But from a graphic design persepctive I just love the work.

I will say this: of everything, the thing I liked the least were the 1984 posters. They were cool just as posters but being told they were an underground marketing awareness campaign for the Actors' Gang, I gotta say it didn't work. 1) hardly any of these in Culver City, where we've been amkinga big fuss about the Actors' Gang moving here. 2)By going to his favorite trick pony and making them contemporary political, I felt Robbie muddied the communication. So I don't know there's a theatrical revival of the book. All I see is another poster lambasting the Bush administration, but I think it's literary. I loved the peacemakers poster he did because it was so refreshing to see him use new subject amtter for his communication.

I dunno. Maybe I just don't like when a single idea makes up the entireity of an artist's ouvre. Even Georgia O'Keefe painted a few skulls in between flowers.

I've been a fan of Robbie's work for years- as many punk rock shows used his images to advertise. In many cases, artists may be upset about that fact- but I imagine Robbie would be all for it.