The
Message Is the Message
In Not Your Typical Political Animal: Animal Drawings and Paintings by Guerrilla Poster Artist Robbie Conal, this New York-born “red-diaper baby” turned Southern California art activist reveals his skill at transforming nature into propaganda.
“Animals are the only consistent positive metaphors I’ve been able to muster in my political paintings, drawings and posters,” Conal writes. “Somehow — for me at least — they function as opposites, even antidotes, to willfully exploitive and abusive human behavior.”
This is a much thinner book than the others, but it concentrates on a single passion. Conal uses a brutish representational style (nothing cute or cuddly here); nonetheless, some of the imagery, like “Midnight Jellyfish,” is painted in a futuristically exquisite manner.
In Conal’s universe, the politicians he frequently skewers serve as foils for their animals. In “President Lyndon Johnson and His Dog ‘Him’ ” and “President Richard Nixon and Checkers,” his pairings of humans and dogs celebrate one over the other (guess who comes out on top?).
He imagines some remarkable likenesses: J. Edgar Hoover looks like his Boston terrier on one page, and on another resembles a frog. Is this an insult to the frog?
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