Men With No Lips^29
Robbie ConalThe notice Post No Bills was coined in
mid-nineteenth-century England to
prevent the hangers of illegal placards from
littering London’s otherwise dreary streets.
By law, the Post No Bills notice had to
appear approximately every four feet along
a wall or hoarding for it to be considered a
placard-free surface; but even the threat of
fine or arrest didn’t daunt the erstwhile
posterist in the performance of his duty.
Since then, Post No Bills has become an
invitation to engage in the act of posting.
Once the only method of displaying
advertisements and proclamations for
those without access to mass media,
postering is still the cheapest and most
defiant means of reaching the public.
Few have challenged posting ordinances more than Venice,
California–based artist/activist Robbie Conal (b. 1944 ). As the leader of a
national band of agitators, he has flown coast to coast armed with rolls of
incendiary paper to supply an army of poster snipers. In reality, this army is
a loose network of urban poster guerrillas who in the wee hours of the
morning plaster their respective cities and towns with messages that
addressed a variety of social ills. Since the mid- 1980 s, Conal has produced,
at his own expense, an average of three posters a year on subjects he
believes mass media has failed to cover.
Conal’s first foray into confrontational street art was an enigmatic
though provocative poster titled Men With No Lips, an attack on former
President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet, whose tight-lipped responses to public
inquiry obfuscated the dismantling of social welfare programs at home and
the undermining of sovereign governments abroad. This poster, originally
designed to fit standard traffic light switching boxes—the most ubiquitous
unofficial poster surface in Los Angeles—was simultaneously hung on
building walls, hoardings, and lampposts in New York and Chicago. A
hybrid of fine art and agitprop,Men With No Lipswas often mistaken for a