They Get Message Across in a Big Way : L.A. Festival: Three artists take an advertising tool--the outdoor billboard--to convey different messages at selected Southern California sites.

The artworks by three local artists--Erika Rothenberg, Sandra Rowe and John Baldessari--go public Monday on billboards across the city, commissioned as part of Los Angeles Festival.

In the case of feminist artist Rothenberg, this means a 14 x 48-foot parody of inaccurate advertising messages.

Her billboard, which will be at the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Hatteras Avenue in Van Nuys, will feature a drawing of a “typical American family” consisting of a husband, wife, two children and a dog.

Blazoned across their freshly-scrubbed, blue-eyed all-American faces (even the family dog has blue eyes) in bold colorful letters reads, “There are still homes in the U.S. that consist of a husband who works, a housewife and two kids!”

But to drive her point home, in the lower right hand corner, Rothenberg cites the actual number of such American families existing: only 4%.

“It’s an ideal that doesn’t exist,” Rothenberg said. “It’s surprising because I think most people might say 60% of all American families are this ideal, but even if it was a family with just one child instead of two, that statistic is still only 10%.”

Americans base legislation on such false images, she says, and “few of us are living up to these images. Most of us are have-nots. There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that this perfection pounded into us does not exist.

“I don’t know how people are going to take (the billboard). Hopefully, it will make people realize they are not alone and in fact, they are in the majority.”

Originally from New York, Rothenberg herself is one of the “have-nots.” Although married with a youngster at home, she is a full-time working mother. “These are my opinions. Hopefully others will bring their opinions into it too,” she said.

Did the Los Angeles Festival committee members place any restrictions on the message for her billboard art?

“None,” she says. “Perhaps they were crossing their fingers that I would not be completely disgusting as I can be. However, they did know I would be provocative.”

Along with her billboard for the Festival, Rothenberg will be featured Sept. 4-23 at the Soap Plant, 7400 Melrose Ave. in Hollywood, as part of the Open Festival, a concurrent part of Los Angeles Festival but on in which artists have funded their work themselves. She will have a window display titled “Have You Attacked America Today?”

Initially shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, and initially funded by Art Matters, an East Coast organization that supports controversial artwork, the display also satirizes American advertising. Rothenberg says there is not enough dissent in present-day American society. Thus viewers see her dissent-laced designs for everyday household products that one might find on the shelves at the supermarket, including items like “flag-burning kits” and “protest pills.”

Space for the three billboards was donated by the Patrick Media Group after demographic and marketing research on the locations. Peter and Eileen Norton have underwritten the project with a $25,000 grant. Rothenberg is among artists represented in the Nortons’ private collection. “She is very interesting in her social commentary,” Peter Norton said.

In addition to Rothenberg’s San Fernando Valley site, an abstract billboard by Baldessari will be installed Monday at Santa Monica and La Brea and Rowe’s work featuring two eyeless human faces covered in lines over the message “You Are the Future” will be completed at Crenshaw and El Segundo.

Baldessari has been out of town and unavailable for comment but Rowe said she hopes people will view her figures as having no particular race or sex, rather as symbols of themselves: Individuals taking responsibility for the future.

“Most billboard advertising assumes people have an indirect, passive role,” the Cal State Pomona art professor said. “I hope that my ‘You’ will talk to people and have them ask who, what and how.”