Elisha Shapiro (aka Nihilist Field Marshal Shapiro) is a Los Angeles-based media prankster and conceptual artist. He has been creating his neo-dadaesque public spectacles for the past 15 years and first came to public attention with his 1984 Nihilist Olympics. The Olympics were followed by a Nihilist campaign for President in 1988 and a Nihilist campaign for LA County Sheriff in 1994. In 1999 he staged Nihilism Expo '99, a world's fair for nihilists. He currently hosts a monthly cable TV show called Nihilists' Corner.

• List of Field Marshal's Art Work
  
• Essay about Field Marshal's Art
  
• The Field Marshal's Childhood
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Below is a list of the work of conceptual Artist, Elisha Shapiro.



PERFORMANCE ART


NIHILISM EXPO 1999
the Lab, Downtown Los Angeles
November 20, 21 and 22, 1999
installation of 5 pavilions, performances and film festival


VOTE NIHILISM '94
Shapiro For Sheriff Campaign HQ Opening
Zero One Gallery, LA, February 12, 1994

I DON'T BELIEVE IN ANYTHING;
WHY DO YOU?
KPFK radio, Los Angeles - Soundings, Aug. 7, 1990; Apr. 2, 1991; Nov. 9, 1993
LA Perspectives Festival, UCLA, April 26, 1991
LA Cultural Affairs Grant, July 1991
LACE, LA, November 14, 1993
Nihilism Booth, Westwood Village, May 1992
Freewaves October Surprise, October 17, 1992
FAR Bazaar, December 4, 1992

NIHILISM EXPO
Announcement Press Conference
SMARTS summer performance series, Santa Monica, August 5, 1989
Nihilism Expo Cancellation Gala - performance, Zero One Gallery, Los Angeles, September 1, 1990

VOTE NIHILISM '88
Announcement Event, July 4, 1987, Downtown Los Angeles
Nihilist Party Nominating Convention, August 12, 1988, Santa Monica
San Diego Airport Event, October 1, 1988
San Francisco Airport Event, October 8, 1988

THE HOLY WARS, Los Angeles, April 1985, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

1984 NIHILIST OLYMPICS, Los Angeles,
1981-84, 40 performances at: city locations,
Gorky's Cafe, Lhasa Club, Club Lingerie, SPARC

FLATLANDS, performed/collaborated, Pilot Theater, Los Angeles, July 1983

ELIGIBLE BACHELORS with Linda Albertano, performed, Los Angeles/San Pedro, 1983

SWAY BACK, performed/collaborated, The House, Santa Monica, March 1982

REST AREA # 17, performed, October 1981, Industrial St Space, Los Angeles






VIDEO SHOWINGS


NIHILISTS' CORNER 1993-present
Monthly show on Adelphia and Media One Cable systems in LA,
and Manhattan Neighborhood Network in New York City.
LA Cultural Affairs Grant, 1993


VOTE NIHILISM '88 campaign video
LACE, September 30, 1988
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, May 1989
Onyx Sequel Videos, August, 1990

MEET ELISHA SHAPIRO
Oranges & Sardines Gallery, 1983
Onyx Sequel Videos, September 1990

NIHILISM EXPO commercial, Onyx Sequel Videos, August, 1990




STATIC SHOWS

INFLUX, November, 1993, Gallery 400, Univ. of IL at Chicago

BENEATH THE SURFACE
Photography, 1986-7
Cheap Racist Gallery, Los Angeles
Northwest Artists' Workshop, Portland

NIHILIST OLYMPICS
Information and Sign-up Centers, 1983-4
Installations at: LA Street Scene Festival, L.A.
Gorky's Cafe, Los Angeles,
Lhasa Gallery, Hollywood
Oranges & Sardines Gallery, L.A.

"MEET ELISHA SHAPIRO:
The Photography Show"
Oranges & Sardines Gallery, Los Angeles, 1983

SECOND NIHILIST FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS
Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, 1980

LA DADA FEST, Installation on Friday the 13th
LAICA Downtown Window, Los Angeles, 1980

FIRST NIHILIST FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS
Los Angeles, 1978

ARTWORDS AND BOOK WORKS, LAICA, Los Angeles, 1978

SELECTED MAIL ART SHOWS,
(eleven shows) 1978-80
Los Angeles, Eugene, San Diego, San Francisco,
Richland, Santa Rosa, New York, Bloomington

FIRST BIENNIAL JURIED SHOW, 1978
Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles



OTHER ACTIVITIES

Cactus Foundation, Director, 1985-1990
Nihilist Film Festival, Director, 1999-present.
1984 LA Nihilist Olympic Committee, Chair
Nihilist Olympic Arts Festival, Coordinator
OK Magazine, co-editor and contributor, 1977
Nihilist Press, Director
Nihilist Calendar, Writer and Publisher, 1980-present
Cooperative Nihilist Housing Project, Fieldmarshal
First and Second Nihilist Festival of the Arts, co-director
Guest Performance Art lecturer at U.C. San Diego and Irvine, 1986

California Teaching Credential
MFA in Professional Writing from USC

WRITING

Elisha Shapiro has had articles published in:
The Los Angeles Times (OP ED)
Los Angeles Free Press, 1972-6
New Times Magazine
Inside English, 1997
Figaro (New Orleans)
California Recreation Magazine
PSA Magazine
Rock Magazine


Elisha Shapiro has also written several short stories, a screenplay and an anthology. He was given a reading of two of short stories at SPARC in August 1983. His short story, The Haberdasher, was published in MIXTURE Magazine.




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Below is an essay about Elisha Shapiro's work.

Modern mass media has a profound and growing effect on the way people see the world and themselves. Subsequently, mass media exerts great influence over the values to which most people subscribe. This is the reason Elisha Shapiro's conceptual art takes the form of staged public events, and why the press coverage of those events has become central to his work. The form Shapiro has developed expands on the forms and issues which the Dadaists explored in the early part of this century. In addition Shapiro combines some of Warhol's perceptions to bring these explorations to contemporary realities. The form of the work which Mr. Shapiro produces is so related to the content of his art that this form is integral to the artist's expression, adding to the content and significance of the art.
These staged events include spectacles like political rallies, press conferences, political conventions, sporting events, fundraising events and world's fairs. Shapiro subverts these benign events by adding incongruous elements like harsh and disturbing imagery and idiosyncratic humor. Through his style of subversion, the artist succeeds at engaging his audience at the same time as he aggressively challenges it.

NIHILIST OLYMPICS

In the summer of 1984, after four years of careful planning and preparation, Elisha Shapiro presented his Nihilist Olympic conceptual art event in Los Angeles. One of the forty events which comprised this piece was "The U-Turn Competition." On the first Friday of the LA Olympics, panels of Nihilist judges were stationed at five busy intersections around the Los Angeles area. At advertised times, the competition began. More than eighty people competed for the most "stylish" traffic maneuver-and the competition was lively.

Later in the Nihilist Olympics, Shapiro staged "The Lazlo Toth Art Defacing Competition." On a pleasant Saturday afternoon at the Otis Parsons' parking lot, 30 competitors and 60 spectators gather for the event. The crowd cheered on the art-defacers who modified, smashed and burned contributed paintings and sculptures. These Nihilist Olympic games generated more than one-hundred print and electronic news stories. As a result, millions of people heard about the Nihilist Olympics.

VOTE NIHILISM '88

As Shapiro finished the Nihilist Olympics, he began planning VOTE NIHILISM '88. In this piece he launched a Nihilist Party campaign for President of the United States. This campaign included an extensive platform, a campaign video, media events such as an announcement of candidacy, airport campaign stops and a convention. Vote Nihilism '88 incorporated the media attention into itself.

Shapiro creates these events by combining public relations techniques, celebrity imagery and audience participation. He uses commercial forms of photography, video, printing, display, writing and graphics. The result looks like Madison Avenue gone crazy--on a budget.

NIHILISM

The word "Nihilism" is a repeated element in this work. Nihilism is simply the rejection of all value systems and the questioning of all bases for moral choice. With this label, Shapiro creates a media image of a person, or sometimes a group of people, who publicly deny basic cultural assumptions about belief. The people the artist creates in his work reject a cultural imperative to subordinate their identities to some moral, religious or commercial value system. The only time that our mass media ever portrays people who don't believe in anything, those people are either a maniacs or monsters. The idea that it could be a reasonable choice to reject this subordination of our identities is completely alien to the mass media and its viewers. So there is an implicit irony when Shapiro inveigles the media (which normally acts to reinforce these cultural values) to broadcast this dissenting point of view. The appearance of the artist's nihilist imagery in the media not only stimulates the audience by informing it that there can be a choice in matters of belief, but more importantly, these images in the media call attention to the media itself and to the role the media plays in the choices we make.

These art/media events are carefully structured to make the press coverage an amplifier (and filter) for the art. The imagery, and the work's content, are integral to the press coverage of each event. Those who read these articles or hear the electronic coverage receive the images just like those who attend the events. While those who attend feel the dimension of the audience participation, the reader or listener receives the crucial dimension of the media context and media filtration.

Shapiro's art takes this adventurous form because this form is effective--it adds depth and irony to the content of the work, it reaches a broad audience and it reaches beyond the usual art audiences. And because these art events and their press coverage do not obviously look like art, they can challenge people to think about the work's issues--people who would normally find gallery art unengaging because of its separateness.

The form of this work is particularly appropriate to this work's intent, which is to stimulate questioning of what and why all people in our society believe--the most fundamental choices people make. These choices concern value systems--questions like: What is good and bad? What is spiritually important? How do we deal with death? What can guide a person's ethical decisions? What is the moral nature of an individual and mankind? The way we deal with issues like these in our culture is basic to the way we judge ourselves and others; in turn, the way we judge ourselves has much to do with many of the psychological problems our culture fosters (self-hatred; denial of feelings, responsibility and reality; and delusions about things and people around us). In our society, values and morality are considered a private matter, but choices in these matters are not freely made. There are subtle cultural influences and pressures exerted on everyone to subscribe to a certain kind of value system.

Consider the kinds of values systems held by nearly every person in this society. All these world views declare that there is something more important than any individual (a God, ethic, moral structure, etc). The homogeneity of these value systems is what Shapiro's work examines. The lack of questioning at this fundamental level of thought is what Shapiro's work challenges. And his work focuses on mass media so much just because the media has become the setting in which we all learn what acceptable values are, and what an acceptable world view is.



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THE FIELD MARSHAL'S CHILDHOOD


When I was four I liked to sit in the hall in my house with all the doors closed. I felt safely isolated from the outside world. The only light was from the cheap etched glass fixture on the ceiling above my head. It was a cool retreat from the smog and heat of Riverside, California outside. It was not too large a space for a five year old, and there were no people.

One afternoon I had closed myself in when my older brother, back from his day in the third grade, insinuated himself into my hall.

"Elisha, I think there's something in your eye." he said, reaching for my right eye. He gently tugged on my lower lid, pulling it away from my eyeball. Somewhere, outside the field of my vision, he held a wire clothes hanger. Then he simply hung it on my lower eyelid.

My father appeared quickly when he heard the screams. He removed the hanger and slapped my brother a few times.

That summer, it was 1958, my parents piled us all into the Hudson, and we drove cross-country. We spent a while at Lake Michigan, and on our way home, we stopped at Little America in Texas. I remember Little America as a hotel for families, or maybe an amusement park, or possibly both.

While we were at Little America, my parents gave me a party for my fifth birthday. It was a nice party, but more importantly I got a cowboy suit as a gift. This wasn't just any cowboy suit--it included a shirt, pants, hat, boots, holster and gun. And it was all red with white piping. When I put it on and saw myself in the mirror, I was stunned by how grand I looked. I think it was the best birthday present I've ever received.


Several months later, back at home, we no longer had the Hudson. The white, round, old-fashioned car was replaced by a modern, red Plymouth station wagon with fins. The whole family was loaded into the wagon, going somewhere, when there was a siren and flashing lights. My dad pulled over and a very serious and tense policeman came over. From low in the back seat, I watched as he began grilling my dad, asking him all sorts of questions. Then he said, "Do you know you have a gun on your car?"

My father was non-plused.

The policeman eyed my father suspiciously. Then he walked to the rear of the car and picked up my gun off the right fin. When he realized it was a toy, we could see him relax.

"This belong to one of you?" he said to my brothers and me in the back seat. My father took the gun and passed it back to me as he apologized to the policeman.


In the house we lived in at that time, the kid's bathroom had a regular bath tub. But in my parents' bathroom, they had a bath and shower combination with sliding glass doors. Sometimes they'd let me take a shower in their bathroom. I liked the enclosed nature of their facilities. I'd sit in the tub with the glass doors closed, with the shower on, and sometimes with the bath running. I could play that way for as long as they'd let me.

One day I got an idea. I got all the washcloths I could find, and a couple of towels. I turned on the bath water all the way. Then I started using the wash clothes and towels to block all the cracks in the glass doors which might let water out. After a while, the water was to the top of the tub. Some water leaked out at the drain stopper lever--so I blocked that with a wash cloth. Soon the water was creeping up the glass doors. I was standing. Then I started treading water.

It was like my own swimming pool, or my own aquarium. I happily splashed around, and my washcloths seemed to be holding.

My mother, who was several rooms away, noticed water flowing down the hall and into the living room.

The next thing I knew, she burst into the bathroom. She looked at me, a bit puzzled. Then she became agitated, shouting for me to turn off the water.

At this point, turning off the water required a pretty deep dive. Unused to performing manual tasks while under water, it took me a few tries.

She wasn't satisfied. She urged me to go back under to open the drain. I reluctantly obeyed.

When she got me out and dried off, she sternly told me not to do that again.


Maybe a year after this, I remember getting up one morning to find my mother sitting at the kitchen table with a big piece of raw meat pressed to her face. When she took it away, most of her face underneath was swollen and the same purple as the meat. She was in her bathrobe, having come home from the hospital during the night while I slept. As close as I could piece the story together at the time, this is what happened. She was driving home from a class at night. She was tired and fell asleep. Then the red Plymouth station wagon went off the freeway overpass on which she was driving. The car burst into flames, and a passing stranger dragged her unconscious body from the wreckage. My mother was bruised like I didn't know people could bruise. But that's all that happened to her. There was a small article about it in the Riverside Press Enterprise. My mother's rescuer was hailed as a hero.

All this happened a couple of days before Mother's Day, and in my kindergarten class, our assignment was to make Mother's Day cards for our mothers. Considering these dramatic events, I resolved to render them as faithfully as possible on my mother's card.


One Sunday afternoon I was sitting in our front yard among the fustucca plants, pulling weeds as my father had instructed me. Molly Boblette was there. Molly lived two houses down from us and was the second of four children. She was older than I was by about five years . I didn't really notice when or from where she had come. She saw a hoe leaning against the house were my father had left it. She picked it up and came over to where I sat. Leaning on the hoe, she said, "What are you doing, Elisha?"

"Weeding."

"Do you dare me to hit you on the head with this hoe?"

I had been in this situation before, having older brothers. I knew there was no correct answer to her question. I just looked at her, trying to figure out what it was she wanted from me.

"Okay, then." she said, awkwardly picking up the hoe and hitting me on the head with it.

It wasn't that bad. I continued to watch her to see if she was done. Then a strange look came over her face, and she turned and ran away.

As I turned back to my weeding, I felt something warm drip down my forehead and into my eye. I reached up to touch it, and when I saw the red of the blood on my hand, I screamed and ran inside the house.

The sight of my head and face covered with blood caused some excitement. My dad wrapped my head in a towel, picked me up and put me in the car. Then he drove fast to the hospital and rushed me in. When the doctor cleaned me up, he found a tiny cut, maybe a half an inch. He told my father that cuts on the head bleed a lot.

When my dad asked me why Molly hit me, I told him that I didn't know. Molly was sure she had killed me and so had locked herself in her room.


Of course I knew Michael the best of the Bobblettes because he was just about my age. I found him fascinating and disquieting. Michael was painfully skinny, with dark hair and sharp features. Living so close, we usually walked the four blocks to our neighborhood elementary school together. Usually he would do most of the talking, telling stories, often made up. He was dramatic and eccentric. He gesticulated with his hands, and used hard words. He was different from anyone else I knew, and yet this did not bother him. I just the opposite. I hardly spoke to anyone and avoided any extra attention.

A couple of years after Molly hoed me, when I was in the third grade, I remember how Michael entertained the other students by standing on a texture-coated bench on the gravel playground and singing opera in Italian. I assume it was Italian. All I knew at the time was that it was not English.

He sang with such exaggerated emotion that the kids who had gathered around him, could only stare blankly in disbelief. I watched from a safe distance, back in the crowd. I didn't want to be anywhere near the front where all the attention was focused.


Around that time, Michael asked me if I believed in Jesus. I didn't know what he meant. He said, "Do you believe that Jesus was the son of God?"

"No."

"Well, it's true, you know."

I had thought that this was a matter of opinion, upon which reasonable people might disagree.

He said, "No. It's in the encyclopedia. I looked it up, so it has to be true."

This had me stumped. I knew the encyclopedia was a very reliable source. Yet it seemed to be in direct contradiction to my parents, who were also a very reliable source.

I told Michael I'd have to discuss this matter with my parents. When I did, they said Michael must have been looking in some special Catholic encyclopedia. They said a regular, non-Catholic, encyclopedia would say that some people "think" Jesus was the son of God. And it would also say that some people didn't think so.

I accepted that.


I was in the third grade that year, and my teacher was Mr. Zert. He was the only male teacher at Victoria Elementary School, was in his early thirties, and wore a stylish mustache.

Though my previous teachers had never been mean to me, school was like a strange competition at which I was not good. School work appeared to be much easier for other students than it was for me. My discomfort about school included academics, sports and making friends. But I tried my best since I did not seem to have any choice about being at school.

Mr. Zert started in on me right away. The first day he asked me how to pronounce my name (all my teachers did this). Then he asked me what my middle initial, "P", stood for. I imagine he was hoping for a more familiar name like Paul or Pat. When I told him the P stood for Pessach, he let the matter slide. The next day, when he called roll, he had solved the problem. He pronounced my name, "Elisha P. Shapiro," as if it was written, "Elisha Peesha Peero." He almost sang it, accentuating the rhyme with obvious pleasure.


One day there were three of us standing at the board. We had to add 647 to 294. Standing next to me was the smartest girl in the class. The smart girl finished. Then the other guy finished. Everyone waited for me. When I was done, I was the only one who had the right answer. Mr. Zert earnestly asked me how I achieved the sum. My complicated explanation went something like this. First, I had to add the 7 and the 4. Well, I know that 7 and 3 made 10, so that left one over. I put the one down and then added the 9 and 4 and the one from the ten I just got. Well I knew that 9 and 1 is 10, so I had 3 left over from the four and one more from the 10, which made 4. So I put that down. And then I finished the last column similarly.

Mr. Zert seemed impressed, and told the class I had a good way to add the numbers, and that it doesn't matter if it took me longer because I got the right answer. I was a proud boy.


A game we played a lot was called French dodge-ball. It is played on a basketball court with two teams throwing balls at each other.

On my team, just two of us were not "out" yet, and our opponents were throwing hard, trying to get us. We were cornered. The ball was thrown. I ducked, hitting the asphalt, and my remaining team mate jumped over the ball. The ball missed us both, but when my team mate came down, he landed on my finger.

It took me a while to notice what a bloody mess my finger was. It didn't hurt much, but it looked very odd and misshapen. Another boy took my arm. "We better go to the nurse's office."

I followed obediently. As we sped along the institutional walkways, up ahead we saw Mr. Zert. "He'll know what to do." said my companion.

As we approached, we saw our teacher was in the center of a circle of young girls. Then we could see he was intently playing a game of cat's cradle with one girl as the others watched.

We edged into the circle, me holding my mutilated ring finger for all to see. The girls made way for us.

"Mr. Zert?" I peeped.

"Can't you see I'm busy." he snapped, eyes still riveted to the string cradle.

I sheepishly retreated, and we went the rest of the way to the nurse's office on our own. My parents came and took me to the doctor who repaired my finger.

The next day, with finger bandaged, I returned to school. After class started, Mr. Zert quietly came to my desk.

"Elisha, I'm sorry I didn't help you yesterday. I didn't see you were hurt."

"It's okay." I was not use to teachers talking to me this way.






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