Yeeeeaaaah, Shia LaBeouf has done some stuff and some things.
He's done some stuff and some things that have made people engage in scientific research in an attempt to breed an entirely new culture of celebrity hatred.
From making plagiaristic films "inspired" by famous modern graphic novelists, to making plagiaristic graphic novels "inspired" by 20th century European poets.
He's had a sensational meltdown. He's stormed out of screenings, totalled cars, engaged in fisty-cuffs, been arrested, imprisioned, fined, court dated, and most notably of all he's worn a big brown bag that tells people he's not famous anymore.
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| Shia LaBeouf tells the world he aint famous no more. |
It began, I think, as a desire to be him. When I was just getting out of university he was this awesome looking dude, in awesome movies, doing awesome stuff. What higher ambition could I possibly have had?
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| Shia LaBeouf in Even Stevens. |
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| Motorcycle Riding, Crypt Rading, 50's Son of 80's Hero, LaBeouf. |
These points aside, what I'm trying to say is I had a somewhat mysterious pull toward LaBeouf, and that pull began to explain itself in the lead up to what everyone called his "meltdown".
The Abbrev'ed Downfall of Shia LeBouf
It was at the height of his fame that things seemed to spiral out of control. Having made a pretty successful debut as a writer director at Cannes with his film about the power of film. Shia returned triumphantly to LA and posted the film online, for free, for all to watch. That was nice of him. However. It was then discovered by the people who have internet that the film was a massive plagiarising of Graphic Novelist's Daniel Clowes work. The film, Howard Cantour.com, took characters, chunks of dialogue, locations and the actual frame work of a short story Clowes wrote, and that's when shit really did hit the fan.
I saw the film, and it was pretty good, regardless. You can see it here: HowardCantour.com
And read the original Daniel Clowes comic here: Justin M. Damiano
From here he apologised numerous times until he finally announced via Twitter that he was "retiring from public life". It seemed like we'd be in for the predictable decent of the Child-Star, who would most definitely hammer a whole heap of drugs, punch some people in the face, and ultimately be discovered with his $60,000 sports car sticking out the roof of his Hollywood home, whilst he sat naked in the corner of an unfurnished master bedroom covered in faeces and eating dead flies he collected off the windowsills.
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| Shia LeBouf hounded by press after scrapping with a dude for seemingly no reason. |
Then, he apologised.
His apologies explained how he'd become so caught up in the creative process he simply forgotten to credit Daniel Clowes original story. He then went on and roughly explained that copying another artists work is wrong, but using another artist work to make a different piece of art is fair game. His argument began to explore ideas such as intellectual property, censorship and ownership of ideas within art.
It didn't help that the media put his every word under an access all areas microscope. We were allowed to see his every mistake and his every tweet, and his every tweet could be re-tweeted, bated, bled and changed. LaBeouf was personally recording and commenting on his own plummet, through his own twitter feed, with over a million pairs of eyes joining him for the decent. It seemed he was out of control and rambling, ready to smother himself in shite and eat some flies.
The End...
Until someone discovered his apology for plagiarising was plagiarised.
For me, this was the moment in that movie when the penny drops. When the invisible suddenly becomes visible. It's the part where the plot gets thick.
His apologies and subsequent apologies for plagiarised apologies were all plagiarised. His output on Twitter consisted, it seemed, of a collection of plagiarised thoughts and feelings that's victims spanned poets like Charles Bukowski to search engines like Yahoo Answers.
LeBeouf then stated his Twitter account is actually a 'Metamodernist' piece of viral performance art. Then LaBeouf embarked upon a series of actions described by Dazed magazine as "a multi-platform meditation on celebrity and vulnerability". Working with British artist Luke Turner and Finnish performance artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö, he created #IAMSORRY.
In February 2013, just days after the whole brown bag in Berlin thing, he opened his live art exhibition #IAMSORRY. What he was apologising for or to who were unanswered and seemingly irrelevant. From Tuesday until Sunday, from 11am till 6pm, at The Cohen Gallery on Beverly Boulevard, he sat alone in a room as one audience member a time was invited into a white room, there they're asked to pick an object from a table. The objects of choice: Pliers, An Indiana Jones whip, a Transformers toy, a bouquet of flowers, a pink ukulele, a bottle of Jack Daniel's, a bowl full of abusive tweets on paper, a bowl of Hershey Kisses and a copy Death Ray by Daniel Clowes.
With one object in hand they could walk into an adjoining room, and in there was Shia Lebouf sat at a table wearing the brown paper bag that reads "I Am Not Famous Anymore".
Apparently audiences could say and do anything they pleased. No matter what they did, Lebeouf stayed silent. Some people took the brown bag of his head, engaged him in conversation, asked him questions, said derogatory and abusive things, even took selfies with him.
TMZ paid a visit to the star, without much luck in drawing from him a response.
'I tell him this all seems incredibly self-serving,' the website's reporter wrote. 'No response. I ask him to share a swig of whiskey with me. No response. I ask him if any slimy characters have put their lips on the bottle - he breaks into a wide smile. Then immediately his face returns to its regular stoic self.'
Apparently whilst one audience member was with him he blubbered and cried.
Interestingly, again, accusations of plagiarism were thrown at the piece and some claimed it was a publicity stunt. It was claimed he was simply imitating, Marina Ambromavich's work The Artist Is Pesent. Even though Marina herself disregarded the claim and stated the piece had an entirely different objective to her work.
The Artist Is Present displayed the artist as the art work. It was physical, thoughtful, calm and devoid of the usual shapes and structures we'd expect to see in a gallery space. The physical, unappologogetic presence of the artist makes the otherwise invisible entity, tangible and understandable. And in as much as Marina Ambromavich wanted the artist to be noticed, it feels like LaBeouf's work is about the opposite.
It seems like LeBeouf's #IAMSORRY is about association and apology, but more importantly it's about the absence of the artist. Not physically, but in every other variation. Speechless and motionless with a brown paper bag on his head, it's almost like he's wanting to be forgotten, or perhaps forgiven. Exactly what he's apologising for, to me, is irrelevant. Just the notion of an apology suspending this premise is enough.
As a performance maker interested in the phenomenon of celebrity this is where things get interesting for me.
What has Shia LaBeouf become? What was this work intending to say, if anything? Surely we think of him as this Hollywood Child-Star who's fame is thanks to hugely popular blockbuster teen pleasers like Transformers. Now it appears as if some re-invention has happened, and it seems to be have been tugged out like an old brown tooth from the mouth of his plagiarism mistake. Many accusers state this is all a response to cover up the embarrassment of the Daniel Clowes incident, one harsher reviewer stated that Shia LaBeouf read a book about performing once.
I'm not convinced. He put his movie on the internet, the everything machine, every country in the world has access to this wonderful database of information. Did Shia LaBeouf post his film online for everyone to see, for free, thinking that no one who viewed it would have ever read a comic book before? I don't think so.
What ever the case, Shia LaBeouf has me interested, so much so I'd leap into the deep end and say this is more than a publicity stunt, this is an Artist who has experienced fame and it's devices from the inside, all of his life, and now he's making work that examines and explores those notions.
The Artist Is Present displayed the artist as the art work. It was physical, thoughtful, calm and devoid of the usual shapes and structures we'd expect to see in a gallery space. The physical, unappologogetic presence of the artist makes the otherwise invisible entity, tangible and understandable. And in as much as Marina Ambromavich wanted the artist to be noticed, it feels like LaBeouf's work is about the opposite.
It seems like LeBeouf's #IAMSORRY is about association and apology, but more importantly it's about the absence of the artist. Not physically, but in every other variation. Speechless and motionless with a brown paper bag on his head, it's almost like he's wanting to be forgotten, or perhaps forgiven. Exactly what he's apologising for, to me, is irrelevant. Just the notion of an apology suspending this premise is enough.
As a performance maker interested in the phenomenon of celebrity this is where things get interesting for me.
What has Shia LaBeouf become? What was this work intending to say, if anything? Surely we think of him as this Hollywood Child-Star who's fame is thanks to hugely popular blockbuster teen pleasers like Transformers. Now it appears as if some re-invention has happened, and it seems to be have been tugged out like an old brown tooth from the mouth of his plagiarism mistake. Many accusers state this is all a response to cover up the embarrassment of the Daniel Clowes incident, one harsher reviewer stated that Shia LaBeouf read a book about performing once.
I'm not convinced. He put his movie on the internet, the everything machine, every country in the world has access to this wonderful database of information. Did Shia LaBeouf post his film online for everyone to see, for free, thinking that no one who viewed it would have ever read a comic book before? I don't think so.
What ever the case, Shia LaBeouf has me interested, so much so I'd leap into the deep end and say this is more than a publicity stunt, this is an Artist who has experienced fame and it's devices from the inside, all of his life, and now he's making work that examines and explores those notions.
Although the chick who wrote this article on Flavorwire clearly disagrees. http://flavorwire.com/437931/shia-labeouf-has-officially-ruined-performance-art-for-everybody
For me LaBeouf embarked on an idea, and whispered this subtle and subdued f**k you to everyone and anyone who felt it was there right to formulate and express an opinion of him. It feels like he's rebelling against a world of media that is attempting to take unauthorised control of his identity. He made these weird and wonderful statements about ownership and imitation in art through Twitter, that question his intent for the film HowardContor.com, in doing this he has pried open, just a little bit, the lid of the jar that lets us explore the cultural phenomenon that is celebrity.
You should check out The Campaign Book a digital art space for the work of Labeouf, Ronkko and Turner: http://thecampaignbook.com
And last, but by absolutely no means least, here is the video that inspired me to write this article.
En-Bloody-Joy...
Justin Teddy Cliffe
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