With Shia LaBeouf’s recent press and art stunts, it is getting harder and harder to surmise what is art in contemporary culture. We have performance art, artists appropriating images from mass media, ready-mades, and many other things which can be questionable when it comes to defining what art is. Working in the art industry even I can say that till this day I have a hard time telling what is art anymore because of the blurring of so many lines, especially in terms of appropriation.
Entertainment and art have always overlapped to some extent. Both musicians and actors are considered artists of their craft. Many of these industry people also become collectors and personal friends of major artists. Kanye and Jeff Koons. Lady Gaga and Marina Abramovic. And the list goes on. Then we have actors such as James Franco trying to become fine art artists and it often turns out to be a complete joke in the end.
Shia’s recent pop-up exhibition at the Cohen Gallery in L.A. is one of these blurred lines. The actor has joined forces with Nastja Säde Rönkkö, a Finnish artist, and Luke Turner, a British artist and writer, in creating an installation titled #IAMSORRY. Guests are welcome to enter the space, sit across from the actor, and encouraged to present him with a gift from a bag which includes items such as a bottle of Jack Daniels, a whip, pliers, a small bottle of Brut, a bowl of tweets written to Shia, among other items. The actor sits in a tuxedo with a paper bag (with slits for the eyes) over his head which reads, “I am not famous anymore,” with his hands on a table. The paper bag appears wet around the eyes implying that the actor has cried or is crying.
On Februrary 9th Shia LaBeouf wore a similar bag to the premier of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac at the Berlin Film Festival. (I have heard a screening for the movie is taking place at MoMA in the spring of 2014 for Part I of the film)
Shia LaBeouf at the premier for Nymphomaniac in Germany Feb. 9 for the Berlin Film Festival
The motivation for the art installation-apology stems from a series of plagiarism incidents, most notably LaBeouf’s 2012 short film, HowardCantour.com. The flick gained infamy for its uncanny resemblance to a Daniel Clowes comic from 2007. LaBeouf also received heat for plagiarizing a majority of his apologies, and most recently, he made headlines when he stormed out of a press conference after dropping a cryptic Eric Cantona quote involving seagulls and sardines.
Supposedly LaBeouf wrote a manifesto in 2011 in which he defined a meta-modernism movement where he cites the capricious relationships between “irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt” as one of its many doctrines. Whether meta-modernist ideals credit or discredit #IAMSORRY, and whether LaBeouf’s recent antics are a collage of performance art, erratic antics, plagiarism, and relics of his entertainment industry, has yet to be determined.
The #IAMSORRY installation has tinges of Marina Abramovic’s “The Artists is Present,” which showcased the famous performance artist sitting across from viewers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Attendees of Shia’s art installation were skeptical of his artistic abilities saying: “It wouldn’t surprise me if he was just copying something else” and “It was waste.” Reporters on the other hand, wrote of their own experiences as well.
Attendees for the #IAMSORRY art exhibit at the Cohen Gallery in L.A.
“And so I sit across from Shia LaBeouf with our hands intertwined and resting on the pink ukelele, the actor’s gaze constant and growing wetter until tears start to fall from his eyes, sliding down the brown paper bag over those messy, scrawled capital letters,” Vulture reporter Kyle Buchanan recalls. “He rubs my hand with his thumb as he weeps.”
A reporter at The Daily Beast had a similar experience, but upon a second trip to the exhibit, cajoled LaBeouf to remove the bag from his head in order to pose for a picture. “Can you give me a sign that you’re really Shia LaBeouf?'” The Daily Beast reporter Andrew Romano asked LaBeouf. “And that’s when it happened: LaBeouf reached up and took the bag off his head,” Romano recalled. “He looked miserable. I’m pretty sure he had been crying. We sat there silently for a few seconds, staring at each other. And then I asked my second question. ‘Can I take your picture?'” With no response, Romano went ahead and took the photo.
The major issue of this installation is the question of open-sourcing. In late January the actor tweeted that his erratic antics and acts of plagiarism were all actually a part of a piece of performance art. The performance piece was supposedly a commentary on “social media absurdity” and copyright in the digital age. He named three muses in this artistic undertaking: Training Day screenwriter David Ayer, MOMA poet laureate Kenneth Goldsmith and meta-modernist artist Luke Turner. All three have now acknowledged the actor’s social experiment.
“While filming Fury, Shia and I had many in depth discussions about art theory, performance and social media as a performance medium,” Ayer told TIME in a statement. “Shia is a committed, brilliant and fearless artist and will bring that commitment to anything he does. Shia is on a creative journey right now, and I am sure he is pleased with the conversations it is causing.”
Goldsmith told TIME that he had never heard of LaBeouf until the actor started quoting the poet extensively on the web, claiming the words as his own. While these acts of plagiarism caused some victims like Daniel Clowes to consider legal action, Goldsmith wasn’t among them: “I thought it was great,” he said. “You know, that’s what I do.”
Goldsmith has written a book about the subject and discussed it on the Colbert Report, in his classroom at the University of Pennsylvania, and even at the White House. To him normalizing plagiarism is, well, … normal. “In my class, my students get marked down for originality,” he said. “They must plagiarize well and convincingly, and I don’t think [LaBeouf] has done that so far. Quite frankly, that’s why people have been so angry with him. Had he been a better plagiarizer, a smarter plagiarizer, people actually would have been admiring of his action rather than scornful.”
“It’s hard to do this stuff well,” Goldsmith continued. “You can’t just start cutting and pasting randomly and think that people are going to be convinced by it. If he were in my class, he would have gotten a very bad grade.”
“I love the idea that we are collaborators without ever collaborating…plagiarists like Richard Prince and Jeff Koons make millions of dollars recreating other people’s work. In every other world, it is a legitimate strategy,” Goldsmith explains.
LaBeouf’s third muse and closest collaborator Luke Turner have teamed up and literally brought the plagiarism conversation right into Hollywood by setting up a performance art installation in L.A. A press release for the event reads, “Shia LaBeouf is sorry. Sincerely sorry.” But what is the actor really sorry for?
Goldsmith offered us further insight into the apologizing: “Normally when these kind of scandals break what we see is a James Frey — people go out and apologize and he’s shamed and everybody’s shamed… [LaBeouf] plagiarized and instead of apologizing, he decided to tap into the vast body of strategies that have been developed really over the last hundred years, and used that as a defense instead of a typical apology.”
I mean we have all been there as high school and college students. Our teachers threatening to fail us if we plagiarized our reports, spending hours on Wikipedia trying to change sentences around and find synonyms for different words so we would somewhat avoid plagiarism, but in the end we’ve all done it at least once or twice, holding our breath hoping the teacher wouldn’t notice. In today’s world with so much digital information, the internet, and the issue of intellectual property, plagiarism and out-sourcing is inevitable to some degree or other. Shia LaBeouf just throws it in our faces and in reality never really directly apologizes for it verbally but rather wears it on his face visually. So is it still considered an apology? Or is he sorry that he’s not sorry? I’ll leave the vague for you to decide because after all conclusions in art are largely subjective.
LaBeouf’s free #IAMSORRY exhibit will run through Sunday, Feb. 16 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day.
***In honor of the theme of the article a portion of the article has been appropriated from other websites. Just goes to show how simple out-sourcing in today’s world really is***
Aesthetic Fraktur 