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Shia LaBeouf Sets Up Shop At Los Angeles Gallery To Say He's Sorry
The line outside the gallery (Photo by Jean Trinh/LAist)
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Shia LaBeouf's plagiarized apologies have taken a high-brow turn.
LaBeouf, or someone pretending to be him, has made himself available to the masses—one at a time—at the Cohen Gallery on Beverly Boulevard from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. today through Sunday. The exhibit is being called #IAMSORRY, a collaboration with Finnish performance artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö and "meta-modernist pioneer" Luke Turner.
LaBeouf's team sent out a proposal explaining the performance that borrows heavily—we might even say plagiarizes—the work of other artists, including Marina Abramović. However, there are some distinctly LaBeoufian touches, like an Indiana Jones whip:
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Proposal via The Hollywood Reporter
The release misspells the name of Daniel Clowes, the first artist that LaBeouf was accused of plagiarizing. In the weeks since, he's come up with a host of plagiarized apologies for his plagiarism, including the speech of a soccer player. He vowed to retire from public life but it didn't last long.
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The gallery (Photo by Jean Trinh/LAist)
LAist's own Jean Trinh was brave enough to send us this dispatch from 7354 Beverly Boulevard where a line had formed outside the door. She described the scene in side this way:
You walk into a room where a French girl with a thick accent is standing behind a table. She tells you to choose one of the items on the table she calls implements. There's a vase of daisies, a copy of Daniel Clowes' "Death Ray" book, a rusty rench, a whip, a pink ukulele, a bottle of perfume, a Transformers toy and a bowl with tweets people have written to him. She leads you to a room behind a black curtain and he's sitting there with a tux and paper bag on his head. You sit there with him and ask him questions. No response from him, not even a smile or chuckle. He just blinks at you.
Trinh said it was an incredibly uncomfortable experience: "We just had a staring contest." She had picked out the pink ukelele from the table and brought it into the room with him and asked if he'd like her to play him a song; he just blinked at her. Trinh said she couldn't tell if it was actually LaBeouf himself, though some others swore it was him. (She did note that whoever was behind the mask had a few small tattoos between his thumb and index finger, as LaBeouf does.) One man said that he read some of the tweets to LaBeouf and saw a tear trickle down his face through the eye holes in the paper bag. The guy who went in after him said that he was crying uncontrollably, sobbing and shaking.Some of the first takers were the employees of Buzzfeed whose offices are across the street from the gallery. We asked them how their session went and how they pronounce the actor's name.
Kevin McShane, a videographer at Buzzfeed, told LAist: "It's a love-hate thing. I think he's a jackass but I love how he's manipulating his public image for art." McShane pronounces his name "La Buff."
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Justin Abarca, another Buzzfeed staffer told us, "It was interesting and I didn't know what to expect but after going in I thought 'This is what I should've thought it would be all along.' He's totally ripping off Marina Abramovic and making it his thing." He doesn't hate LaBeouf: "He's just a young dude trying to be cool but he's not." He refers to him as "the beef."
Update: So the crying man underneath the mask is actually Shia.
Related:
Here Are Some Artists Shia LaBeouf Copied For His #IAMSORRY Project
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