Let Shia LaBeouf, Artist, Motivate You to Reach Your Dreams
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if Shia LaBeouf’s bizarre antics — plagiarizing, walking red carpets with bags over his head, fighting with cast mates, etc. — have been performances or actual emotional meltdowns. But a new video of the former child actor and Transformers and Fury star yelling and screaming is very much a piece of art.
The motivational video above, which started to go viral on Monday, is part of a longer project that LaBeouf participated in with the students at Central Saint Martins, a leading art college in London. The breakout clip features LaBeouf screaming a fiery mix of inspirational clichés and existential warnings directly at the audience. Flexing like an angry, rat-tailed love child of Hulk Hogan and Chris Farley’s iconic Saturday Night Live character Matt Foley, LaBeouf bellows bromides like “Don’t let your dreams be dreams!” and channels personal trainers by screaming, “You should get to the point where anyone else would quit, and you’re not going to stop there!”
For all the play that the clip is getting, it’s only one of 36 different sequences that LaBeouf, working alongside artists Luke Turner and Nastja Säde Rönkkö, made with the students. In fact, LaBeouf simply acted as high-profile clay for the students to mold, as they wrote every one of his lines. Other segments include LaBeouf reading a poem by Charles Bukowski (one of his favorite authors), telling stories about dead pet cats, listing colors, hawking samurai swords, standing on his head while reciting poetry, and crying. “I was really amazed by what Shia produced — a lot of people had asked for very specific things and he was totally accommodating to all of those requests,” one of the students told The Guardian last week.
Watch the longer compilation below:
“Right from the beginning, our collaboration has been about human interaction and expression across networks,” LaBeouf, Turner and Rönkkö told The Guardian. “The audience for our projects and experiences are as much part of the work as we are — they complete the work. It comes from this idea that we are all artists really, and we are all expressing ourselves more than ever across Twitter and social media. The Central Saint Martins students seemed to get that intuitively.”
You’ll next see LaBeouf on the big screen starring as a Marine in post-apocalyptic America in Man Down, the press tour for which should provide ample opportunity for more Shia antics.
