On February 9, 2014 at the Berlin Film Festival (The BBC reported)…
US actor Shia LaBeouf has walked out of a news conference for director Lars von Trier's new film Nymphomaniac at the Berlin Film Festival.
LaBeouf left after 10 minutes, quoting footballer Eric Cantona's famous 1995 line: "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea."
He later appeared on the red carpet wearing a paper bag on his head.
Written on it were the words: "I am not famous any more."
LaBeouf had walked out of the news conference after being asked about the film's explicit sex scenes.
His parting line was taken from a cryptic quote Cantona delivered after he had caused a furore by kicking a fan in the crowd while playing for Manchester United.
Screenshot from a video in the BBC report. Shia pauses in mid sentence to drink.
This past weekend, actor and performance-art plagiarizer Shia LaBeouf made headlines at the Berlin Film Festival when he walked out of a Nymphomaniac press conference and appeared on the red carpet wearing a paper bag on his head that said, “I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE.” Today, we learn that the actor has flown back to the States—with his new accessory, natch—and is now starring in a befuddling six-day art installation in Los Angeles called #IAMSORRY.
The only information provided about the exhibit came via press release, which explained, “Shia LaBeouf is sorry. Sincerely sorry. He will be in situ at 7354 Beverly Boulevard for the duration. Implements will be provided. Free admission.” Based on the accounts of several reporters who attended the exhibit on its first day, the experience involves being asked to select a prop from a table—among them, a pink ukelele, a Daniel Clowes book, a bowl of Hershey Kisses, a bottle of cologne, a bullwhip, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s—and then being ushered into a room to sit alone with Shia LaBeouf, who is wearing a tuxedo and the “I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE” brown bag, for five minutes. And as hard as various reporters tried, they could not get the actor to break his latest performance-art character and speak, let alone answer questions.
#IAMSORRY, 2014 7354 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles
Visitors were invited into the gallery one at a time and asked to choose from an assortment of objects to take in with them, before encountering LaBeouf in a small room wearing a paper bag mask emblazoned with the words "I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE." The artists' announcement stated only: "Shia LaBeouf is sorry. Sincerely sorry."
A reporter for the LAist wrote…
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.
People lined up to meet LaBeouf; some took selfies, some got aggressive, some shook his hand and thanked him. Was he having a breakdown? Was he rebranding himself? Or was he just trying, in his own way, to become an artist? Luke Turner and Nastja Rönkkö have some of the answers. The two contemporary artists, both of whom have exhibited extensively in Europe, were Shia's collaborators on #IAMSORRY.
According to the duo, LaBeouf approached them after encountering Turner's website on metamodernism, which Turner describes as "an age characterised by oscillations between modernist and postmodernist values". As he puts it, it's the defining impulse of our age: a desire to be "both ironic and sincere in the same moment". #IAMSORRY, the final product of their collaboration, didn't just take place at the Los Angeles gallery – it also played out on LaBeouf's Twitter; in Berlin; at a London College of Fashion seminar, where he read Guy Debord to students; and even via skywriting. It all culminated with LaBeouf sobbing his eyes out in front of strangers.
In n interview portion of the article, Rönkkö explains…
“At its core, the most fascinating part of the performance was whether people would see Shia as a person, flesh and bones and soul, or as an object, a celebrity.”
about the “existential crisis” he underwent after being caught plagiarising graphic novelist Daniel Clowes for a short film, Howard Cantour.com, that aired at Cannes in 2013.
…as well as…
One woman who came with her boyfriend, who was outside the door when this happened, whipped my legs for ten minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me… There were hundreds of people in line when she walked out with dishevelled hair and smudged lipstick. It was no good, not just for me but her man as well. On top of that my girl was in line to see me, because it was Valentine’s Day and I was living in the gallery for the duration of the event – we were separated for five days, no communication. So it really hurt her as well, as I guess the news of it travelled through the line. When she came in she asked for an explanation, and I couldn’t speak, so we both sat with this unexplained trauma silently. It was painful.
The interviewer asks him to respond to accusations that his art performance “Method” plagiarized Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present. He denies any such plagiarism.
The actor is currently undergoing treatment for addiction, following his June arrest for disorderly conduct and harassment after he interrupted a performance of Cabaret with obscene language.
Turner did not respond when asked if the incident was reported to the police, but said that their collaboration with the actor continued.
Turner later provided more details of the incident after Piers Morgan asked him on Twitter why they had let the [alleged] rapist “just walk away”.
The artist replied: “It wasn’t clear at the time precisely what had happened, & the 1st priority was to ensure everybody’s safety in the gallery …
“She ran out, rather than simply walking away. Beyond that, it’s not my place to comment.”
In a different article on December 1, 2014, The Guardian reported
Regardless of that incident, #IAMSORRY stinks of bad art.
…and…
LaBeouf’s exhibit sounds more like the kind of poorly conceived and basically silly event that gets performance art a bad name. Real artists rarely wear bags on their heads.
Clearly this does not excuse rape.
Yet it does put into perspective the romantic myth of “suffering for art”. People suffer for art all the time. Unfortunately, the art is rarely worth it. Pain alone does not make you an artist.
That article included this image and caption…
Visitors outside the Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles, in February 2014 for Shia LeBeouf’s #IAMSORRY Photograph: Valerie Macon/Getty Images
According to their webpage [archived here], they have engaged in a number of other projects but that gives us an idea. For the purposes of the Culture War Encyclopedia, we are mainly concerned with their project HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS.
Image source: The Guardian, captioned “LaBeouf at the art installation on Wednesday. Photograph: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images”
Source: NY Daily News. Caption. “Shia LaBeouf's "He Will Not Divide Us" quickly devolved into a must-watch internet fever dream where anonymous trolls ate chicken tendies, danced, denounced the "vegan agenda" and paid tribute to the ancient Egyptian frog god Kek. (James Keivom/New York Daily News)”
HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US is a participatory performance by LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner that invites the public to deliver the words “He will not divide us” into a camera mounted on a wall outside the Museum of the Moving Image, repeating the phrase as many times, and for as long as they wish. The performance commences at 9:00 a.m. on January 20, 2017, the day of the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States.
Open to all, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the participatory performance will be live-streamed continuously at www.hewillnotdivide.us for four years, or the duration of the presidency. In this way, the mantra "HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US" acts as a show of resistance or insistence, opposition or optimism, guided by the spirit of each individual participant and the community.
They apparently moved past the idea of trying to get people to just repeat the slogan to trying to get people to say the slogan and then comment on it. The HWNDU webpagestates…
the public was invited to deliver the words "HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US" into a camera mounted on a wall outside the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, responding to those words in any way they wished.
This invitation would be taken back. As shown in, The Triggering of Shia | He Will Not Divide Us by Internet Historian, Shia himself was seen on the stream assaulting various people for saying reprehensible things to him, obviously to trigger him. So, not only were they insincere when they invited anyone to speak freely, but he would use violence to enforce a ban on speech he didn’t like.
Using violence to force your will upon an other person in violation of their human right to freedom of speech seems sort of… well… you know… totalitarian (like Nazis, fascists and communists).
At any rate, assault causes division, Shia. Breaking promises does too.
What happens in the following video clip from the HWNDU livestream would be the subject of a lot of reports. This was not the beginning of the idea of milk being a symbol of racism but it was the beginning of a wider public discussion about that idea.
The clip begins with a large man in a MAGA hat dancing while others cheer him on. This man is called /pol/Blart or just Blart by various people in various clips. He appears in many of these clips. He was there when Shia was arrested. In some of these, he explains that he shows up “every day” to be a dissenting voice because, he says, HWNDU failed to deliver it’s promise of freedom of speech. He does not seem to be part of any group. One thing I have seen him do on different days was chant, “He will unite us!” This clip features both Shia and Blart.
People of different colors having fun together.
An other man, who we will call Guy, turns to the camera and says something about Blart getting naked. He too can be seen in video clips from many other days.
A man called Absolute Plaidman can be seen in the background. He can be seen in other clips from other times which show that he frequented the art installation on his own to just have fun, troll, dance and so on. For example, he can be seen in this video, this video, this video, this video, this video, this video and so on.
A man who is apparently called Silent Bob appears and feigns the act of squeezing Blart’s moobs. Silent Bob apparently frequented the installation because he can be seen in other video clips from other times. He can be seen inthis video for example. An other man, who we will call Rager yells loudly and comically, not unlike those fake wrestlers do between fake wrestling matches. Rager can be seen in other clips from other days, like this one, for example.
Starting at about 1:09, two white men we will call Beefyman and Beardlyman show up together.
On the right bicep of Beefyman’s white jacket is a certain symbol. If it were one-point-up it would it would be the same as the Lamborghini symbol (without the letters) or a conventional depiction of a tetrahydron (a 4 sided solid). However, with one-point-down, it is a rare depiction. A reverse image search yielded nothing relevant. The one use of such a symbol that I am aware of is the symbol for Identity Evropa who changed their name to the American Identity Movement. See Identity Evropaand American Identity Movement.
Beefyman takes off the jacket and Beardlyman asks if they were going to take off their shirts. “Is that the meme?” he asks. They take off their shirts. Silent Bob and Rager take off their shirts too. They dance.
An Asian man they call Jackie 4chan takes off his shirt and dances with them. Jackie 4chan can be seen in other clips, like this one, for example. They have a push-up contest and goof around.
Rager yells, “Toxic masculinity squad! Yeah!”
Beardlyman yells “Make America masculine again!”
Someone yells “Perpetuate testosterone culture!”
At about 5:27, Guy yells “Let’s make America manly again!
Starting at 5:44, Beefyman says, “Listen, 6 million? That’s bullshit! Look into it. Google Nano-thermite.” I did indeed search “nano-thermite” but it was unclear what Beefyman wanted us to find. The “6 million” is almost surely a reference to the 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Watch the video. Did others agree? Did anyone nod in agreement? Did the others even hear him?
Other guys take off their shirts and lots of silly stuff is said and done. They joke about Fight Club, mock Alex Jones, etc.
At 10:02, Beefyman says the N word. Guy is standing right there. Silent Bob is right there too and it seems like he must have heard the N word. He does/says nothing about it as the goofing continues.
Starting at 11:14, some guys show up with containers of milk that they hand out. The shirtless guys cheer, toast, shout “Got Milk?”, drink and so on. One of the guys who handed out milk is clearly not white but he holds out his coffee cup so that one of the shirtless guys can pour milk into it for him.
At 11:49, Beefyman says, “You may not like it, but this is the face of white nationalism.”
Some guy sticks his face in front of the camera to add, “Now with 8 grams of protein!”
Silent Bob says, “This racism right here, is how we deal with this! Fuckin’ learn! Fuckin’ learn!”
Beardlyman yells, “This is fascism! Shirtless men drinking milk!”
Rager yells, “This is how the Vikings conquered Europe!”
At 12:28, Beefyman yells “Whole milk! None of the 2% shit! Know who else is 2%?” He never answers. Beardlyman yells “Whole milk!” and others yell “Whole milk is pure milk!”
Jackie 4chan drinks milk.
Absolute has taken off his shirt and continues to dance and stuff.
At 14:28, Guy looks at the shirtless men and then at the camera and says, “So there you have it. All of the milkmen. We got - the party’s all here. Fucking dream team, man.”
At 15:01, Rager says, “Ice cold glass of pure racism. Get it down ya!”
“With just a hint of cocaine.” says Guy.
Beefyman says that, “if you’re not doing neck workouts, you’re a cuck. If you don’t have a neck harness, you’re a faggot!”
Beardlyman joins him and the two say that if you do not lift this much or squat that much, you’re a cuck and so on.
Silent Bob points to Beefyman and says something about “This is what you don’t wanna have because you don’t wanna hurt animals? Fuck you! This is true masculinity!”
Absolute Plaid and Silent Bob shout out for someone called Milk Viking.
All sorts of weird things were done and said throughout the video.
Guy and Silent Bob smile and nod to each other.
Guy says goodbye to people watching the stream and, at 18:22, shakes hands with Blart, Jackie 4chan and others.
At 19:34, the shirtless man with a black sun tattoo shows up. We will call him Don Rohr because that’s what his other tattoo says. He points to his black sun tattoo, holds up milk, says, “That’s right bitch!”
Don Rohr drinks milk, spits it put and says, “This is pure fucking…racism, bro!”
At 22:32, a shirtless white guy with glasses and a beard says, “Hey all you non-whites, I can do this and you can’t!” He drinks and spills, “So good! You can’t have any.” This is a reference to the claim that whites have a high tolerance for milk and others do not. We will return to that below. Also see milk.
At 23:33, the same guy says he is more hung than the average black guy because milk builds strong boners. Let’s call him Milkboner.
Beefy and Beardly yell about milk nationalism and so on.
Don Rohr has put a shirt on but he pulls it partly aside to flash his black sun tattoo and says, “Fuck you!
At 24:28, Milkboner says, “We must secure the existence of our diets for milk drinking.”
At 28:19, Milkboner says, “I think some of you people are kinda antisemetic.”
At 31:04, some guy puts his finger under his nose to simulate Hitler’s mustache and he gives the Nazi salute.
Eventually they put their shirts back on.
Multiple police cars show up and people say that the museum director was talking with the police.
Starting at about 44:28, they start chanting, “Build that wall!”
A man in long orange dreadlocks and a tambourine dances with them. He is known as Paperboy Prince. he apparently was an other person who frequented the art installation.
Starting at 46:39, they get quiet and a police officer tells them they were too loud so they are shutting it down for the night. They are told to leave and not come back for the rest of the night.
Some brownish skinned man says “Oy vay! Shut it down!”
The officers make everyone leave and they put up barriers.
It seems to me that /pol/Blart, Jackie 4chan, Guy, Silent Bob, Absolute Plaidman and others were just there to goof around and at the worst, engage in light-hearted trolling. It seems to me that Beefy Man, Beardly Man and Don Rohr were there to joke around and troll, but not in an ultimately light-hearted way. It seems to me that those 3 actually do subscribe to identity politics and are therefore racist and their trolling was not so innocent.
In this clip, Blart says that he didn’t hear anything about milk and racism. He says tht people should not be allowed to say the N word on the livestream.
We can not, however, discount the fact that Silent Bob did hear Beefyman use the N word in the way that he did. We also can not discount the fact that Silent Bob was clearly joking when he pointed to milk and referred to it as racism. In this clip, Silent Bob says he regrets what he did/said that night.
In the wake of this silliness, we were told that milk can be a racist symbol. See milk.
A guy in a Megadeth shirt with long hair (he is referred to as Milkman to his face so we will call him Milkman too) can be seen from the beginning of this video drinking from a bottle of milk. Starting at 2:02, he repeats, “Down with the vegan agenda” as others argue. A brown skinned man tries to have an intelligent debate with a leftist but the leftist rage quits.
It is clear that Blart, who may not be white himself, is friendly with people who are clearly not white.
Starting at 1:35, a container of milk is held up close to the camera and someone off camera says, “Whole milk, notice it’s whole milk.”
Milkman shows up and people cheer.
Starting at 1:52, a brown guy says to Milkman, in a friendly and re-affirming tone, “Hey! Milk is not racist.” and Milkman agrees and adds that Paperboy Prince is a shill for the vegan agenda. Others laugh. They continue to joke and riff.
The one they call Absolute Plaidman shows up on his own. He is cheered at as he approaches. He is apparently someone who liked to appear at the art installation and not part of a white supremacist gang or whatever. He says, among other things, that Biden rapes kids.
A brown man (referred to as Young Tiger Woods) drinks milk in this clip as Paperboy Prince chants “He will not divide us.”
Young Tiger Woods asks Paperboy why milk is racist. Is it because it is white? Paperboy can only say that they should not drink milk straight out of the containers.
Milkman is seen drinking milk in the background.
The moronic media made much of the milky madness. In the wake of this silliness, we were told that milk can be a racist symbol.
Referring to the display diabolical dairy doings with the guy sporting a black sun tattoo, the guy with the Identity Evropa symbol on his jacket and others, Mic wrote,
Amid all the tattoos of Third Reich iconography bouncing around, one thing stood out: The neo-Nazis were all drinking milk.
There was one such tattoo, to be accurate. Also, most of those guys were not neo-Nazis or anything of the sort. Indy100 made the more straight forward yet inaccurate claim that there were multiple men with,
tattoos relating to the Nazi party and the Third Reich
There would be many other articles about this murky milky maniacal maleficence. These are in the section on milk.
According to Indy100, the Museum of the Moving Image (where the camera was installed) stated,
Over the course of the installation, there have been dozens of threats of violence and numerous arrests, such that police felt compelled to be stationed outside the installation 24 hours a day, seven days a week...Ending our engagement with the installation is the most prudent path forward to restore public safety to the Museum, its visitors, staff, and the community.
was shut down after becoming a "flashpoint for violence," a museum spokesperson confirmed to the Daily News.
"The installation created a serious and ongoing public safety hazard for the museum, its visitors, staff, local residents, and businesses," a statement from the museum read.
"Over the course of the installation, there have been dozens of threats of violence and numerous arrests, such that police felt compelled to be stationed outside the installation 24 hours a day, seven days a week," the statement continued.
The exhibit "deteriorated" after LaBeouf was arrested on site for becoming aggressive with an attendee and charged with assault on Jan. 25
The HWNDU webpagestates that it was relocated to the El Rey Theater, Albuquerque on February 18 2017 where the livestream camera was again mounted on a wall. According to Know Your Meme,
On February 19th, Redditor stillnihilist posted a GIF of a man brandishing a firearm on the stream, claiming that he displayed the weapon while saying "Fuck Trump and his supporters" (shown below). Within 48 hours, the GIF received more than 3,200 votes (97% upvoted) and 260 comments on the /r/The_Donald subreddit.
Someone's protesting Shia LaBeouf's protest by spray painting the camera trained on his "He will not divide us" demonstration.
A vandal approached the live stream camera -- set up by LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner -- early Tuesday morning at around 4:20 and unloaded a canister of red spray paint. The vandal is wearing a mask or bandana to hide his identity.
The hijinks went down in Albuquerque, days after Shia made it the new home of the protest after getting kicked out of his New York venue.
Cops tell us there was a report of shots fired around 2:51 AM in downtown Albuquerque. The location was just one block away from The Historic El Rey Theater where LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner's protest installation opened this week.
Shia tweeted, "We have taken the stream down after shots were reported in the area. The safety of everybody participating in our project is paramount."
Better safe than sorry, but police say they didn't find anyone with a gun at the location, and gave the all clear. As it turns out, no one was in front of the camera at that time anyway.
As of 6:50 AM PT ... the camera is still down. It's unclear when they'll flip the switch again.
On 8 March 2017, the project moved to an undisclosed location. A flag emblazoned with the words "HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US" would be flown for the duration.
The claim that the flag would stay there for the “duration” was taken as a challenge by the folks at 4chan. They were given a seemingly insurmountable task to play the greatest game of capture the flag ever played. No clues tipped them to the location. But somehow, with the power of determination and youth unemployment, they found it and they trolled it hard.
The search began on March 8 and was immediately narrowed when Labeouf was spotted on social media at a diner in Greenville, Tennessee, although some in the thread still believed the flag was in the Great Lakes area due to wind patterns. The time of the sunset in Greenville matched with the time of sunset on the stream, and so did the weather on local weather reports.
Finally when three planes flew over the area, 4channers were able to triangulate an approximate location of the flag.
This area was too large to search unfortunately. The 4channers began looking to the stars, using ancient astronomy to help map the direction of the camera and pinpoint a more precise location.
They also sent out a guy in his truck to honk his horn around Greenville to see if they could hear it on the livestream, to mark the location.
The trail led into a field on private property next to some poor soul’s house. Tennessee based 4channers were standing by to capture the flag. After scoping out the area for hours they finally made a move. The anonymous group stole the “He Will Not Divide Us” flag and replaced it with a Trump “Make America Great Again” hat and a Pepe the Frog t-shirt.
The flag pole was left barren on the stream all morning, until Labeouf and co. finally turned the stream completely off in utter defeat.
The Blaze reported that the steam was taken down and later resumed, showing an empty flag pole.
They say it was moved to Liverpool, UK where it lasted from March 22, 2017 to March 2, 2017. According to Breitbart, “dangerous trespassing” was the reason given for the shutdown there.
Now installed above an art gallery in an old biscuit factory in the French city of Nantes, the flag came under attack overnight Tuesday-Wednesday by a drone, which attempted for several minutes to set it on fire.
The remotely-piloted arson attempt failed when the drone crashed.
“An unauthorised drone carrying a burning piece of cloth approached the flag to try to set it alight. The fireproof flag was undamaged and the attempt failed,” Lieu Unique gallery said in a statement.
…
Local radio France Bleu Loire-Ocean reported Wednesday that there had already been “an attempted intrusion” at the gallery in Nantes, which put the flag on display on October 16 and intends to keep it in public view.
The tale of the “He Will Not Divide Us” livestream is probably not over, but this saga marks another stunning defeat for Labeouf. It shows 4chan will follow him to the ends of the earth for a good laugh, and he inevitably will be the butt of the joke.
The flag now rests in the home of one of the greatest anons 4chan has ever known.
