Is Shia LaBeouf’s Marriage in Las Vegas a Work of Performance Art?

The vows were full of Elvis Presley jokes.

Shia LaBeouf. Courtesy Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images.

Shia LaBeouf has become so well-known for his frequent antics—some of which have only retroactively been identified as performance art pieces—that at least one major media outlet is questioning whether or not the actor’s outlandish Las Vegas wedding, which took place this past weekend, is for real.

According to a report in Vanity Fair, the actor “has added an exhibit to the art installation he calls life with an apparent wedding to his girlfriend, actress Mia Goth.” The report cites gossip website TMZ and says “edited footage” shows an Elvis Presley impersonator conducting the ceremony at wedding chapel Viva Las Vegas; an unidentified woman wearing a Hawaiian lei served as a witness. In a string of Elvis references, the newlyweds promised to “adopt each other’s hound dogs” and “never wear their blue suede shoes in the rain,” as well as vowing to “always be each other’s teddy bear,” according to the report.

LaBeouf and Goth met in 2012 while filming Lars von Trier’s film Nymphomaniac: Volume II.

In November 2015, the actor spent 72 hours in Angelika Film Center in downtown Manhattan for #ALLMYMOVIES, a live-streamed piece where LaBeouf watched every film in which he’s ever appeared in a single sitting.

Mia Goth. ©Patrick McMullan. Photo - Nicholas Hunt/ PatrickMcMullan.com.

Mia Goth. ©Patrick McMullan. Photo Nicholas Hunt.

Other performances by LaBeouf, along with his collaborators Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner, have included: two entire days spent riding an elevator at Oxford University; METAMARATHON, a 144-lap run around Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum; and #TAKEMEANYWHERE, a 30-day road trip in which the hitchhiking artists let participants take them anywhere in the country.

As Vanity Fair points out, La Boeuf’s previous “avant-garde lifestyle choices”  have included wearing a paper bag over his head on the red carpet, holding a journalist’s hand while crying, and skywriting apologies for an incident involving copyright infringement.


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