“Transformers” star Shia LaBeouf and his art collaborators of more than two years, Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner, announced on Thursday their latest piece of performance art, in which the hitchhiking trio will allow the public to pick them up at coordinates posted online and deposit them anywhere.
Titled “#TAKEMEANYWHERE,” and commissioned by Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado and The Finnish Institute in London, it runs through June 23. Since it began on Monday, LaBeouf, 29, has tweeted latitude and longitude coordinates for a spot on Colorado State Highway 7 near the Chapel on the Rock in Allenspark, Colorado; a tourism center off I-87 south of Cheyenne, Wyoming; outside T Joe’s RV Park near Cheyenne; and the corner of Wesr 15th Street and Hilltop Drive in Kimball, Nebraska. A map at takemeanywhere.vice.com tracks their journey.
Turner on Thursday retweeted a post by one Brett Drake, who posted photos of himself and friends posing with the trio and wrote, “Best day I’ve had in my life. Thank you … for having us on your journey!” Several hours later Turner retweeted a photo by Katie Owens of herself and a friend with the three, captioned, “Today was great.”
“With these projects, we try to retain a naïveté — or that’s the goal,” LaBeouf told Vice.com about this and the trio’s other collaborations, such as November’s “#ALLMYMOVIES,” in which LaBeouf invited the public to view his films with him at Manhattan’s Angelika Film Center. He said this new project is about “making friends,” with Rönkkö adding, “It’s about trust, and also a journey. I’m more interested in the in-between state than arriving at a destination.”
LaBeouf added, “There’s definitely an ‘Easy Rider’ kind of nostalgia to it, but there’s also a futuristic ‘Blade Runner’ GPS thing going on. … With everything we do, we’re trying to find meaning, make meaning.”
“Going back to that idea of the Great American Road Trip,” Turner told Vice, “there’s always that sense of wanting to escape into the landscape, whereas here we’re being tracked the whole time. We’re both escaping into it, while becoming more visible than we’ve ever been. That creates a strange dynamic.”
“Because you can’t really disappear anymore,” Rönkkö said.
