Shia LaBeouf is now saying his plagiarism and strange behavior was all “performance art.” The actor claimed in two long tweets that #stopcreating, the hashtag he used to mark many of his past Twitter apologies, is a project he produced with the help of several other artists. The explanatory posts have since been deleted from Twitter, according to the Wrap.

In recent weeks, Shia LaBeouf has been accused of plagiarism and then of plagiarizing his apologies for plagiarism. He has been embroiled in Twitter feuds. He written his apologies for his behavior with an airplane. He even said he sent a picture of his genitalia to a director to land a role in Nymphomaniac. This, he says, was all part of the act.

But LaBeouf fans and followers have had a hard time distinguishing his meaningful gestures from what might be just strange Hollywood antics. LaBeouf even became a butt of a joke delivered by Jim Carrey at the Golden Globes.

If it is all a performance, it’s not all that original. Joaquin Phoenix pulled a similar stunt in 2009 when he grew a beard and said he was quitting acting to pursue rapping. He kept up the act for a year, giving a crazy interview on The Late Show with David Letterman in service of Casey Affleck’s mockumentary I’m Still Here.

LeBeouf claims that “Meta-Modernist” Luke Turner, screenwriter of Training Day David Ayer and the Museum of Modern Art’s first poet laureate Kenneth Goldsmith helped him with the #stopcreating performance project. In the picture tweet he posted, LeBeouf wrote:

Performance art has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. My twitter “@thecampaignbook” is metamodernist performance art. A Performative redress which is all a public apology really is. All art is either plagarisum [sic] or revolution & to be revolutionary in art today, is to be reactionary. In the midst of being embroiled in acts of intended plagiarism, the world caught me & I reacted. The show began. I became completely absorbed, oblivious to things around me. I found absorption in what I was doing, freed my conscious and released my authentic creative imagination. My use of Twitter started a broad cultural discussion that needs to be had about plagiarism in the digital age *celebrity/social media absurdity…

See LeBeouf’s full tweets here.

[The Wrap]