"Cattle Market Pona" ("Viehmarkt Pona"), Performance by Sebastian Bieniek, 2011
What is the difference between "Performance", "Action Art", "Installation Art" and
Video Art?
When the artist or the body of the artist is in focus, so the acting is part of the artwork, it's a performance. When the artist isn't visible but it's still about people and when it's that fast changing in time that you can see the "Beginning" and then "End", than it's "Action Art" (Happaning is kind of outsourced - not directed by a single artist but by many). Installation is when you can't see it "changing" in time, so it looks always the same, or can be at least restored, and when it's about objects.
However even still some installations like "My Breath rests here" ("Hier ruht mein Atem") have some performance character (at least in the creation phase), but than again not really, because than "the painting of a painting" could be also a performance, so it's more about the focus.
A recorded and shown as a video performance, without real life viewer and the interaction with the viewer like "The 30 € truth" or "Crying for this Video" for example is a
video. (Definition by Bieniek)
Pona, Georiga, 2011. Performance by Sebastian Bieniek on a Cattle Market. The people who make up the cattle market were encouraged to capture the cattle market on a painting.
In 2011, Sebastian Bieniek accepted an invitation from Art House Pona to realize a performance in the immediate vicinity of the Kunsthaus. Since the Kunsthaus is located in a beautiful but remote area in Georgia, the artist found the local cattle market to be the most interesting place to do a performance.
Similar to his work "Picture Of Equality / Picture Of Differance" (2001), the artist decided to make the visitors the creators of the work of art.
So Sebastian Bieniek entered the cattle market with a screen in hand and asked the cattle market visitors - and participants - to fill this screen. He explained that in order to "paint" the cattle market, he doesn't want to "paint" what he sees, but rather "capture" the people who make up the place on the canvas and who can do that better than the people themselves?
The market is only identified by the "signs" of the people who fill / animate it. And people are not what you see, but what they do themselves. That is why what you do must be recorded if you want to record the "place" as it "lives" or as it was tangible.
So encouraged by the artist, people gathered around the canvas and everyone signed it or painted something on it. Until it started to rain ... From then on, the canvas served the people as a kind of canopy and the rain, which changed their appearance, was part of the process and, like the people, left its mark on the painting that resulted from the action..
Pona, Georiga, 2011. Performance by Sebastian Bieniek on a Cattle Market. The people who make up the cattle market were encouraged to capture the cattle market on a painting.
Pona, Georiga, 2011. Performance by Sebastian Bieniek on a Cattle Market. The people who make up the cattle market were encouraged to capture the cattle market on a painting.
Pona, Georiga, 2011. Performance by Sebastian Bieniek on a Cattle Market. The people who make up the cattle market were encouraged to capture the cattle market on a painting.
Pona, Georiga, 2011. Performance by Sebastian Bieniek on a Cattle Market. The people who make up the cattle market were encouraged to capture the cattle market on a painting.
Pona, Georiga, 2011. Performance by Sebastian Bieniek on a Cattle Market. The people who make up the cattle market were encouraged to capture the cattle market on a painting.