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)

Performance / short-movie, Galerie 35, Simon-Dach-Str. Berlin

The vernissage visitors were welcomed by a video installation. The video showed the same scenery as what they saw. A few photos were hanging on the wall of the exhibition, and visitors came into the gallery. Suddenly the visitors on the video, who by the way were also there in real life, began to destroy the photographs, to throw everything over, to demolish the gallery.

Audience during the action and exhibition "Deja Vu" in Galerie 35 in Friedrichshain, 2002.

Here is an attempt at description what happened at the opening:



This is perhaps the most complex art action by Sebastian Bieniek (unfortunately the documentation material is missing, maybe it will still be found).

Here is an attempt at description.

Not a specific work of art but the entire exhibition including the exhibition visitors becomes a work of art here.

When entering the gallery, visitors to the exhibition saw several photos hanging on the wall. A vase with flowers and a central TV screen that played exactly what you found in the gallery. Namely: exhibition visitors, photos on the wall, vasel with flowers and a television screen.

Suddenly the film that is shown on the screen shows that some drunk men enter the showroom and the same thing happens in "reality". Several drunk men enter the exhibition and just as it is shown in the film and on the screen, they tear up the photos hanging on the wall, knock over the vase of flowers and destroy what they can.

This is a remarkable anticipation of the media projection and the associated future design that Sebastian Bieniek had artistically visualized here and made tangible for the exhibition visitors.

If you liked this you may like also:

• "The 30€ Truth", 2012
• "Life is Bad", 2000 
• "The Stolen 100 DM"  
  

Press reviews:

English translation from original german:

Artists have always been fascinated by the simile between landscape and human body. Numerous photographers with a mass of contributions on this topic, surrealists like Dalí, who created erotic, absurd landscapes with the curves, or directors like Anthony Minghella, who began his epic “The English Patient” with a view of a seemingly endless desert landscape and the Pictures underlaid with a story from “A Thousand and One Nights” refer to the age-old tradition: the connection between woman and nature. Sebastian Bieniek breaks this stereotypical principle with his work. The portraits with the hard contours of a man's face smeared with what advertisements like to sell us with a young woman's body, Nivea-Crème, work more complex. He only uses photography to stage his sculptures, which were created with painterly means. The recurring motif in his work, however, is the attempt by people to understand time-space, to manipulate it. With these works, the artist, who in the past tended to attract attention for his drastic performances, seems to have become wonderfully good. Perhaps that is precisely why the vernissage guests in Galerie 35 should prepare for a surprise. Because the first impression is often deceptive.

DIE TAZ, 2002

Original in german:

Seit je sind Künstler fasziniert von dem Gleichnis zwischen Landschaft und menschlichem Körper. Zahlreiche Fotografen mit einer Masse von Beiträgen zu diesem Thema, Surrealisten wie Dalí, die mit den Kurven erotisierte, absurde Landschaften erzeugten, oder Regisseure wie Anthony Minghella, der sein Epos „Der englische Patient“ mit dem Blick auf eine schier endlose Wüstenlandschaft begann und die Bilder mit einer Erzählung aus „Tausendundeiner Nacht“ unterlegte, beziehen sich auf die uralte Tradition: der Verbindung von Frau und Natur. Sebastian Bieniek bricht mit seiner Arbeit dieses stereotype Prinzip. Die Porträts mit den harten Konturen eines Männergesichts, das mit dem beschmiert ist, was uns von der Werbung gern mit einem jungen Frauenkörper verkauft wird, Nivea-Crème, funktionieren vielschichtiger. Die Fotografie nutzt er lediglich, um seine Skulpturen, die mit malerischen Mitteln geschaffen wurden, in Szene zu setzen. Das wiederkehrende Motiv in seiner Arbeit ist jedoch der Versuch der Menschen, den Zeit-Raum zu begreifen, ihn zu manipulieren. Mit diesen Werken scheint der Künstler, der in der Vergangenheit eher durch drastische Performances auffiel, wunderlich brav geworden zu sein. Vielleicht sollten sich die Vernissagengäste in der Galerie 35 gerade deshalb auf eine Überraschung vorbereiten. Denn oft trügt der erste Eindruck.


DIE TAZ, 2002 

(Link to the article in the DIE TAZ onlie archive)