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/painting. Toasting a painting. "It's toasted", the toasted painting by Sebastian Bieniek, 2011.

Art and advertising have a lot in common. One of them is that both of them want to burn themselves into the client's mind. If you have achieved this - in whatever way - then you are successful. I am particularly interested in the absurd in it, the fact that it does not matter how what you use to make yourself noticeable, whether it is true or a lie, the main thing is that you do it and create it.

The Lucky Strike cigarette brand was one of the most successful advertising icons of our time. The brand's most famous advertising slogan is "Lucky strike - it's toasted". But what does that mean? The cigarettes are toasted. Yes, but all cigarettes are toasted (this is what a process in tobacco processing is called), and even if they are, what does it say about the cigarette? Nothing at all! But you remember it and connect it inseparably - like a link - with the cigarette brand.

In my work, I play with strategies like this by questioning, pissing off, reflecting on and counteracting them. For this reason I wrote "Sebastian Bieniek - it's toasted" on a picture and burned it halfway. As you can not overlook, the picture is actually toasted, but whether the picture is better, that has to be decided by the client.

Performance/painting. Toasting a painting. "It's toasted", the toasted painting by Sebastian Bieniek, 2011.

Performance/painting. Toasting a painting. "It's toasted", the toasted painting by Sebastian Bieniek, 2011.

Performance/painting. Toasting a painting. "It's toasted", the toasted painting by Sebastian Bieniek, 2011.