The Way Real Artists Do It" by Sebastian Bieniek, 2014-2020
Sebastian Bieniek’s photographic series "The Way Real Artists Do It" (2014–2020) stands as a radical, humorous, and deeply subversive exploration of the mythology surrounding artistic creation. Comprising nine original photographs, the series lifts the veil on an "ancient secret," explicitly documenting fictional, staging glimpses into how "real artists" relieve themselves. By capturing these private, base bodily functions, Bieniek demystifies the romanticized cult of the artist, creating an intense tension between everyday human vulgarity and the sacred aura historically granted to cultural creators.
To fully understand this conceptual framework, the series must be viewed through the lens of Bieniek’s early performance art and his broader painterly practice, completely separate from his viral "Doublefaced" photographs. Having studied under pioneering performance artist Marina Abramović, Bieniek developed an early affinity for confrontational actionism, staging public, radical interventions that deliberately disrupted social expectations and consumer dynamics. This performance pedigree bleeds directly into his paintings, such as the Facination series (2014) and Threeeye No. 5 (2014). In these works, Bieniek physically overpaints antique oil portraits—such as a 1901 depiction of a priest—adding distorted features, extra eyes, or auxiliary heads. Much like the defecating figures in "The Way Real Artists Do It", these overpainted canvases function as acts of artistic vandalism and spatial intervention. They strip classical motifs of their historical dignity, replacing an established institutional reverence with a raw, unsettling, and highly contemporary sense of existential fragmentation.
Historically, this line of systemic provocation deeply aligns with the Italian avant-garde movement Arte Povera and its ethos of using mundane, "poor" materials to break down the elitism of the art market. The most direct intellectual ancestor to Bieniek’s series is Piero Manzoni’s legendary 1961 work, Artist's Shit (Merda d'artista). Manzoni famously canned his own feces and sold them by weight based on the fluctuating spot price of gold, a biting critique of consumerism and art market fetishization. Bieniek operates on a parallel plane of provocation; where Manzoni commodified the literal product of the artist's body to satirize capital investment, Bieniek uses the cinematic vocabulary of photography to document the performative act of elimination itself. Both artists recognize that within a hyper-capitalistic art world, anything generated or performed by the "genius" can be transuted into high art. By rendering the artist's biological waste as a high-end, limited-edition photographic series, Bieniek echoes Manzoni’s joke, exposing the ridiculousness of institutional appraisal.
Furthermore, "The Way Real Artists Do It" shares structural links with other historic boundary-pushers, notably Yoko Ono and Cindy Sherman. Bieniek’s approach mirrors the instructional, anti-materialist philosophy of Yoko Ono’s Fluxus event scores, which stripped art down to basic, raw human actions. Simultaneously, the series operates in conversation with Cindy Sherman’s iconic strategies of self-staged critique. While Sherman uses intricate costumes, prosthetics, and makeup to dissect cinematic archetypes and the male gaze, Bieniek utilizes a similarly calculated, fictional staging of his own or a model's body. However, instead of exploring media-driven glamour or cinematic tropes, Bieniek subverts the ultimate art-world stereotype: the untouchable, divine maestro. Through this grotesque yet brilliant lens, Bieniek uses his camera not to capture reality, but to construct a brilliant satire on artistic authenticity, establishing "The Way Real Artists Do It" as a vital extension of his confrontational, conceptual oeuvre.
other Photography by Sebastian Bieniek until 2024
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