In his 2005 avant-garde movie “Confessions of a Sociopath,” the filmmaker and performance artist Joe Gibbons stares into the camera and announces with a growl: “I’m Joe Gibbons. I don’t need a job. I just take what I need.” He then adds, in a more buoyant tone, “I’m just kidding about that.”

Apparently not. Mr. Gibbons, a former lecturer in art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was sentenced on Monday to one year in prison after he pleaded guilty in State Supreme Court in Manhattan to third-degree felony robbery for entering a Capital One Bank in Chinatown this past New Year’s Eve, stealing $1,002 and filming it all on a pocket-size pink and silver video camera. He claimed it was an act of performance art coupled with dire financial straits.

Mr. Gibbons, 61, is something of a cult figure in the performance art world: His work, mostly film installations, has appeared four times in the Whitney Biennial and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His M.I.T. profile cites his predilection for exploring “the boundaries between fact and fiction.”

And yet Mr. Gibbons, as a bank robber, had all the skill of Woody Allen in “Take the Money and Run.” In Chinatown, he handed the bank teller a note reading: “THIS IS A ROBBERY. LARGE BILLS. NO DYE PACKS / NO GPS.” The bank teller, Mr. Gibbons said, gave him small-denomination bills and an exploding dye pack that burst as he dashed away.