Photo courtesy of the Whitechapel Art Gallery 
Photo courtesy of the Whitechapel Art Gallery 
Photo courtesy of the Whitechapel Art Gallery 
Photo courtesy of the Whitechapel Art Gallery | Death to Grumpy Grandads (2002) |
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A Short History of Performance Whitechapel Gallery, London As part of A Short History of Performance 2002 at the Whitechapel Gallery, I invited the six people with whom I had worked as Bernsteins to re-make a performance we had first presented in1973. We had not all been together for nearly thirty years and our first communication was this piece which consisted of laughing for one hour. Re-doing Death to Grumpy Grandads created a vibrantly new work as we roller-coastered between spontaneous laugher and desperate grimaces; trying to read our relationships now as our older selves. The piece entered the slippery area where authentic response and self-conscious theatricality merged. The audience and performers overlapped as it became hard to gauge who was laughing at who. Grumpy Grandads also worked as a sound piece, rising and falling as waves of intensive reverberations were followed by silences filled with bristling antennae. “Death to Grumpy Grandads, 1973, by the London-based group known as Bernsteins, went still further in eroding the distinction between the subject and object of the work; at the end of Bernsteins' hour-long laughing marathon, many viewers' jaws were aching - a refreshing change from the conventional durational formula based on watching someone else have a really bad time.” Art Forum |
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