1971-1974

Anne Bean, Peter Davey, Malcolm Jones, Jonathan Harvey, Chris Miller, Brian Routh and Martin von Haselberg

The name Bernsteins came from a derelict, atmospheric chemist shop in Mile End Rd where we all lived for longer or shorter periods.


Bernsteins used complex instructions to create randomised algorithms. These sometimes included audience suggestions, re-interpreted polaroid photographs taken during the show, blindfolds and crutches to create further randomity in already slippery systems. These labyrinthine instructions extended to land drawings such as one at Essex University based on the constellation of the stars and later set alight.

Performances were made at Reading Museum and Art Gallery and several universities. We also embarked on 24 Random paintings, each the same size, 4’ x 4’, with titles such as ‘Twisted Girders’, ‘Cowboy throwing the Lariat,’ ‘Salmon: two identical paintings’ or an exact copy of a ‘masterpiece.’ All were to be exhibited under the name Johnny Muldoon in Switzerland, imagining each one of us taking it in turn to be Johnny at the PV. We missed the deadline that the gallery had given.

“Taking measurements of yourselves as artists” was a full day of working in Fairlight Glen, Hastings. The Kipper Kids attempted to simultaneously pick each other up, instructions and results were recorded on a blackboard connected to an exo-skeleton of wood and body shapes were outlined in wood, filled with leaves and then displaced by the body lying back in the outlines. The gallerist and artist Victor Musgrave visited and after watching concluded that our genre should be named ‘Obstacle Art.’

The press release for the Whitechapel Art Gallery, A Short History of Performance (2002), read:

“The Bernsteins was a group of artists based in and named after a disused East London chemists shop. They were Anne Bean, Peter Davey, Malcolm Jones, Jonathan Harvey, Chris Miller, Brian Routh and Martin von Haselberg. Their performances start from simple premises which are then extended by improvisation and audience participation, both willing and unwilling and sometimes unknowing. Death to Grumpy Grandads was first performed in 1972 and involves the performers laughing for one hour, timed by an alarm clock…..


For the first season in the series (of A Short History of Performance), we invited 7 artists to re-enact performances that they had first held in the 1960s and 70s. They were Bernsteins, Stuart Brisley, The Kipper Kids, Jannis Kounellis, Bruce McLean, Herman Nitsch and Carolee Schneemann. In our consideration of artists to include we sought to reflect a variety of approaches to performance that had characterised the period, from Schneemann’s Kinetic Theatre and Nitsch’s theatricalised ritual to the often absurdist collaborative practices of Bernsteins and the Kipper Kids.

It was also important that better known performances such as Schneemann’s Meat Joy, from 1964 and Nitch’s Orgies-Mysteries Theatre should feature alongside lesser known works by Brisley and Bernsteins, works that had slipped from history books at times because, as was the case with Bernsteins, they privileged the imprecise incidence of memory and hearsay over hard documentary fact.”

Andrea Tarsia, curator Whitechapel Art Gallery