As part of A Short History of Performance 2002 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery I invited the six people with whom I had originally worked together as Bernstein, to re-do a performance we had done in1973. We had not been all together for nearly 30 years and our first communication was this piece, which consisted of laughing for one hour. Re-doing this, created a vibrantly new work as we roller-coasted 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 in terms of who was laughing at who and the piece also worked as a sound work rising and falling, waves of intensive reverberations followed by silences filled with bristling antenna.

“Death to Grumpy Granddads, 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