STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London
STUART BRISLEY, 180 Hours Work for Two People, 1978, Acme Gallery, London

At the Acme Gallery in London, Brisley performed 180 Hours Work for Two People (1978). He took both roles: “B”, a vocal bureaucrat inhabiting the upstairs part of the gallery, carefully preserving his urine and excrement and hanging it in a hole in the floor, above “A” who lives downstairs, a man-­off­-the­-street as active as “B” was vocal, but who says nothing. When “A” “disappeared”, “B” began playing his part, wondering aloud where “A” had gone. On the final day of the performance, Brisley heard screaming from the foyer. A woman from a psychiatric ward at a nearby hospital had been attending the performance each day, convinced that the resolution to her problems lay in the resolution of the work. She had arrived too late, missing the end, and was driven back to hospital in a taxi screaming.

Mitchell Algus 2011