Langlands & Bell tell Chitra Ramaswamy why everything from Bin Laden's hideout to Heathrow's Terminal 5 is second nature to them
THE first question that arises with an artistic double act, from Gilbert & George to the Chapman brothers, is how they work together. In the case of Langlands & Bell, the Turner-nominated conceptual artists who have been living and making work toget
her for three decades, the answer is in the first piece they made, The Kitchen, in 1978. A penetrating film examining two kitchens, one old, rusting and blackened, the other gleaming and cared for, Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell originally intended to make one each. It didn't work out like that. They ended up helping wach other too much, which has been the case ever since. They have never made a work apart, though Bell points out that "one of us might be making a model while the other is making a cup of tea".
They got together while studying art at Middlesex Polytechnic in the Seventies, at the same time as they started collaborating. Theirs is a diverse body of work, characterised by a spirit of cool questioning and a celebration of formal beauty, whether building furniture, making pristine architectural models, neon sculptures, existential films, or more recently crossing the threshold of the gallery to design a bridge in Paddington and a piece of public art for Heathrow's Terminal 5.
Their forthcoming Talbot Rice show is their first in Scotland since exhibiting at Mount Stuart in 2004, where they restored an old chapel then lay mirrored glass on the floor, reflecting the space back to itself. This time the exhibition will be a retrospective of their films and animations, from The Kitchen to a film made this year contrasting Folkestone with its twin town Boulogne.
It's the first time the films have been shown together, and so we pass an afternoon in their London studio watching them. "It's such a surprise to us that so much time has passed," says Langlands as we watch one from 1979 that features their younger selves in Dijon, wearing the same leather jacket and taking turns to film each other. "Now we can see recurring interests. The markets, trains and buildings, churches... the idea of the city as the place where people meet, where there is always motion, is in all the films."
Langlands & Bell see art in everything, and make art out of anything. It's an aesthetic present in their appearance, dressed almost identically in utilitarian, ungendered clothes: shirts loosely tucked into black trousers, black boots, matching watches that they designed themselves bearing acronyms of international airports on their faces. They're not quite living art, like Gilbert & George, but the way they look perfectly expresses their attitude to their work: they make no distinctions between art and life.
"We used to eat in the same curry house as Gilbert & George. It was deserted and they used to sit at one end of the restaurant and we'd be at the other." Did they ever put their tables together? "In the end George said come and join us. So we did. They were very supportive though they're more isolated," says Bell. "They don't really have friends," says Langlands.
Langlands & Bell are isolated too, in some ways. Though they exhibited at Saatchi's first show of Young British Artists in 1992 and later at the Sensation exhibition, they never fitted neatly into the Hirst and Emin set. "We left college 10 years earlier than them," says Langlands. "We weren't really part of it but we do have a connection with them." "We're not really part of any group," says Bell. "Well, apart from the two of us."
We move on to the work that garnered them the Turner nomination, The House Of Osama Bin Laden. Asked by the Imperial War Museum to travel to Afghanistan in 2002 as official war artists, they ended up going to a remote, bombed-out house where Bin Laden hid in the Nineties. The outcome of the visit was a virtual installation of the house that looked like a computer game and was even 'played' with a joystick, but was about the absence of the most wanted man in the western world.
"It was a very intense time," says Bell of the trip. "You could be blown up by a roadside bomb but you don't think about that when you're doing it. I think people were quite relieved when we came back. But there's no art without risk and our work is not about fiction, it's based on the concrete real world."
And they're off again. This is the first time they've spoken about their next project, a research trip to Rwanda to make a memorial in London to the genocide. "We don't know what to expect," says Langlands. Bell adds: "I'm sure it will change and affect us quite deeply."
Like many close couples, they constantly finish each other's sentences apart from when they're talking over each other. "We were the first artists to work together at our college and we did a joint degree," Bell says. "They spent their time trying to separate us," recalls Langlands. Then it's back to Bell, who adds: "But we were very stubborn."
• Langlands & Bell, Talbot Rice, Edinburgh, until December 13
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