ARTISTS TALKING

Curator Michael Stanley looks back over a career forged from close collaboration with artists Langlands and Bell.

The Henry Moore Institute, Artranspennine, 1998. The gallery buzzes with the sound of conversation coming from an opal-lit space where a cluster of visitors engage in animated discussion. Their movement and interaction both obscures and articulates the elliptical seating configuration upon which they sit, with voices projecting into the centre over a pile of ruffled papers, the remnants of an earlier presentation. Returning some time later a different performance takes place. People-less and conversation-less, the seating structure, laid bare, emanates an atmosphere of chapel-like reflection. This time, creating a visual dialogue between the architecture of the gallery and the structure that is Langlands and Bell's Eclipse.

Eclipse is acknowledged by Langlands and Bell as a key moment in a career that stretches back over twenty-five years. "For us, Eclipse was important for its open embrace, its participatory nature and dual focus on the dialectics and emblems of art as they exchange with the world of daily activities." Put simply: "design and function becoming art."

Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell started collaborating in 1978 while fine art students at the then Middlesex Polytechnic. "We met there in 1977 and became friends. In 1978 we decided to make a work consisting of two halves with each of us producing one of them. Soon after we began making this piece we realised it was simpler and more interesting to help each other with all aspects of it and it became a seamless collaboration." The installation was called The kitchen and consisted of two kitchens built side by side. "They were both very detailed – complete and accurate in all their appointments... one was old and full of dirty used and rusty kitchen utensils, while the other was sparkling new with cheap chrome, vinyl, and glass furniture... the two kitchens were opposites and also mirror images of each other."

It is tempting to interpret both this and subsequent works as a comment on the split dynamics of their collaboration. But Langlands and Bell have a canny knack of seamlessly finishing each other's sentences, their relationship is not one of two halves but one which reconciles two individual impulses into a singular artistic identity within their work. "We do not have individual roles within the relationship. Our collaboration has evolved out of our shared interests and mutual respect. Collaborating has widened our practice and made us more self-reliant. We discuss, criticise and offer each other perspectives that would not be accessible if we worked on our own."

Propelled by the declaration that "we shape buildings and buildings shape us," Langlands and Bell's work throughout the 1980s sought to expose codes of architecture and their influence on social interaction, resulting in the scaled models of often corporate and state buildings for which they became widely known. There are many points of contact between these and earlier works such as The kitchen: "In some senses these pieces are all archaeologies located in and exploring the time when they were made. They convey evidence of the rituals accompanying our use of buildings, fragments of our hopes and fears."

Between 1987 and 1989, on the cusp of an increasing international profile, Langlands and Bell made a brave decision to take almost a year and a half out to restore their studio, a former clothing factory in Whitechapel. "At the time we needed more room to expand and it was important to prepare a place to work more efficiently, more intensively and at a larger scale." To begin with the project was seen very much as a practical necessity – however, as building work progressed, the artists uncovered more about the building's past. "A brush manufacturer had killed his mistress and buried her under the floor of our workshop. What we thought of as an anonymous space steadily began to assert an identity." The richness of the Whitechapel studio location was to influence their thoughts on the relationship between personal histories and the identity of place, between architecture and collective memory.

The studio then is much more than the point of production, it is where the private and public worlds of Langlands and Bell meet, for the artists, its transformation and preparation has affirmed that "work and life are one".

Although studio production remains a key element of their practice, Langlands and Bell are increasingly taking on larger-scale projects and often within the public domain. Their monumental proposal for Sunderland's Gateway Commission consists of four, seventeen-metre-high archways constructed entirely of glass, straddling a disused Victorian viaduct, while the steel and glass footbridge they have designed in collaboration with engineers Atelier One and the PADT for Paddington Basin in London is about to go on site, (completion due March 2003). Their interest in developing work for public spaces is not simply a development of participatory works such as Eclipse. "We are just interested in developing our work in new realms. What interests us as artists, is finding those opportunities that allow us to see our work in a new context, or develop it in a new direction."

Michael Stanley

MICHAEL STANLEY
is a curator.