Langlands & Bell: Re awakening
Until September 26; Mount Stuart, Bute

It’s a boiling hot day, and an intriguingly cosmopolitan array of guests is strewn across the sweeping lawns of Mount Stuart on the isle of Bute. Standing out from the crowd, in a tailored suit of electric blue, is the owner, Johnny Dumfries – the former Formula 1 racing driver who prefers not to go by his official title, The 7th Marquess of Bute. Lying almost prone on the grass nearby are the tired stars of today’s show, Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, whose first site-specific art work in Scotland, Re awakening, comes hot on the heels of their recent Turner Prize nomination.

All afternoon, the international jet-set has been forming disorderly queues in the larger of the stately home’s chapels, whose stained glass windows cast a disarming red light on the innocent white walls of Carrara marble. Strictly four at a time, they are ushered to a side door and asked to exchange their stilettos for a pair of comfy black slippers. Like novices in a new sect, they shuffle eagerly through the door and along a drab grey corridor, to reach the private inner chapel where they are to be transformed.

The tiny Burges chapel is an idiosyncratic homage to byzantine architecture, built by the devoutly Catholic 3rd Marquess in 1873, to celebrate his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. An intensely private space, it is the only part of the house untouched by a great fire in 1877, and has never, until now, been opened to the public.

Langlands and Bell have covered the chapel’s floor entirely with mirrors, creating an unforgettable experience which resonates physically and spiritually while you’re in it, and intellectually once you get out. Unfortunately today’s batches of four don’t get long to contemplate the finer points of the work before their slippers are requisitioned for the next incursion. But, judging by the satisfaction on their faces as they reach for their Jimmy Choos, there’s no doubt that they’re glad they came (and glad their shoes haven’t disappeared).

My own feeling in the chapel is as close to an out-of-body experience as I hope ever to get. I look down and see myself floating high amongst the pillars and arches, my head towering way above me, up there with the mysterious friezes and reversed inscriptions. On shuffling out, I’m rather disappointed to find that my tatty leather sandals are still there. I step into them as inconspicuously as possible, and head back out to the lawn to find Langlands and Bell.

It’s still sweltering outside, but there is plenty of white wine available to keep the thirst at bay. I find the artist-couple relaxing with their friends, and am reluctant to pull them to their feet. The family has arranged for us to use the Smoking Room, which, according to the guide book, “symbolises the relationship between Heaven and Earth”. The Smoking Room is earth, I think, and the chapel next door is heaven.

Buoyed by the sunshine and wine we bounce into the zodiac-embellished room, and Langlands and Bell sink into the sofa while I appropriate a large pouffe. Ben Langlands seems to be the more serious of the two, and Nikki Bell more animated (possibly a measure of alcohol consumption). They had never been to Bute before they got this commission, so I start by asking if the place lived up to their expectations.

“We didn’t come with expectations,” says Bell. “We come to feel intuitively and see what happens, and we found this space… we loved the simplicity and beauty, and we noticed that the floor was unfinished. There were just bare floorboards and we said, this space is extraordinary – we must somehow reawaken it.”

“It was immediately evident to us,” adds Langlands, “that this was obviously not only a sacred environment in religious terms, but it was also a sacred environment in terms of art. And we could relate to the fact that this [the 3rd Marquess] was a man who clearly had a very vivid imagination, and a very vivid sense of other possibilities, whether they were spiritual or in terms of creative realisation; that he was aware that there was this potential to create a visionary world… So we wanted to wake that up and make that live today.”

The London-based artists, now in their late forties, have collaborated together since 1978. Their thought processes are so interlocked that they habitually finish each other’s sentences as naturally as if they’d started them. Over the last 26 years Langlands and Bell have worked consistently with the themes of architecture and infrastructure. They have presented detailed models and scale plans of existing buildings in various media, and work has just been completed on a structure of their own, a bridge in London’s Paddington Basin.

The artists have also gone digital with The House of Osama bin Laden. The interactive tour combines games technology with actual photographs of bin Laden’s Afghanistan home, whose plain form is a far cry from the extravagent decoration of the Burges chapel.

“It’s quite recently built,” agrees Langlands, “but it’s not modern stylistically – it’s very simple. But in rural Afghanistan these issues don’t really come into play – it’s just a very prosaic structure. Our interest was to go somewhere where this man had been and find out what it was like. To decode and encode it.”

The House of Osama has not only won the artists a BAFTA, but it’s also the exhibition which has earned them a nomination for the Turner Prize.

“Oh, that old chestnut!” quips Bell when I mention the accolade. “It’s not about winning or losing, is it?” she says, downplaying its impact on their work. I point out that £40,000 is not to be sneezed at, and Langlands concedes that “of course it would be nice to win it, but in the end life goes on, there are lots of things to do.”

That’s about as much hype as you’ll get from Langlands and Bell. They are exceedingly cautious about being labelled as celebrity artists, and when I tell them I’ve seen their work in a recent exhibition of BritArt, Bell is quick to point out that “we’re on the cusp of that but we’re not really BritArt.” When our photographer later arrives, the artists prove reluctant to pose in front of the camera, suggesting that we picture the chapel on its own.

But the chapel itself is not the whole story. As we discuss the meaning of the work, it becomes clear that those of us who have made the journey here to see it are a crucial piece in the jigsaw. The chapel, built in honour of a holy pilgrimage, is now reinvented as the object of a 21st century art pilgrimage. “That’s fundamental to the experience of the whole thing,” says Bell.

“There’s an element of reawakening a dormant part of the house,” says Langlands, “but there’s also an element of ritual – the notion that you’re coming to an island. Bute’s accessible but it’s an island. You have to make that journey, and when you come here you have to go through a psychological threshold, a transformation. And you have to take off your shoes, traverse the other world.”

Bell comes to life at the mention of slippers. “Did you wear the slippers?” she asks. “We went to enormous trouble to find them and they were made in a felt shop in Germany. It’s fundamental to the work and they nearly didn’t arrive; we nearly had a nervous breakdown.”

So that explains the tiredness.

The photographer arrives and we leave earth for another look at heaven. There’s a minor crisis when we can’t find three extra slippers for the tripod, but that’s overcome and Langlands and Bell are persuaded to pose side by side. When the photographer innocently suggests that the artists should be separated for individual pictures, a look of stunned incomprehension washes over their faces. He quickly drops the idea, and a diplomatic incident is narrowly averted.

So, that’s that. I return, as I came, by shuttle-bus, bus, ferry, train, foot, train and bicycle, and my accidental pilgrimage comes to an end.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 04.07.04