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

Take two London-based Turner Prize nominees, and ask them to make art in a mock-Gothic Victorian pile on a small Scottish island. No, this is not the latest thing in DIY reality TV, although maybe it should be. In fact, this is plain old reality.

Artist couple Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell have been making art together since 1978, casting a clinical eye on architecture and the way we relate to it. Their virtual tour of The House of Osama bin Laden, using games technology to assemble their own photographs of the building, recently got them shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize.

That was a nice piece of timing for those at the Mount Stuart estate in Bute who had already commissioned Langlands and Bell to make their first site-specific work in Scotland. The result – Re awakening – is no so much an exhibition as an experience.

The pair chose a tiny Byzantine chapel, never before opened to the public, and covered the bare floor with mirrors. The idiosyncratic chapel had been built in 1873 for the third Marquess of Bute, to commemorate his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Making a contemporary reference to such travels, Langlands and Bell painted the international designator codes for Rothesay, Jerusalem, Glasgow and Tel Aviv on one wall of the visitor centre.

And that’s it. Mirrors and designator codes. It seems a long way to travel for two simple things, but it’s a journey (well, actually a pilgrimage) which you’ll be glad you made. Wearing your special slippers and in a hushed group of four, you see the mirrored threshold ahead and it’s as if you’re venturing into a void. When your heart is back in place, you skim across the surface like you’re walking on water (the Christian allusion goes without saying).

Normally, in architecture, you see it from inside yourself. In this chapel, you look down and see yourself in it, as part of it. It’s like having an out of body experience, and sneaking a glimpse through to ‘the other side’.

The more prosaic reaction is that you become super-conscious of the architecture around you. This, along with the corporate style of painting in the visitor centre, suggests that Langlands and Bell are playing a strongly curatorial role. Without intervening in the bizarre visual language of the chapel they have opened it up to public view and made it an object of fascination. This is indeed a re-awakening.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 20.06.04