Making Osama into art

Langlands and Bell in front of Frozen Sky (1999)

11 April 2012

When the Momart warehouse in east London went up in flames last month, destroying Tracey Emin's tent and the Chapman brothers' Hell, among many other BritArt works owned by Charles Saatchi, the chattering classes talked of cultural catastrophe, while the general public struggled to suppress a snigger.

What no one mentioned was the anonymous furniture workshop which backed on to the Momart premises.

"For many years we worked with the two cabinet makers who owned that workshop," says Ben Langlands, one half of the Turner Prize-shortlisted artist duo Langlands & Bell. "They lost everything: their equipment, their stock, their entire livelihood."

"You didn't hear anything about the little people next door who were burned out completely," adds Nikki Bell. "But what they're going through puts everything into perspective for us."

It is a characteristically serious response to a news event that seemed to symbolise, for some pundits at least, the end of the Britpack era. A week before the fire, the Turner Prize shortlist sounded a similar death knell. Noted primarily for its lack of blood and gore, this year's list marks a sea-change in fashion, even a new maturity.

Gone is the self-obsessive navel gazing - the kind of art that takes the life of the artist as its source material (Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn et al). Instead, the jurors have favoured the political, the topical and the global, from work that documents the Texan environment of George "Dubya" Bush by Jeremy Deller, to the computer-simulated House of Osama bin Laden by Langlands & Bell.

Partners in life and in art, 48-year-old Langlands and 44-year-old Bell have lived and worked together in the East End for 25 years - ever since they graduated from a fine art course at Middlesex Polytechnic.

"We came to Whitechapel in the late 1970s and lived in the basement of a tenement block on baked beans and scraps of bacon," says Bell. "There were lots of abandoned buildings in those days," adds Langlands. "Whole terraces of empty houses full of things people had left behind. We came here to wander around and explore. It was an inspiration."

They dress in similar style - white shirts, jeans, cropped hair - have a habit of finishing each other's sentences, and in the flesh are as modest and sober as the YBAs were outrageous and unpredictable.

"There are lots of art worlds in London," says Langlands. "It happened that they [the Britpack] inhabited one world which became, in a sense, the new rock 'n' roll. But actually what's going on in London is very much more diverse than that."

The House of Osama bin Laden is an eerie and perversely moving piece of work. Using high-tech software of the kind employed by the shoot-'em-up computer game Quake, the viewer is taken on a virtual tour of the house in eastern Afghanistan inhabited by Bin Laden in the late 1990s.

You navigate your way around by joystick, entering the hut-like structure of three rooms in which the world's most wanted man once slept, ate, and perhaps planned the devastation of 9/11.

It is furnished sparsely with a single bench, an electric fan and a makeshift bed. From the window you see what Bin Laden saw before American agents forced him to decamp to Kandahar: a beautiful vista across a placid lake surrounded by low mountains.

The kitchen is outside in a separate ramshackle building next to a look-out platform, a dusty bunker and a specially-built mosque. What is particularly chilling is the simplicity, poverty and isolation of the place; a place in which one man successfully plotted to change the world forever.

Superficially, you are playing a computer game, but in fact nothing of what you see on the screen is fictional. At the invitation of the Imperial War Museum, Langlands & Bell travelled to Afghanistan shortly after the 2002 war and took hundreds of pictures and dozens of measurements of the real house in order to create the virtual version back in London. Then, the real thing was protected by a heavily armed local militia.

"No one knew where it was when we first arrived," says Bell. "We had to really search and use local knowledge."

"When we got there the militia men were neither friendly nor unfriendly, but completely nonplussed," says Langlands. "We told them we were working on this piece for a museum in London and would they mind us taking some pictures, but they couldn't relate to the idea of what we were doing. It was when we started measuring the house that we could feel the tension rising and realised we should leave."

The work has since been shown in New York alongside other pieces inspired by the trip to Afghanistan. What did New Yorkers make of it? "There was no controversy," says Bell, "but there was a lot of discussion."

"Bin Laden has a kind of celebrity," says Langlands. "He's a kind of Pimpernel. What is most evident about him is his myth, and in some senses we're both reflecting that and contributing to it."

When watching the House of Osama bin Laden it is very hard not to invest inanimate household objects - the bench, the pile of sheets - with a sense of brooding evil. "What people bring to the piece is part of what we're interested in," says Bell.

Houses, the built environment - from the deserted terraces of Whitechapel to the most notorious hut in Afghanistan - have always inspired Langlands and Bell. Indeed, their work often teeters on the brink between art and architecture. Their latest, largest and most ambitious work, a blade-like bridge clad in white glass within a posh new development at Paddington Basin, will be officially unveiled in September.

Meanwhile, they have a new solo exhibition this month in a spectacularly gothic country estate on, of all places, the Isle of Bute. Plus they have to travel to Holland, Italy, Spain and the US for group shows.

"It's a big year for us, yes," says Langlands, adding soberly, " attention and activity comes and goes in waves, it's very unpredictable."

They are not favourites to win the Turner Prize in December, but they are relishing the chance to show at Tate Britain (the exhibition opens in October). Perhaps unfashionably, they have always been fans of the Turner Prize as a concept.

"It has done its job very effectively," says Langlands. "Before the Turner, contemporary art was completely marginalised. Some people might argue that's healthy, but ... " Bell interrupts him: "It's provoked discussion about art and it's provided an entry-point into the art world. That can only be good."

They don't seem overly excited about it, however. Expect no wild partying, swearing or celebratory drunkenness from the very grown-up Langlands & Bell - that kind of artistic activity went up in smoke last month.

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