Langlands + Bell @ Talbot Rice Gallery

Having spent the preceding week building up our critical stamina by bench-pressing the hardback big-print version of Gombrich's History of Art, The Skinny glissaded into the Talbot Rice knowing exactly what we were up against. Showing thirty years' worth of film and video art in one space is a big ask, and given the number of lunchtime visitors we witnessed pinballing at speed between the exhibits, it seemed that the curators may have overestimated their audience's attention span. Thank heavens they did, however, for although a fair chunk of time is indeed a prerequisite for a full appreciation of this show, once your mental processes begin to fall in with the rhythms of Langlands and Bell's art, being three hours late from your lunchbreak starts to make a surprising amount of sense.

In retrospect, the most impressive thing about this show was the lack of a discernable style or aesthetic. Works such as Virtual World - despite being rather clumsy and obvious attempts to create 'animated poetry' using internet domain codes - have a stripped back, no nonsense Open University kind of quality to them. And yes, even though no aesthetic can indeed be interpreted as an aesthetic of sorts, there is simply a lack of cleverness or irony here that makes the work very easy to engage with. Even when hijacking the modes of digital media - as with The House of Osama bin Laden, in which the viewer must use a computer joystick to navigate a virtual recreation of a real terrorist
hideout - the appropriation is so total that the artists' conceptual concerns rise naturally to the surface. Perhaps I'm being rather generous here, as this show is not without its conceits. NGO, another animated work created during their tenure as war artists in Afghanistan, is a lamentably guileless affair that hammers home the reality of the hostilities with all the subtlety of a Cillit Bang
commercial.

The film work is by far the strongest, however, revealing Langlands and Bell to be accutely observant artists. In both the simplicity of the work and the sense of timing - with shots lingering occasionally
to wonderful, unexplainable effect - we have a sense of the invisible network of connections that exists between images, sounds and all things. It is this feeling that unites these works and reveals the exhibition to be more than the sum of its parts.