The Kitchen
1978
Multimedia environment: found materials, found objects, mirrors, prisms, 2 x Kodak Carousel projectors, audio track of kitchen sounds.
240 x 240 x 240 cm
The Kitchen, Langlands & Bell’s first collaborative artwork was an installation of two kitchens constructed side by side. The visitor entered a decrepit Old Kitchen replete with rotten floorboards, peeling wallpaper, dirty crockery, rusty pots and pans and musty smells, to view a new kitchen though a fixed window set in the wall that divided the two spaces. A mirror image in layout the New Kitchen was furnished with the same modest items and utensils as the old but new, cheap, shiny chrome, steel and glass and lit with prismatic coloured projected light. The visitor could enter the old kitchen, but only stand and see the new kitchen through the window.
Exhibited: Middlesex Polytechnic (aka Hornsey College of Art) Fine Art Dept. Alexandra Palace, London, 1978; Nikki Bell & Ben Langlands ‘Degree Show’, Middlesex Polytechnic, Fine Art Dept. Alexandra Palace, London, 1980. After exhibition the installation was disassembled and component parts (with the exception of the cutlery trays from the Old and New Kitchens) stored at Alexandra Palace until they were destroyed in the Alexandra Palace Fire of 10 July 1980. The cutlery trays from the Old and New Kitchens survive and remain in the L&B Archive.
Catalogues: Langlands & Bell Works 1986-1996, pub. Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Grey Art Gallery, New York. 1996. Degrees of Truth, pub. Sir John Soane’s Museum. 2020.
View: The Kitchen 1978, S.8mm. film.
