The Talbot Rice Gallery’s exhibition of films and animations by Langlands & Bell - an artistic duo who, when they’re not making sculptural work, have been at the vanguard of new media since the late 1970s - serves well, among other things, as a history of the technology of film, from Super 8’s flickering black and white to the polygons and textures of computer simulation.

The show opens with Ooh La La Les Legumes!, a doomy, Godard-influenced piece made in 1979 when the duo were still students. The loosely structured narrative sees Langlands and Bell drifting through Dijon’s markets and cafes, as the camera plays doomily across gravestones and follows cows being herded into an abattoir. A later student work, Pseudo, borrows both the soundtrack from Hitchcock’s Psycho and the director’s techniques, to craft a silent noir in which a woman, engrossed in a thriller on TV, finds herself under attack.

These early pieces are gripping, and sophisticated in their exploration of film technique, but it is only when Langlands & Bell develop their own cinematic language, and turn their cameras on the real world, that they hit their stride.

Borough Market, filmed in 1986, is a tightly focused portrait of a place, and the people in it. Close-up shots of market traders and their punters mugging for the camera are intercut with death masks and cheap statuary, an auctioneer takes bids at breakneck speed, banging his gavel, a stiffly formal equivalent to the vendors shouting prices outside. These frenetic scenes are set against shots of city workers flowing along pavements on their way home. The shots build to form a dense study of the market and its surroundings, contrasting the forward-looking city boys with the tradition-bound stall-holders.

The most recent film here, Folkestone - Boulogne: A Blind Date, applies the same techniques to two towns, and the journey between them. In a nod to their earlier work, Langlands & Bell let their camera rove over more stalls of fruit and veg, and record a fisherman complaining about the decline of his industry. Shots of the red cabins of Folkestone’s funicular railway give way to scenes of a cross-Channel ferry chugging into Boulogne harbour, a simple juxtaposition of two transport systems kept running by the tourist trade.

Shots of elderly folk dancers in traditional costume jigging to accordion music are matched to sequences of gangs of kids clad in the international uniform of hooded tops and tracksuit bottoms. These two groups couldn’t be more different, you might think, but the teenagers are dancing too, performing “jumpstyle” moves. By cutting between the two, Langlands & Bell reduce the apparent distance between the two cultural activities, highlighting the fact that, while the folk dancers are preserving local customs in the face of globalisation, their children, despite the American streetwear on their backs, are busy creating new folk dances.

These pieces are, above all, about people, but when Langlands & Bell remove the human component from their work, they falter. The Artists Studio is a 2002 interactive computer animation that recreates the interior of the Old Library Hallway at Petworth House in Sussex, where JMW Turner kept a studio, contrasted with a virtual version of Langlands & Bell’s own studio space in London. I found it an exercise in frustration, spending five minutes desperately trying to escape an upstairs landing, and the rest of my time interacting with the virtual space by banging my virtual head against the pixelated purple flock wallpaper of a Petworth corridor. I can’t blame Langlands & Bell for my lack of coordination and unfamiliarity with the computer games that inspire the work, but even if I had been able to glide smoothly from Turner’s old haunt to the slickly designed spaces of their HQ, I doubt I would’ve learned as much as I did soaking up the atmosphere of Boulogne, Folkestone, Borough Market or Dijon.

In the upstairs gallery, The House of Osama Bin Laden, a work which earned Langlands & Bell their 2004 Turner Prize nomination, is another interactive simulation, this time set in the al Qaeda figurehead’s one- time base in Afghanistan. The stills reproduced in the catalogue show someone exploring the bombed-out building, finding a rocket launcher propped in a corner, and storage spaces full of moth-eaten rugs. On their field trip to Afghanistan, Langlands & Bell risked life and limb, only realising when reviewing their research photos of the hide-out that they had been snapping away just inches from unexploded land mines. There’s no sense of danger or immediacy to be found in the finished work, though. This could be a commentary on the media hysteria that led up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but it seems more likely to be an unfortunate side-effect of Langlands & Bell’s embracing of new technology and bloodless focus on physical space, a combination that alienates the viewer as much as their film work achieves the opposite.

There’s another problem with these simulated spaces. Langlands & Bell may have been prescient in making work in line with games such as Grand Theft Auto, which allows players to explore cityscapes, or the alternative reality of Second Life, where users potter about their second homes, but the inexorable pace of technological progress leaves these pieces, state-of-the-art five years ago, looking a little dated. This is not true of even the earliest film works, which - despite the fashion of their time, and revealing the technology behind them in the grain of Super 8 or the crispness of DV - show the world, rather than attempt to recreate it.

This is a divided show, then, evenly split between disappointing, anaemic interactive animations and warm, lyrical filmworks, but those films make it a must-see: nobody can beat Langlands & Bell at portraits of people, places and the ties that bind them together.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 5th December, 2008.

The first piece in the show at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, Close-Up, looks like an illuminated wall painting, an abstract made up of circles and dots. It is, though, not a work of art at all, but a lantern slide from the collection of Victorian horticulturalist and gardener Ellen Willmott showing the structure of Volvox globator, a type of algae.

Willmott’s slide serves as a manifesto in miniature for this exhibition. It trains its lens on the experimental microphotography of early naturalists, its adoption by educators seeking to inform art and design with natural patterns, the use of magnification as a means of disorienting and disturbing audiences by Dadaists and Surrealists, and their fascination with the human body that endures in the work of contemporary artists. It’s a warning, too, that things, when seen in close-up, are not what they seem.

The marriage of art and science, or the possibility that art and science can be the same thing, is made explicit in the images taken from Laure Albin-Guillot’s 1931 book Decorative Micrography, where cross- sections of seeds and cells are rendered in layers of charcoal and metallic pigment, and in the plates culled from Karl Blossfeldt’s Art Forms in Nature, which see budding twigs transformed into totemic sculptures and a seed pod metamorphosed into a mosque’s minaret. Stan Brakhage’s 1963 film Mothlight, in which insects, leaves and twigs flash onscreen as abstract forms, is, in this context, an echo of William Henry Olley’s scientific studies of a bee’s sting, a fly’s cornea and the scales of a butterfly’s wing.

The capacity of photography to reveal the obscure is taken up in the next room by the Surrealists, in two senses: psychological and physical. I’m not sure if Man Ray’s photograms count as close-ups - they are made without a lens, by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing it to light - but they are pseudoscientific investigations of objects, and, thanks to the Surrealist strategy of juxtaposition, reveal hidden meanings in everyday materials.

Strangeness is to the fore in Brassao’s “involuntary sculptures”, made with Salvador Dali. Small things - smeared toothpaste, rolled-up paper, a torn matchbox - are transformed by chance gestures in a sort of sculptural take on automatic writing, then transformed again by magnification into monumental works.

The power of the close-up to transform is applied repeatedly to the body. Jaques-Andri Boiffard’s untitled photograph shows a pair of eyes peering, terrified and terrifying, out from behind a dense tangle of hair, and his deliberately unpleasant portraits of ugly big toes illustrate a George Bataille essay, captioned as medical specimens. In the infamous opening scene of Buquel’s Un chien andalou, a woman’s eye appears to be slit with a straight razor, ants scurry from a hole in a man’s hand, and, in a merger of nature photography and the Surrealist’s body obsession, the camera lingers on a death’s head hawk moth. These, the most disturbing images, are shot in unflinching close-up.

Simon Starling is no Surrealist, but he shares space with them here, and bridges the gap between the artists and the scientists, the past and the present. His 2006 work Inventar-Nr 8573 (Man Ray) 4m-400nm is a slideshow which opens with a shot of Ray’s photograph Geological Fold, then relentlessly refocuses, ending on images of cloud-like forms, the magnified molecular structure of silver gelatine used in the photographic printing process.

Upstairs, things take a dramatic turn, away from the Surrealists and toward the conceptual artists of the 1970s. Where the avant garde of the 1920s and 1930s used the close-up to fetishise things, making them strange, mysterious or horrifying, their descendants opt for politically-motivated demystification.

Giusseppe Penone’s Svolgere la propria pelle (To Display One’s Own Skin) is a pseudoscientific survey of the artist’s own body; hundreds of photographs that show Penone placing a microscope slide over every square inch of his epidermis. Carolee Schneemann uses similar tactics, isolating and cataloguing male and female body parts. These works are a reversal of Boiffard’s toes, in which a body part is shown in isolation to reveal its uncanniness. Penone and Schneemann present multiple body parts to normalise them, explicitly rejecting the idea that particular parts should be viewed with shame or disgust.

Kate Craig takes an even closer look at her own body in Delicate Issue. A camera, operated by Craig’s husband, skims over her body, set to the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat and breathing. Craig’s aims are clear, but, just in case anyone misses the point, she interrupts the reverie with a voiceover that poses pointed questions, asking: “What is the dividing line between public and private?” While Delicate Issue must be placed in the context of the feminist, conceptual art-making of the 1970s, the piece signals a return to the surrealism of the body in close-up - folds of Craig’s skin look like desert landscapes, wrinkles offer abstract imagery - taken up by the contemporary artists that follow, who add humour.

Mona Hatoum’s short film loop, projected on the gallery wall in a small circle, again turns the body into a landscape, a strange, shifting alien one. This time, the mesmerising subject is scrotal skin, moving in response to changes in temperature. A private part made public, and made almost unrecognisable in close-up, Hatoum’s piece has much in common with both the surreal images in the lower galleries and the politicised bodies that surround it.

Next, Wim Delvoye, who is best known for Cloaca, a biomechanical digestion machine which ingests food and excretes the obvious, turns again to the body’s waste products in Sybille II. The film shows people squeezing blackheads on their noses in extreme close-up, to the sort of wishy-washy soundtrack used in nature documentaries, reinforcing the impression that these towers of sebum oozing from pores are kin to strange sea creatures, or growing insect larvae.

I am not the squeamish type, but I left the screening room feeling decidedly queasy. It’s a reaction that would have made the Surrealists proud, and Sybille indeed brings us full circle. Dali, the artist who haunts this exhibition, though he appears here only in collaboration with Brassao and Buquel, wrote in the 1934 essay which inspired Delvoye that squeezed blackheads are “alien bodies in space”.

This sort of neat, light touch by curators Dawn Ades and Simon Baker is what makes Close-Up an enormously satisfying show, and reveals their deep, broad understanding of the subject at hand, which is matched with a willingness to let visitors draw their own conclusions.

Coralling a century and a half of scientific investigation and avant-garde art, revealing surprising connections between very different movements in art history, and deftly crafting a narrative around an apparently simple artistic tactic, Ades and Baker have mounted one of the best shows seen at Fruitmarket—or, for that matter, in Scotland—for years.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 31st October, 2008.

This year, the Turner Prize show makes a lot of sense. This makes a change from the more usual cobbled-together feel, with four artists who have little in common bar their nomination gathered so that the public can assess them in advance of the judging panel’s decision.

The tie that binds Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga and Cathy Wilkes is a common interest in making art about art, and the way it is made. They all do this in very different ways, but the underlying theme of artists exploring, researching and revising the work of other artists, the art form in which they work, or, in Wilkes’s case, her own life and practice, makes this feel less like a parade of artists lining up for a cash prize, more like a group show, and a satisfying one at that.

Of the four, Macuga makes the most explicit art about art. Known for quoting from other artists, and for her interest in the way in which art is collected, curated, archived and exhibited, Macuga’s focus here is on two couples, personal and professional. She is showing a trio of sculptures that recreate designs by Lilly Reich, first seen in the German Pavilion of the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition. These cool, stand-offish industrial structures in smoked glass and steel must have packed more of a punch when Macuga exhibited them earlier this year in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, a building designed by Reich’s partner, Mies van der Rohe, but her bid to reassess Reich still stands, thanks to the pieces’ rather pointed titles, Haus der Frau and Deutches Volk - Deutches Arbeit. Macuga’s new pieces for this show are collaged combinations of photographic prints by British modernist Paul Nash, paper cutouts by his partner Eileen Agar, and other ephemera, all culled from the Tate’s own archives.

A snap of Agar in a swimming costume is layered over a Nash photograph of some tree trunks, and a Nash snap of a cliff top is enhanced with an anatomical drawing of a hand pointing down from the heavens from Agar’s collection - posthumous collaborations enforced by Macuga that are oddly convincing, suggesting an alternate history of a particular corner of British art history.

Mark Leckey mines the past, too, but his tactics are more personal, more subjective. His Cinema-in-the-Round is a film of a lecture Leckey has been giving, and revising, for the past two years, a roving, often funny look at the artworks and films that Leckey is drawn to, and the relationship between objects and images, quoting Marx one minute and Homer Simpson the next. Made in ‘Eaven trains a camera on Jeff Koons’s highly-polished steel sculpture Rabbit, which reflects a mirror on the wall of Leckey’s studio, which in turn reflects the materials he gathered while researching the work. It’s a dizzyingly self-reflexive trick, at once commenting on the vacuous sheen of Koons’s piece, and Leckey’s attraction to it.

Self-reflexivity is the cornerstone of Runa Islam’s film works. Cinematography sees a motion-controlled camera slowly panning around the workshop of motion-control expert Harry Harrison, with a soundtrack made up of the clicks and whirrs of the camera apparatus. You’d never guess, but the camera is tracing out the letters of the word “cinematography”. For First Day of Spring, Islam returned to her native Bangladesh, and paid rickshaw drivers to rest, working as actors playing themselves. Again, the camera pans slowly, exchanging an establishing shot for close-ups on the drivers’ faces, but the sudden, unscripted interruption of a passer-by, who looks straight into the camera, reminds us that this is as much a film about documentary film-making as it is a documentary. If all that sounds too clever by half, Islam’s work is saved by being simply beautiful, and by its presentation in carefully-designed, dimly-lit screening rooms - watching them, enjoying the images presented, is enough, with the theoretical underpinnings of each film the cherry on the cake.

After these three, Cathy Wilkes comes as something of a relief. Her work is immediate, affecting and deeply personal. Rather than mining some obscure corner of art history, Wilkes looks to her own life, assembling large-scale installations from everyday elements. Set on top of two supermarket checkout units, there are bowls full of dried soup. On the floor, empty jars with batteries placed inside them. There’s a shop mannequin perched on a toilet and festooned with rusty horseshoes, a tea cup and other detritus. A second mannequin is trapped inside a birdcage and draped in sliced up tea-towels. In part a diary of domestic life, in part a feminist critique expressed in juxtapositions with a surrealist bent, Wilkes’s work works because it is, first and foremost, sculptural. Those dirty bowls are aligned with perfect precision, a pair of jam jars mirror each other, the placement of the squat heaps of roof tiles, each painted with a cross motif, fizzes with tension. And, when that cross motif reappears, this time made of spoons and wadding, it comes, inexplicably, as a genuine shock. There is, too, something deeply satisfying in the way that Wilkes borrows from her own work, slowly developing a grammar of allied objects over many years - there’s a pushchair here that offers a reminder of a 2004 installation in a disused Glasgow hairdresser’s, the tiny whelk shells that peppered a recent show at the Modern Institute have been replaced here by flower petals, the heart motif of a flat, rubbery sculpture is rendered in pink, not yellow as it has been in the past. These subtle repetitions, revisions and removals are, admittedly, only apparent to viewers familiar with Wilkes’s past work, but there’s no doubt that fresh eyes would see that Wilkes has thought deeply about the objects she gathers together, and the relationships between them, even if the reasons behind the choices she makes remain a mystery.

So, who will win? Mark Leckey has been hotly tipped since the shortlist was announced, but he’s not a dead cert like Mark Wallinger, who took the prize last year. There’s no obvious stand-out, either, and none of the artists look out of their depth. Were it up to me, I’d have a hard time choosing between Runa Islam and Cathy Wilkes. Both have developed complex, layered and weighty ways of working, but neither of them, unlike Leckey and Macuga, has slipped over the line into making rather dry, academic work. The result is film and sculpture that makes you think, and think hard, but, more than that, Islam and Wilkes make the sort of stuff that sticks in the mind for reasons it is impossible to explain away in a curatorial note, operating, for all its sophistication, at a gut level, appealing to the viewers’ eyes and instincts. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Islam and Wilkes are better artists than their peers here, but it does make it possible to fall in love with their work, rather than admiring its wit, rigour and sophistication.

The Turner Prize 2008 is at Tate Britain, London, until January 18.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 3rd October , 2008.

Black Box, the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s strand devoted to experimental moving images, operates under something of a misnomer. The name suggests that the big screens and black boxes of the cinema are divorced from, even opposed to, the small screens and white cubes of the art world. Its programme, though, eloquently shows that the divide between the two forms - film and, for want of a better term, video art - is at least semi-permeable, resting not on the work, but on the artist’s intent, the context in which it is shown, the audience that consumes it and the means by which it is distributed.

Of course, this being the EIFF, some of the work on show is purely cinematic. Phantom Love, a feature-length film by Nina Menkes, takes the viewer on an immersive trip through the fractured psyche of Lulu, a woman who, bored of the repetitive attentions of her young lover, allows her mind to empty and fill up again with half-memories and subconscious effluvia. What follows is a series of vignettes, in lavish black and white, that switch from the seedy glamour of hotel casinos to harrowing encounters with a woman who may be Lulu’s sister or her troubled, hidden self. Yet this is still a work at the intersection between art and film, with nods to Buñuel’s work with Dali, and, thanks to a snake slithering down a corridor, direct allusions to the overt, obvious dream symbolism of the Surrealists.

The waters get really muddy with In The Wake of a Deadad, in which Andrew Kötting travels the world with a huge inflatable dummy of his late, grinning father, blowing up the effigy at locations of particular resonance to dead dad and live son. The work is conceived as both a 65-monitor installation and the film shown here. The former must be a confusing affair, bombarding the audience with endless instances of Kötting’s hysterically Freudian erection of his father. In linear, projected form it is, for all its complex merging of performance work and psychogeographic investigation, and its no-budget look, a distinctly conventional film. By turns funny and touching, once the viewer accepts the unedited episodic nature of In The Wake of a Deadad it forms a narrative, complete with surprise plot twist, and paints a portrait of a family beyond Kötting’s awkward tribute to his father. Sure, its not exactly the stuff of a Saturday night at the multiplex, but the simple shift in presentational modes shows that ‘difficult’ video art can become ‘easy’ cinema.

To an extent, the reverse is true of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, now showing outwith Black Box at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. This is the dual-screen gallery version of Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno’s cinema release, one of an edition of 17 that pairs the original film with raw footage from one of the cameras used to track the French international during a match between his club Real Madrid and Villareal. It’s an absorbing piece, which, as the two screens occasionally come together to display the same shot, calls to mind much of Gordon’s video work, with its recurring themes of doubling and doppelgängers. And, too, this version works as - to borrow from the jargon of the DVD extras menu - a ‘making of’, revealing the choices made in the edit suite, and the glossy sheen given to the washed-out rushes in post-production. It also raises questions about the distribution of artworks made of moving images: why is this work a hugely expensive, limited edition, when the film on which it is based was made available to anyone for the price of a cinema ticket? (A question that can be asked of many a ‘cinematic artist’, like Mathew Barney, whose masterly Cremaster Cycle is trapped in $100,000 DVD sets, or Glasgow-based documentary-maker/artist Luke Fowler, whose fluid filmic portraits can only be seen at gallery screenings, despite, arguably, belonging in the cinema.)

To return to Black Box, Beverly Hood’s piece Madame I not only questions modes of distribution but folds the means of viewing the work into the work itself. Telling the story of an anonymous patient in a neurological study who has lost her sense of proprioception - the awareness of the body in space - this short computer-animated film is designed to be viewed on a mobile ‘phone. And so Hood poetically evokes Madame I’s situation, a consciousness that has lost its moorings to the physical world, and forces us to look to our own disembodied existence as avatars virtually linked by the ever-present network through increasingly sophisticated mobile devices.

Is Hood’s work video art, a short film, or some as-yet-unnamed interactive experience? After taking in the work on show, or the films screened, at Black Box, such distinctions disappear, and this is the programme’s great strength: it not only gathers the best in moving images at the margins, but questions their very nature. Fascinating stuff, individually and collectively.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.