Hamad Butt: endlessly theorising

The House Galleries at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (IMMA), are currently home to the first retrospective of Hamad Butt (1962–94), a British-Pakistani artist whose truly radical work constituted a flagship artistic practice in 1990s Britain. Previously the old Master’s House – adjacent to the main IMMA complex in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham – the House Galleries are an apt site for Butt’s work, which does much to unsettle and expose the domestic and familiar as the sites of greatest danger and potential jeopardy. Lovingly curated by Dominic Johnson, with Seán Kissane from IMMA and Gilane Tawadros from Whitechapel Gallery, London, Apprehensions is an unprecedented opportunity to see the work of this singular artist from across his short career.¹ The exhibition also stages a defiant cultural intervention at a time when fascist and anti-immigrant sentiments in Britain and Ireland have recently exploded into the frenzied violence of rioting and destruction, on a scale not seen since the 1970s, when Butt was a teenager living in East London, following his family’s arrival from Lahore in 1964.

The first ground floor galleries are devoted to Butt’s breakout installation Transmission FIG.1, initially presented at his degree show at Goldsmiths, University of London, in June 1990. A circle of nine glass ‘books’ – each with an ultraviolet neon light as a spine and held in rehal-like curved steel brackets – sits quietly on the gallery floor FIG.2. One ‘page’ of each book is etched with the image of a triffid, the alien invader and blinder of human sight created by John Wyndham in The Day of the Triffids (1951). The cool blue glow of the installation is seductive, and yet the books are difficult to look at; the ultraviolet light dazzles and pinches the eye. A pile of goggles, offering relief, are placed at the centre of the circle, yet the visitor is barred from taking a pair.² The references in the installation are deliciously varied, invoking the Qu’ranic study circle and the transmission of knowledge and faith, the whirling dervish of Sufism leading to spiritual ecstasy, and the menace of the triffid as a figure representing human limitation, blindness, disease and extinction. The exhibition is explicit, in a way that the work is not, that HIV/AIDS was the determining context for Transmission. Butt’s diagnosis as HIV positive in 1987 prompted a range of concerns: about the stigmatisation of people with AIDS; the promiscuous symbolic landscape of the epidemic; the wilful blindness of government and zealous recriminations of religious leaders; and the scapegoating of sexual and racial minorities therein.³

Remarkably, alongside the drawings and video work that accompanied the first showing of Transmission, the curators have reconstructed Butt’s Fly-Piece FIG.3, a wood and glass vitrine encasing fly pupae that hatch and feed on sheets of sugar-soaked paper printed with nine oblique statements on the installation. The flies’ mindless consumption of the paper mimics the human tendency to submit to the compulsive nature of our base drives, even despite our best ‘knowledge’ – a condition that the accelerating climate crisis is making only too clear. Butt is said to have destroyed the original Fly-Piece in anger after Damien Hirst (b.1965) appropriated the idea of using live flies for his installation A Thousand Years (1990). However, attending too keenly to this salacious story runs the risk of decentring the importance of Butt’s work on its own terms, and cleaving to a masculinist celebration of innovation and primacy. Is it really a surprise that Hirst would steal? Either way, the reconstructed work is now part of IMMA’s collection, and a testament to the dedication and vision of the curators, as well as the artist’s brother, Jamal Butt, the manager of his estate.⁴

In the adjacent room is Hypostasis FIG.4, the first of three sculptures titled Familiars (1992), which in turn use chlorine, bromine and iodine as raw materials. In Hypostasis, three curved steel rods project upwards from the gallery floor, each holding a blown-glass spike that contains liquid bromine FIG.5. Installed in a pyramidal shape, the phallic spears seem poised either to meet or collapse, their potential energy perpetually on the point of dissipation. They seem to model the apprehension of a precoital encounter, which here would cause the glass to shatter and release the bromine, a toxic skin irritant. Familiars extends to the basement galleries, where Cradle FIG.6 is installed. Nine blown-glass spheres filled with chlorine gas and a small amount of water are suspended from the ceiling with steel wire, organised into three groups of three.⁵ The chemical weapon is held innocuously in a form that resembles a Newton’s Cradle; as the balls are blown gently by the ambient air of the space, barely touching, beads of water condense and trickle down their insides.

Finally, Substance Sublimation Unit FIG.7 is a steel ‘ladder’ of vacuum glass rungs, each filled with an electrical element and crystals of solid iodine. The current ascends the ladder, intermittently heating the rungs, causing the iodine to sublimate into a brilliant purple vapour. To capitulate to the temptation of climbing the ladder would burn the skin and smash the already-brittle glass, releasing the toxic gas. Again, the references and resonances in Familiars are copious and varied: from the invocation of witchcraft and alchemy as the Islamic ‘Other’ to European Enlightenment chemistry; the perversion of the ayvān arch formation in Hypostasis; the underbelly of threat in parental protection invoked in Cradle; and the ladder as motif of spiritual ascension and bodily abjection in Substance Sublimation Unit. In their astonishing beauty and intellectual promiscuity, these works humiliate any attempt to tie them to any one context. Yet, cautious of cultural erasure of HIV/AIDS, Johnson is right to stress the importance of the experience of sexual pleasure and its concurrent risks in the staging of seduction and danger in Familiars, both in the exhibition materials and in his editorial work for the accompanying catalogue.

The final floor of the exhibition showcases archival material and Butt’s work in drawing, painting and printmaking – practices that he continued throughout his career, even after his turn away from painting for large-scale projects at Goldsmiths. Butt’s interest in depicting the male nude is at the foreground here, as is his sexual humour. For example, the drypoint etching Short Story with Surprise Ending FIG.8 depicts two nude men in a sparse, tiled bathhouse, one cradling a scrotum with an elongated, triffid-like cock – the title describes the outcome of a first, faltering attempt at masturbation. The curators conceived this final floor as a refraction of the previous two, offering a ‘reading backwards’ of Butt’s sculptural concerns into earlier, figurative work.⁶ An enhanced understanding of the artist’s use of colour and light is one outcome of this strategy, as the vivid blue of Transmission and orange, acid green and luminous purple of Familiars become apparent as painterly illuminations of surface and space – in ways, akin to Dan Flavin’s neons, which variously court and thwart the viewer’s desire.⁷

Displayed in the last room, a taped interview made by Jamal in March 1994 FIG.9, just five months before Butt’s death from AIDS-related complications, is a final highlight. Butt is both erudite and charming, yet impatient with the terms of his brother’s questions; he is a spellbinding presence, and perhaps the best commentator on his own work. He shows a notable contempt for the bourgeois consumption of art, pleased that some of the glass in Substance Sublimation Unit had recently broken, describing it as the logical outcome of the work: ‘it’s appropriate […] they come along to be poisoned and scared, to get their little thrill from art’. He is clear that, although he may make his work for ‘intensely personal’ reasons, once it enters the public realm, these are necessarily foreclosed. This is an interesting contrast with the catalogue, which scatters personal snapshots of Butt throughout, in defiance of the opacity of his sculpture. Most compellingly, Butt dismisses any conception of art as a ‘purely mechanical process’, either illustrating a theory or enacting a determined result; rather, his work is ‘endlessly theorising’ on its own terms, perpetually inviting new audiences and new interpretations.

Butt’s insight prompts a reconsideration of the contemporary reception of his practice, especially in relation to HIV/AIDS and ‘British’ art. Firstly, the website exhibition text describes Butt as ‘arguably the first British artist to respond in a non-militant, conceptual mode to HIV/AIDS’.⁸ Marketing impulses aside, why make this claim to primacy? It is more than disputable – there are numerous practices from the 1980s that could be described in such terms. More importantly, however, the binary upon which it rests, between militant and conceptual artistic responses to the AIDS crisis, is itself an imported distinction. It was carved out in the American context where, without universal access to healthcare, the necessity for targeted activist critique was far more acute than in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, the distinction is built on exactly the kind of simplistic, deterministic understanding of art that Butt derided.

The video work of Stuart Marshall (1949–93) is exemplary here, which in the United States was considered to be foundational to AIDS activist art, and yet confounded the conceptual–militant binary. Journal of a Plague Year (1984), for example, combines contemplative locked-off shots of sleeping men and more polemical footage of burning books.⁹ Helen Chadwick (1953–96) explored the attractions and dangers of the unbounded body in a similarly oblique way in Viral Landscapes (1989). Even works developed for an explicitly activist context of display, such as the photo-installation Metaphysick: Every Moment Counts (1989) by Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–89) and Alex Hirst (1951–92) for the exhibition Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology (1990), were opaque, mysterious and dazzlingly beautiful. Like these other practices, Butt’s art calls on us to ‘endlessly theorise’ art made in the context of AIDS in the United Kingdom on its own terms.

The second point for reconsideration is Butt’s recuperation as a ‘lost artist’ of the 1990s, whose work and legacy are in the process of being rescued. The fact that ‘Hamad Butt’ – the forgotten queer, Black British artist lost to AIDS – fits the current market demand for the diversification of 1990s ‘Young British Art’ and the decolonisation of curricula, displays and exhibition practices so well should give us pause. Johnson’s insightful and careful work, in the spirit of Butt’s dissident art, sidesteps this pitfall of cliché, but others have not been so cautious, notably Elizabeth Fullerton’s embrace of the lost artist narrative in the Guardian in 2023.¹⁰

In her account of the psychological dynamics of losing, the psychoanalyst Anna Freud makes the simple but by no means banal argument that declarations of loss are indicative of the preoccupations of the loser, rather than the lost. For Freud, the cultural myth of the ‘lost soul’ depicts a figure who is ‘pitiable rather than threatening and uncanny rather than outwardly frightening’. Such souls ‘are “lost”’, she writes, ‘as symbols of object loss’, their appearance as poor or desolate reflecting ‘the emotional impoverishment felt by the survivor’.¹¹ To whom, after all, has ‘Hamad Butt’ been lost? Not to survivors of the period of his life, who remember his art well as a searing contribution to the time, but certainly to an art market and culture industry that need ‘symbols of object loss’, with which to appear to redress their historic biases and elisions. To conceive of Butt as pitiable and lost, rather than threatening and frightening to notions of canon and history, is to betray the thrust of his remarkable art, which aims to defamiliarise, to make us not feel at home, neither in our own house nor in this increasingly broken world.