by Pairs of glass panes, displayed like open book pages, stand on small stands low to the floor, each accompanied by a UV tube where the spine should be, the highlight of which illuminates the printed image of a science fiction monster The glass pages take on the 1950s. The light will damage your eyes if you look for too long.
The room is lit by a cold blue glow, like the darkroom in a nightclub. The UV light causes your teeth to fluoresce. The creature is based on an early book jacket illustration for John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. The creature has a bulbous, hairy body resembling a pair of testicles on stocky legs, from which emerges a strong, hollow stalk with a searching, plant-like stinger emerges. The sexual connotations are unavoidable. The elements lie in a circle on the floor, like a study group in a madrasa. The elements are connected by various wires, and in the inaccessible center of the circle lies a confused pile of goggles.
Hamad Butt’s Transmission was created for his graduate exhibition at Goldsmiths’ College in 1990 and always seemed to me to be both ambitious and over-the-top – often like student art in that it went too far to prove its worth. But you have to risk being precocious to get anywhere. The broadcast was originally accompanied by a glass-fronted bulletin board containing mysterious text printed on sugar-impregnated paper. Butt put maggots behind the glass, which pupated and turned into flies that would eat the paper.
Shortly after showing his fly piece, Butt had it destroyed after seeing a display case by Damien Hirst (who had left Goldsmiths the year before) entitled A Thousand Years, which contained live flies, a cow’s head and an insect cutter shown that same summer. Hirst had transformed the life cycle of the fly into a dark parable about life and death. It was dramatic and obvious, even though Butt’s work was sneaky and weird.
Transmission was the first of the four works that established the artist’s name and on which his enduring reputation rests. “Transmission” was followed by a trio of unique but interconnected properties called “Familiars,” all completed in 1992. In the last two years of his life, Butt was unable to work. He died in 1994 at the age of 32 from complications of AIDS.
Born in Lahore, Pakistan; Butt’s British-raised, queer and nominally Muslim art is now the subject of an exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, produced in collaboration with London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where the exhibition will go on display later next year. This is not a rediscovery of a lost artist. From the beginning, Butt had his supporters. Every now and then the late British art critic Stuart Morgan would proclaim: “I just met this young artist. He’s a genius!”
Hanging on wires in a precisely aligned row, three groups of identical sealed glass vessels, each containing a greenish-yellow solution of chlorine gas, hang in the air, like a gigantic and dangerous version of Newton’s Cradle, the popular table toy of bored executives in the 1980s . Playing with Butt’s version would lead to disaster. Above our heads, three curved steel tubes screwed to the ground arch towards each other, each with a hollow glass pin at the tip filled with amber-colored bromine. It seems like an evil alien device invented for a cheap sci-fi movie. I expect there to be a flicker of electricity between the prongs, but that doesn’t happen.
A vertical ladder, on each rung of which is attached a glass vial with a heating element that instantly vaporizes iodine powder into a harmful reddish-purple haze, climbs up the wall. The rungs of the ladder light up and then darken again, revealing a dangerous climb in which the powder instantly turns into gas without ever becoming liquid through a process called sublimation. Only a fool would attempt to climb the ladder.
Butt’s Familiars all seem to have a secret purpose. They are a mixture of metaphor and alchemy, science and sculpture and invite you to resist. This and the serious threat of danger is what makes it so attractive. What they are really concerned with is the potential to hurt and hurt, if nothing else. Butt’s use of halogen chemicals – iodine, chlorine and bromine – all of which have therapeutic or antiseptic properties as well as carcinogenic or toxic effects, reflects the dangers of the chemicals used in early attempts to slow the progression of the AIDS virus. Butt was diagnosed HIV positive in 1987 while caring for his partner.
Butt stood somewhat apart from the media circus that followed his YBA colleagues at Goldsmiths. He wasn’t part of the gang. He worked slowly. His work required technical research and development, often in collaboration with chemists, scientific glassblowers and specialist manufacturers. His art was not easy to assimilate and it was not market friendly. Butt was complicated to install, store and transport and required commitment from those who wanted to display it. He worked on the edge of the overheated market. He found the scramble for the next big thing to be inappropriate and disruptive to his work practices.
In a typically wide-ranging, insightful and witty article from 1992, Morgan wrote about Butt’s “stealth” and mischievously said, “Stephen Daedalus’s.” dictum “Silence, banishment and cunning” suited Butt down to the Ground.” References to Leftfield, in this case to James Joyce, were typical of Morgan’s approach. Butt’s sculptures (if they are such) were first shown at the long-defunct Milch Gallery in London before being shown again at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. In 1995, a year after Butt’s death, his Familiars were included in the Tate Gallery exhibition Rites of Passage, curated by Morgan and Tate curator Frances Morris, alongside a group of 11 artists including Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys . Butt was the youngest and least known participant.
Since his death, Butt’s Familiars and his Transmission have all entered Tate’s collection. Whatever threat and presence these sculptures once had is contained in Dublin, where each of the familiars is cordoned off and physically inaccessible. You cannot look at them in relation to each other. Her placement has little of the depressing sense of occasion and drama that I remember from her installation in Rites of Passage.
That’s almost all there is to Butt’s art, but that’s not it, as the exhibition in Dublin shows us. This is not a retrospective – too big a word for what Butt has created in just under a decade; A career would also be inappropriate, as Butt was racing towards his early death as an artist with no long-term prospects. IMMA has reconstructed Butt’s fly-infested bulletin board and enriched the exhibition with a paper trail of handwritten notes and sketches, typed pages, undated drawings and a portfolio of drypoint etchings, charcoal drawings and also a series of oil paintings, all created in the years before the artist He found a way of working that made a name for him.
Butt spent much of the 1980s in and out of art school. He dropped out of one college and took advanced courses in printmaking at others. He painted and etched and tried to find his voice by drawing and painting angular, sometimes cheerful, mostly naked male figures in bathhouses. The characters were alternately sexy and anxious, cavorting and lonely. Bright light bulbs dangled, men struck intricate poses. All are heavily designed in the style of Picasso and Andre Masson and redesigned in the light of 1980s Neo-expressionism. I wish I liked them better. The images feel clogged and overworked.
He dropped all of this soon after returning to Goldsmiths in 1987. Numerous later, undated drawings bypass symbolism and abstraction but add little. Butt’s art remains strange, allusive and unique regardless of its time and outside of time. He needed more time than he had. This also reinforces the impression of an artist caught in the middle of the action, superimposing another reading on an already complex, truncated art.
