Hamad Butt, Transmission, 1990. Glass, steel, ultraviolet lights and electrical cables. Overall display dimensions variable. Exhibition view, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, IMMA, 2024. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin
6 December 2024 – 5 May 2025
by VERONICA SIMPSON
To walk into a room and know there is danger must have been a daily occurrence for Hamad Butt (b1962, Lahore; died 1994, London), or indeed any gay man in the 1980s, once the paranoia around Aids had kicked off – a very real fear of social hostility, bigotry or worse. Discovering he had Aids in 1987, at the age of 25, would have made Butt even more aware of his physical presence as a combustible element, a volatile ingredient in a society stoked with hysteria about what was then labelled the “gay plague”. And fear is a key emotion that Butt wished to evoke with his extraordinary sculptures, combining fragile with potentially toxic ingredients, which, if not treated carefully, could cause real harm.
Hamad Butt, Familiars 3: Cradle, 1992. Vacuum-sealed glass, crystal iodine, liquid bromine, cholerine gas, water and steel. Overall display dimensions variable. Exhibition view, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, IMMA, 2024. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Veronica Simpson.
I walk into the basement gallery where Cradle (1992) is exhibited: nine glass balls, each the size of a melon, are filled with chlorine gas. They nestle in brittle proximity to each other, suspended on slender steel wires a few inches above a hard floor in a swing structure inspired by Newton’s Cradle. The gas glows a sublime chartreuse. They are clustered in three groups of three, like some treacherous executive toy, the setup subtly communicating imminent threat: one gentle push and the noxious gas would be released into the air, causing sickness or worse.
Hamad Butt, Familiars 3: Cradle, 1992. Vacuum-sealed glass, crystal iodine, liquid bromine, cholerine gas, water and steel. Overall display dimensions variable. Exhibition view, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, IMMA, 2024. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Veronica Simpson.
The tension in the room is palpable – though at the time, I wondered if it might be emanating from the gallery invigilator, perched on a stool in the corner far from this work (which, after all, has waist-height wire barriers to keep mischievous adults or children beyond arm’s length). She is, however, very close to another seductively sinister work: a steel-framed ladder with nine rungs made of glass tubes containing iodine crystals; it reaches heavenwards, via a newly reopened aperture in the ceiling revealing a big rooflight, splattered with driving, December Dublin rain. A heating filament at the centre of each is activated in a programmed sequence, ascending slowly. As the filament warms, the iodine is activated and a cloud of noxious gas turns the clear glass to purple. Iodine is toxic – exposure could cause respiratory failure, blindness, burns or vomiting. And this work has a reputation for leaking, according to our curator and tour guide, Dominic Johnson. When it had its first institutional outing at the Tate, as part of the 1995 show Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the 20th Century, it leaked a few times, requiring the gallery to be evacuated. One can imagine Butt, who had died only a few months before the show opened, enjoying the mischief and media furore these ultimately harmless leaks caused.
Hamad Butt, Familiars 1: Substance Sublimation Unit (1992). Iodine under vacuum, glass, steel, infrared lamps, timing device, wiring. Overall display dimensions variable. Exhibition view, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, IMMA, 2024. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Veronica Simpson.
Thanks to the painstaking work of Tate’s conservation team, leakage is unlikely now, Johnson assures us. The Tate owns these two works, displayed in the basement of IMMA’s separate House Galleries, along with the third of Butt’s Familiars Series, on show upstairs. The eerie, glowing ladder here is Familiars 1: Substance Sublimation Unit (1992); the toxic executive toy is Familiars 3: Cradle (1992). On the ground floor is Familiars 2: Hypostasis (1992). Three extended, claw-like metal prongs curve up towards the ceiling. Each is secured to the floor by a small base plate, and each appears to be “loaded”, catapult-like, thanks to a wire that extends, tautly, from two-thirds of the way up the steel “bow” down to its own fixing, a few feet away. About four-fifths of the way up, these claws turn into delicate glass tubes, filled with a glowing amber toxin of their own – this time, liquid bromine.
Hamad Butt, Familiars 2: Hypostasis, 1992. Liquid bromine, glass, steel, steel wire. Overall display dimensions variableExhibition view, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, IMMA, 2024. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
This halogen is apparently vital for human life and a valued component in the manufacture of disinfectants, sedatives and petrol. It is said that bromide, a derivative, was added to the tea of British troops during the first world war, to suppress their libidos. It is also carcinogenic and corrosive. Yet again, one has to appreciate the skill and sophistication of Butt’s selection and deployment of every element in these works, each with a multitude of overt and hidden meanings. And Butt knew his pharmaceuticals well – at the time of the Familiars’ construction, Butt was being dosed with a cocktail of potentially toxic medications that typified the early stages of panicked, scattergun treatment for HIV and Aids. Kill or cure was a theme in his life, as well as an undercurrent in his work.
What of his use of the word Familiars? Johnson says: “He’s particularly interested in The Familiar as a witch’s companion, but also the term as we use it for friends and family. His family told me about the way that they were raised, to be particularly fearful of jinn – Islamic mythological entities that move between the living and the dead.” There is a 20-minute video interview with Butt – one of only two in existence – on level 1, in which he talks about capturing spirits with his work. He also speaks eloquently of that time, before the “enlightenment”, when alchemy was seen as the manipulation of spirits and other dark forces as well as chemical elements – he suggests in his interview (amateurishly but engagingly conducted by brother Jamal, just months before Butt died) that this understanding should be revived.
Exhibition view, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, IMMA, 2024. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
That dark sense of forces working to animate elements – or vice versa – is very present in these Familiars, the last significant works produced by Butt before his death in 1994 (as Johnson explains, his work halted in 1992 when he became a carer for his partner, who had Aids, and Butt never recovered sufficiently to continue; though the level 1 room is filled with drawings and ideas for future artworks). With Familiars, Butt has refined the “push-me-pull-you approach to the object”, as Johnson describes it, which he was beginning to articulate in his “breakout” work: Transmission (1990), which is also on show on the ground floor. With each iteration, that push/pull of desire/repulsion is more apparent. As Johnson says of Hypostasis: “We’re drawn in by the geometric clarity and the beauty and the way the light picks up the colour in the tubes. There’s an invitation to enter the arch, but to do so could kill you.”
Johnson’s lyrical, lucid writings about Butt are one of many fine things in a new monograph about the artist, which he also edited. What with the book and his erudite monologue as he escorts us around this building to one side of the great, stone-walled former military hospital that is now the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), it is hard to imagine adding anything new to his appreciative meditations. Johnson, who is professor of performance and visual culture at Queen Mary University of London, got in contact with Butt’s brother Jamal a few years ago, to see if there was any more work in the archives. It turned out there was – many paintings and works on paper had been languishing in the family’s garden shed for the last three decades. Going through them, Johnson and Jamal realised a wonderful and revealing show could be put together. The idea immediately found kindred spirits in IMMA’s Seán Kissane and Gilane Tawadros, director of the Whitechapel, the co-curators; Whitechapel will take this show on its second outing next year.
Exhibition view, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, IMMA, 2024. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
One of the challenges for the curators is how to make the most of a diverse but limited range of materials. By siting the exhibition in a small, self-contained building and on three levels, they have found a way to weave coherence around the spirit of the artist, in all his manifestations, as well as the experience of individual works, without being restricted by chronology. Butt, Johnson points out, had evolved his art practice over several years before he joined that stellar cohort of Goldsmiths students of the late 80s (Damien Hirst, Michael Landy, Angela Bullock). He had completed a foundation at Goldsmiths in the early 80s, then got part way through a fine art degree at North East London Polytechnic (now London Metropolitan University), and it is fascinating to see these early drawings, prints and paintings in the first-floor gallery. They reveal so much of Butt’s feeling for colour and line, though his sensual depictions of the male nude can be read, biographically, as expressive of his youthful sexual awakenings as well as his evolving technique. He abandoned this work, he has said, because it felt like he was “copying” his heroes – Picasso, Cocteau, André Masson – and you can see their influences here. Returning to Goldsmiths in the late 80s, he was ready to find something new among his peers, but also expressing the social and cultural conflict and paranoia in which he, newly diagnosed as HIV-positive, found himself. Johnson says: “He starts out as an artist apparently very indebted to modernist visual references and then somehow arrives at a point in 1990 when the work looks like so little that has come before. If you look at Transmission, it’s quite hard to place it within the canon of international or British art.”
Exhibition view, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, IMMA, 2024. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
So, to Transmission, an astonishing work from Butt’s Goldsmiths degree show in 1990. There are two elements here: in the small opening gallery is Fly-Piece (1990), a wood-framed, museum-style glass case in which live bluebottles pupate and hatch, feeding off the sugar paper on which Butt has printed “prophetic” texts. While this is widely acknowledged as the first piece of “bio-art” installation, Butt later smashed it up, apparently in anger at seeing Hirst’s A Thousand Years later that year, with live flies dying in a big museum-style glass case. Between Butt’s brother, the institutions and curators, and expert biotechnologists, this piece has been painstakingly recreated for the show. A series of drawings, some of which were exhibited in the initial presentation, many of which were not, is also shown. Johnson says the fly here is most significant as “agent of corruption” due to its movement between diseased and fresh bodies.
Hamad Butt, Transmission, 1990 (detail). Glass, steel, ultraviolet lights and electrical cables. Overall display dimensions variable. Exhibition view, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, IMMA, 2024. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
In the adjacent, main gallery a set of glass “books” is arranged in a circle: nine books are open on metal stands, revealing nine glass pages apiece, the spine of each featuring a slim, ultra-violet blue lamp. (We are warned not to stare at the lamps, as UV light can damage the eyes). Each book features an etched illustration of a triffid – inspired by John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids, later turned into a movie. Johnson says: “The triffid is a harbinger of blindness, contamination and mass extinction, which Butt appropriated as an analogy for HIV.”
The circular layout of the books is apparently taken from the presentation of the Qur’an at an Islamic funerary ritual. We are drawn to examine the delicacy of the etched triffid on each page, while repelled by the danger posed by the naked UV lamp. At the original, Goldsmiths presentation, Butt had created a break in the circle to allow visitors to walk into the centre and pick up some protective goggles from a pile. The goggles are here, though the access to them is denied. Transmissions was shown at Tate last year, after a rehang of its collections, but in a sterile, white gallery. It is so much more potent here, in a room the curators decided should be painted a vivid blue, inspired by Butt’s own drawings of the work.
Next to this work, Butt’s analogue animation Triffids plays on a very 1990s kind of TV monitor. It tracks a narrative in which Triffids are pursued, shot, burned and killed. The “toilet stall graffiti” style, as Johnson describes it, is compelling, playing on the phallic aspects of the plant’s hairy roots and protruding stem.
Exhibition view, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, IMMA, 2024. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
While the show’s publicity makes much of the idea that with Butt’s work, fear became a new sensation to introduce into a gallery, I would challenge that assumption – fear has played a huge part in the dissemination of religious myth and morals. Think of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500). There are legends of the 19th and 20th century whose ability to deploy terror or anxiety are unparalleled: Van Gogh’s tortured landscapes, Francis Bacon’s spectrally disembodied portraits. And I can think of many artists whose work is undoubtedly indebted to his bold blend of science and art, deployed with bravery and clarity. On seeing this show – one of many more, we can hope - nobody would deny that Butt deserves his place in that lineage.
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