‘Dicing with death’: the lethal, terrifying art of Hamad Butt – and the evacuation it once caused

Last month, Tate Britain’s first rehang of its collection in a decade provoked a blizzard of controversy, with detractors railing against the supposedly “woke” prioritising of politics over aesthetics. Regardless, the London gallery clearly saw a need to update their offering to reflect how the story of contemporary British art has evolved – and to encompass the many important players who had previously been left out. Familiar names such as Tracey Emin and Antony Gormley remain, but they are now on an equal footing with less exposed artists such as Donald Rodney and Ingrid Pollard. One particularly exciting addition is the little-known Pakistani-born artist Hamad Butt, whose striking 1990 installation Transmission has been given a whole room.

Created at the height of the Aids epidemic in Europe and the US, Transmission evokes multiple terrors. Donning safety goggles at the entrance, you encounter a darkened space with nine open glass books, lit by UV lamps, arranged in a circle on the floor as if for some cabalistic ritual. Through the eerie glow, an etching looms on each book of a triffid, the giant carnivorous plants that overrun Earth after a blinding meteor shower in John Wyndham’s 1951 sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids. On the wall, nine cryptic statements pronounce things like: “We have the eruption of the Triffid that obscures sex with death” and “We have the blindness of fear and the books of fear”. The piece explores fears of the foreign invader, of deadly desire (through the distinctly phallic-looking triffid), of literal blindness as well as blind faith, the open tomes recalling a madrasa or a witch’s coven.

Butt attended Goldsmiths College in London alongside many of the Young British Artists (YBAs), yet blazed his own trail in his brief life, cut short by Aids. He created lyrical, dangerous works around themes that still preoccupy us today: precarity, the spread of viruses, homophobia, racism. “I honestly think Hamad Butt is the closest thing I’ve met to a genius in my life,” says Stephen Foster, former director of John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, who staged a 1992 show of Butt’s work.

For the director of Whitechapel Gallery, Gilane Tawadros, who has championed Butt since the 1990s, what distinguishes him is “the way he seamlessly weaves popular culture, scientific knowledge, artistic understanding and social and cultural insights into works which are poetic and edgy, and completely unlike any others made by his contemporaries at the time.”

Tate’s rehang positions Butt’s work as a linchpin in British contemporary art. Transmission is sandwiched between a 1990s room featuring the work of YBAs alongside artists such as Sutapa Biswas and Mona Hatoum, and another spanning the 2000s to the present that showcases artists such as Rene Matić and Kudzanai-Violet Hwami. “There was so much about Transmission that was of the 1990s moment but still so incredibly relevant to questions being raised in contemporary British art,” says curator Nathan Ladd. “Even the title Transmission felt such a pertinent and poetic metaphor for this global pandemic we’ve all gone through.”

So why haven’t we heard of Butt before? His lack of visibility is partly due to the complex and hazardous nature of his works, and the fact he died in 1994 aged 32, when the YBA phenomenon was in full swing and institutional interest was dominated by their eye-catching, confrontational art. Butt’s profile is set to rise, however, with at least two museum shows in the offing and a scholarship under way around his artistic output.

Born in Lahore to strict Muslim parents, Butt was the second of five children. The family moved to England in 1964. As a child, he would cover walls and cupboards with paintings and drawings, which his parents would take down, struggling to see art as a viable career option, his brother Jamal says. Butt’s journals from that time reveal his emotional turmoil as he sought to reconcile his sexuality and desire to pursue art with his religion and his family’s expectations of a career in science. A degree in biochemistry to placate his parents was soon dropped.

Butt attended Goldsmiths from 1987 to 1990, during which time fellow student Damien Hirst organised the storied 1988 warehouse show Freeze which launched BritArt. But his work was never an easy fit. “Hamad could in that period have been seen as almost not relevant to those who expected things to be spelled out in a very clearcut way,” says Butt’s former tutor Sarat Maharaj. “His subtlety and the deliberate opacities and obscurities of his work must have baffled quite a lot of people.”

Transmission was first shown in June 1990 for Butt’s degree show. That version featured the glass books, a video of a triffid and a wall cabinet containing fly pupae and sugar-soaked paper written with the nine enigmatic statements. The flies hatched, ate the paper and died in a symbolic performance of human history, repeating “an endless cycle of information being literally eaten, digested and passed on”, as Butt explained in a home video made by Jamal. Butt reportedly destroyed his fly piece and since then Transmission has only been shown without the insect component.

In July 1990, Hirst exhibited his own live fly work A Thousand Years at the exhibition Gambler, curated by the gallerist Carl Freedman. Hirst’s work centred on the fly life cycle as a metaphor for human existence and included a rotting cow’s head and an Insect-o-Cutor. A Thousand Years is arguably Hirst’s most critically acclaimed work and cemented his position as an artist to be reckoned with. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

During this period Butt was dealing with HIV-related health issues that he couldn’t share with most of his family. “Being gay and having Aids were not subjects easily raised among the elder family members, especially in Asian families,” Jamal says. This was before antiretroviral medication became widespread; Aids was perceived as an automatic death sentence. “Sadly Hamad was given triple therapy just as his immune system began to shut down.”

Aware the clock was running down, Butt threw himself into his next, three-part project, Familiars (1992), for Southampton University’s John Hansard Gallery. Like Transmission, the title is a wordplay, Familiars referring to witches’ demons, sexual intimacy and the halogen family in the periodic table. Where Transmission carried an implicit risk through UV light and glass that could blind and cut, Familiars took the danger to another level. Fascinated by metamorphosis and alchemy, Butt created three elegant sculptures using solid iodine, liquid bromine and chlorine gas.

Cradle was a monumental variation on the desk toy Newton’s Cradle, but rather than metal balls that knock against each other, it comprised 18 vacuum-sealed glass baubles filled with lethal chlorine gas which would smash if set in motion. Hypostasis consisted of three vicious-looking bowed glass spears with orange liquid bromine tips. The third work was Substance Sublimation Unit – a perilous ladder with rungs made from vials containing heat lamps and iodine crystals, which transformed into a gorgeous violet vapour as they were heated, ascending like an otherworldly stairway. Butt’s dark humour is evident in these visceral sculptures that invite participation but can also kill.

Once these highly toxic works had been fabricated for the show by scientists at Imperial College, London, Butt and Foster, the gallery director, drove them in a van to Southampton. “We pulled up at some traffic lights and as I was easing forward very, very slowly, we went over an empty plastic bottle which exploded under my car tire,” Foster recalls. “I nearly died.”

In that show the sculptures were fenced off and Foster remembers hanging hazmat suits around the walls “in case anything got released”. In contrast, photos show people drinking and milling around the noxious works when they were displayed in 1994 at the legendary squat-cum-gallery Milch. They were presented a year later with alarms and sensors at Tate’s exhibition Rites of Passage. Even so, the Tate was evacuated at least once over leakage fears.

“Everything he touches has got this critical life-death thing about it,” says Butt’s friend the artist Angela Bulloch. “It’s dicing with death.”

In his final years Butt’s close friend, artist and photographer Diego Ferrari, became responsible for installing his work; Butt would sketch out instructions when they met in hospital or in cafes. “He was fragile, he was losing his life, but he didn’t want pity so we kept working until almost the last month,” Ferrari says. “He had an incredible sense of his own work. He wanted it to permeate the social tissue, then and in the future. He was very clear about that.”

This may yet happen. Dominic Johnson, professor at London’s Queen Mary University, is writing a book on Butt, whose work he considers “the most sophisticated response we have in British art to HIV/Aids”.

“He produces these environments that are both fearful and seductive, and that just seems so fertile for thinking about sexuality in that moment. At the same time he’s thinking about his own body as a vector of fear, as an HIV-positive body, a brown body, a Muslim-appearing body – all these other ways in which he’s this fearful outsider figure,” he says. “All that makes the work very powerful; it’s also really beautiful.”

In uniting seemingly opposing ideas such as science and the supernatural, emotion and intellect, the sacred and profane, high art and gothic horror, Butt’s work feels astonishingly fresh and resonant today. Restlessly curious, he understood that science did not have all the answers and was equally invested in art and alchemy. In a poignant moment of Jamal’s home video, Butt laments the disappearance of demons, familiars and magic in the shift from “medieval alchemical witchcraft to modern rationalistic chemistry”. Despite his weak condition, he laughs, saying: “It’s this dangerous spirit that I like and think should be revived.”

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