In the gas-filled sculptural installations of Hamad Butt, death is always close at hand. A new retrospective at IMMA in Dublin considers the fear-laden alchemy of an overlooked visionary.

Text by Thomas Roueché

What does it mean to encounter fear in an art gallery? In the work of Hamad Butt, danger is omnipresent. At the recent retrospective of his work at IMMA in Dublin, Hamad Butt: Apprehensions (until 5 May), the late artist’s fragile installations threatened to explode, shatter, and leak the poison gas they contain throughout the crowd. Merely looking too closely, trying to decipher what they were saying, how they were saying it, posed the threat of cornea damage. His installations weave together the scientific and the magical; they are apparitions in every sense of the word. Their risks are by turns chemical and mystical.

Hamad Butt was born in Lahore in 1962 and moved to London aged two. He began his artistic career with drawing, paintings and works on paper, before moving into larger-scale installations after his studies at Goldsmiths between 1987 and 1990. He would die of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1994 at the age of 32 after a short but exceptionally prolific period of work. In some ways the context of the 1980s AIDS crisis helps to understand his practice, as does his Muslim, South Asian background, yet he distanced himself from these identities, remarking that “some people choose to identify themselves more strongly with their cultural backgrounds; I won’t deny it to myself but I won’t speak for it, in the same way that I don’t primarily regard myself as a gay artist”.

Butt showed his first major installation, Transmission, at Milch Gallery in 1990. A television showed an animation of drawings based on the carnivorous plant on the cover of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. Elsewhere, a wooden cabinet held paper with text written on it, and live flies. The centre of the work was a glowing circle of etched glass books arranged in a circle, each inscribed with an image of the triffid. The books burned blue with UV light – to stare at them for too long would damage the viewer’s eyes. The circular arrangement of the books calls to mind a khathēm, a tradition within Islamic funerals in which scripture is read collectively.

His 1992 work, Familiars, is a series of three installations, “Cradle”, “Substance Sublimation Unit”, and “Hypostasis”, that features poisonous halogen gases encased in brittle glass, for the creation of which he sought advice from Imperial College’s chemistry department. “Cradle” takes the form of a Newton’s cradle executive desk toy, whose orbs would break if used and release the chlorine gas inside. “Substance Sublimation Unit” is a ladder with 11 rungs made of glass vials filled with iodine crystals heated by a wire element until they form a gas. To ascend would mean, once again, releasing poisonous gas into the gallery. The curving javelin-shaped tubes, capped with points of bromine, of “Hypostasis” speak to the tripartite nature of the godhead; the work presents a mystical fragility that reaches up to pierce the sky. But there is an intimacy here. In a contemporaneous review, the artist’s friend Stuart Morgan refered to the works as “Butt’s dangerous pets”.

These works have rarely been shown prior to the current show; in an installation at the Tate in 1995, one of the works began to leak, forcing an evacuation of the museum. On their first showing, at Milch Gallery in March 1994, “a typically crazed Milch affair”, as Gregor Muir wrote at the time, attendees “found themselves pressed ever nearer the threatening glass balls”.

Butt’s “domestic bombs” sit in tension with the more painterly tone of his earlier works – drawings and paintings that, sometimes heavily, bear the influence of his artistic predecessors. Sean Kissane, the co-curator of the show at IMMA, has described how they reposition and queer the work of a master like Picasso, reclaiming the forms from a homosocial and homosexual perspective. Dominic Johnson, his co-curator, points to the fact that at some point Butt clocked the derivative aspects of his own work, choosing to move on to something more profound and challenging.

Yet while Butt’s works on paper are reminiscent of his mid-century predecessors, they also anticipate a turn to painting in queer art that feels omnipresent in today’s art market. It is the sensuality of a new generation of queer artists like Doron Langberg or Louis Fratino, whose paintings document the easy sexuality and gentle intimacy of urban gay communities, capturing a sense of queer domesticity and a resurgent interest in the decorative. Politics becomes rooted in the domestic, in the communal ordering of the intimate realm, fixed within the personal narrative and identity of the artist.

As Butt’s work matured, he rapidly eschewed the identitarian and the figurative, the lazy portrayal of sexual gesture and knowing intimacy, as he put it, after realising “how much of a copycat I was being”. Sketches made at the same time as Familiars incorporate elements of Islamic art, mihrabs and iwans, alongside arms, bodies and recurring triffid figures, but they feel broken, refusing direct representation. These works are uncomfortable, difficult, even scary, as much in what they present the viewer as what they withhold. As with his installations, the power of the unexploded bombs lingers, and finds its way into deeper, more primal fears. “I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute mementos, amulets,” he wrote.

Despite their heavy, scientific feel, Familiars – the name of which references the ambivalent shape-shifting spirits that accompany witches – is rooted firmly in the Islamic alchemical tradition and what Dominic Johnson has called “the mystic foundations of rational chemistry”. “Substance Sublimation Unit”, with its life-threatening ladder, captures this most profoundly. A key symbol in alchemy, Neoplatonism and Masonry, the ladder draws on the biblical image of Jacob’s Ladder and the individual’s moral and spiritual journey from earth to heaven, to enlightenment and knowledge.

Triffids (1990). Courtesy of IMMA

For the alchemists, Jacob’s vision of “a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it”, showed how occult knowledge was indeed attainable, and communication between heaven and earth could be reciprocal. For John Dee, Jacob’s encounter with the angels’ heavenly passage to and from earth formed the basis of his Enochian linguistics and his attempts to converse with angels – an endeavour that was for him part of the scientific method. “A means,” as Morgan put it, “of separating the scum from the glory.”

In Butt’s ladder, each rung is delicate and fragile, unable to carry weight. If one were to attempt to climb it, each rung would shatter, releasing iodine gas and forcing a sublime, deathly transformation.

In his essay for the show’s catalogue, João Florêncio remarks on the dangerous “what ifs” that Butt’s installations imply: “Will it hurt? Will I like it?” These are the questions that esoteric study asks, too. Transmission invites us in to read and contemplate hidden knowledge from its circle of glowing UV books, even as that act threatens to leave us sightless – like the unfortunate characters in Wyndham’s novel, blind and at the mercy of the lashing tongues of ugly monsters. It speaks to our powerlessness, our nakedness, in the face of the cold chemical realities of science and nature.

Transmission, with its vitrine of flies, who hatch, feed and die, was very likely copied by Damien Hirst in his work, A Hundred Years, which was first shown a month after Transmission. The installation, which features the decapitated head of a cow, would go on to become a vital building block in the Hirst mythology, not least after, as Hirst tells it, he recieved a call from his gallerist to tell him that Francis Bacon had been standing in front of it for an hour, transfixed. Butt was devastated by the plagiarism, and destroyed the original installation. The work at IMMA has been carefully reconstructed for the show.

Hirst would famously say, “There has only ever been one idea, and it’s the fear of death; art is about the fear of death.” Yet unlike the literalism of his sensationalist contemporaries who would go on to define fin-de-siècle British art, Butt’s work engages not with crude horror but with the sublime. The queer intimacy he presents is cold and alienating. “Beauty as strategy could be something from outside,” Butt wrote, “an unforeseen, dangerous event that takes us by surprise, frightens us.”

His work presents fears and desires, of contagion and pleasure that are terrifying and alluring, scientific and mystical. In the face of anxiety and danger, Butt offers us a crystalline, alchemical transcendence, a vision of beauty in which absolutely everything is at stake.  .