Unruly Absences

“I WORK FOR SELF-REVELATION.” So states Hamad Butt in a proposal for an exhibition that never took place, typewritten by the early-twentysomething artist circa 1985–87. The document is one of many artifacts centering the incomplete and interrupted character of Butt’s oeuvre in a roomful of archival ephemera toward the end of his retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Butt, a resolutely enigmatic artist, died in 1994, at 32, having been HIV-positive for most of his adult life. The proposal’s four-word declaration inadvertently prefigures the following decade of an intensely introspective practice, in which he promiscuously experimented with methods of giving sculptural form to the sense of all-pervading peril and pent-up hostilities that characterized his world: the drab England of the late-Thatcher-early-Major grey-zone years and its attendant fatal inaction around HIV/AIDS. The exhibition’s presentation of the sculptural installations for which Butt is best remembered, and some of the drawings and paintings that preceded them, frequently emphasizes the artist’s sustained interrogation of what happens when one’s selfhood is compromised by its environment—by diseases of bodily and societal kinds.

The narrative that unfolds in Apprehensions details a body of work that is proudly cerebral, formally licentious, and vacuum-packed with allusions—theological, art historical, pop cultural. Less immediate are references to what one might consider readily identifiable markers of his own milieu, which make retrospective attempts to peg his work to its most straightforward identitarian parameters—Hamad Butt, forgotten gay Muslim artist—ring futile. Guest curator Dominic Johnson’s team (across IMMA and London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where the exhibition travels later this year) premise the exhibition mainly upon slick restagings of the two expansive, installation-based conceptual projects that brought Butt renown in the early 1990s, Transmission (1990) and Familiars (1992). During this time, Butt briefly became affiliated with the London press’ reductive vogue of “hazardism”—artworks whose materials contain potential health and safety hazards. He had been a fellow traveler at Goldsmiths of those who would later accumulate immense wealth and celebrity as media-designated poster-children of that era’s officially sanctioned nationalist optimism, the Young British Artists—some with works strikingly analogous to Butt’s early experiments.

Butt’s perennial themes of bodily corruption and contamination materialize in the exhibition’s first section, devoted to Transmission (1990), a formally adventurous sculptural sequence filling three rooms. Its centerpiece is a circular structure of glass books etched with semi-visible images and illuminated by ultraviolet light, explicitly referencing the khatam, an Islamic funerary rite in which collective recitation honors the deceased. The installation stages a dialogue between the conservative British mainstream’s scapegoating of minorities in Butt’s own time and the iconography of John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), in which bioengineered plant monsters wreak havoc upon a sick world. A key feature of the work is that the figure of the Triffid—whose bulbous form manifests in a series of untitled pastel drawings and on a glitchy analogue video monitor presented alongside the circular sculptural work—cannot but evoke a cum-spurting cock. That this motif, in turn, lends the work both added potency as an AIDS metaphor and levity is one early example of Butt’s own capacity to code-switch and shapeshift in singular ways, and to produce imaginative forms for his provocative study of faith and faithlessness in a crooked time.

Like many comparable artists of his time (though unlike most official narratives of “AIDS art,” which center directly activist practices at the expense of more thematically mysterious work), Butt’s increasing politicization looked less like agitprop and more like a dive deeper and deeper into the realms of the interior and intrinsically ungraspable. Butt’s overarching project is thus defined by holding divergent, unanswerable questions in tension. The exhibition accordingly embraces frictions inherent in its own plural imperatives: on the one hand corrective, as a near-comprehensive overview of an insufficiently celebrated “major” artist (with all the elaborate art historical scaffolding that implies), and, on the other, a poetically irresolvable portrait of an oeuvre interrupted, an ascent eternally suspended by the tragedy of historical circumstance. The exhibition’s centering of its own innate insufficiency is well-established long before the wall text in the exhibition’s final room states that “a poignant feature of this exhibition is its incompleteness.” There is ingenuity everywhere you turn in this exhibition, to be sure, but one is explicitly encouraged to wonder where it might have gone.

Mounted over two floors and composed of a laser-precise combination of glass, metal, and hazardous substances, Butt’s second major sculptural series, Familiars (1992), consists of three large glass tubes standing upright, a series of glass pendulums arranged to evoke Newton’s cradle, and a ladder constructed of heat lamps. They all contain active chemicals in primary states of matter, which provoke consideration of how fear dictates our movements among other bodies and the substances that surround us. The year after Butt died, Familiars was included in the Tate’s influential group show Rites of Passage, cocurated by Butt’s friends, the Welsh critic Stuart Morgan and future Tate director Frances Morris, and became a minor cause celèbre when a gas leak required the gallery to be evacuated. Familiars, like Transmission before it, is delicately constructed from combinations of chemical substances and industrially sourced materials. It escapes easy categorization even as it bears a conceptual forthrightness, which can sometimes verge on doctrinal. 

What brings Transmission and Familiars their dynamism is their almost sedative stillness, serving Butt’s vision of a world conditioned by imminent danger. In Butt’s sculptures, this danger is both material and symbolic, and threats of toxicity and contagion are always already omnipresent, thickly felt in the airspace of the environment in which one looks. The same is true whether one encounters these works in Ireland’s largest contemporary art institution three decades after his death, or in the differently inhospitable context out of which they emerged.

Now, however, in its white-cube presentation at IMMA, the work does not read as being exactly shocking or discomforting, perhaps because the incorporation of supposedly active peril in the gallery environment has been dimmed by subsequent experiments and, more likely, by the copious explanatory materials included—both from the institution and in Butt’s own words. This is not to say there isn’t pleasure or vivacity in the experience of being among them, just that they’re of mostly academic sorts. Seeing a letter written by a gallery director risk-assessing Butt’s use of bromine, chloride, and iodine adds something to the work, to be sure, but perhaps also takes away from what might be gained from experiencing it in purely sensational terms. An uneasy relationship—not unproductive—recurs throughout the exhibition between the mystery inherent in Butt’s strange and unruly installations and the descriptive imperatives of their institutional presentation, which risks overdetermining work that seems to be explicit only about its own unclassifiability.

So many present-day obsessions of the art world and its discourses find precursors in Butt’s work: The copious archival material included at the exhibition’s end gives the work a perhaps unlikely air of the socially conscious “research-based art” that now dominates the more academically inclined end of the art world; the incorporation of Butt’s early paintings evokes contemporary discourses on tensions between queer figuration and abstraction; and his explorations of the sculptural environment’s capacity to articulate structural-political valences of health and infection presage such ideas’ ubiquity in the art schools and biennials of our own time. Butt’s prescience in the form that he gave to some of these preoccupations is in no doubt. But the resurrection of these works at a moment when institutions are hungry to embrace and reclaim narratives of late gay artists of the 1970s and 1980s lends the exhibition a sterile quality, despite the intelligence of its curatorial moves.1 The ample critical attention the exhibition has already received, both in international art publications and in the mainstream press of Ireland and the UK, suggests both a voracious appetite for and a concerted effort on the organizers’ part to push a decisive narrative of Butt’s institutional comeback. The opportunity to experience the works in such a handsome and rarefied setting is much welcomed, but also creates a sense of establishmentarian inevitability, which in some cases closes off the possibility for a more speculative engagement with what Butt’s works meant in his own lived environment.

At the close of the exhibition, appearing alongside the typewritten exhibition proposal and numerous other contextual curios, is a home video from 1994. It was recorded by Butt’s brother, Jamal, who would become the main preserver of the artist’s legacy and a key collaborator on this very exhibition. Situated between artist interview and intimate domestic documentary replete with brotherly irritability, the footage provides insight into Butt’s cheekily provocative character as much as his formal and thematic preoccupations. In the video, Butt describes his practice, commenting that “even now the work I do is quite linear; it’s just making line drawings.” It plays as something like a joke, coming at the end of an exhibition that underlines his practice’s restlessly probing complexity. The typed document and the home video are bookends to Butt’s career—one from the very beginning and one from the very end, both in the artist’s own voice—chronicling the extent of his far-reaching practice as a live and lived process. A fitting coda, then, to an exhibition overflowing with the thrills of unknowing and ambiguity.

It’s no slight on the work itself to say that the exhibition’s conclusion—pointing to some of Butt’s unstaged installations, unwritten books, unexploited curiosities, and unlived futures—is when it feels most vitally engaging. Butt’s uncharted explorations resonate throughout the exhibition as abundant absences, even as wall texts inevitably linger on the historically exceptional character of Butt’s practice, and indeed the exhibition’s own firstness—Butt’s work has never previously been presented outside of England and his most well-known works have not been shown together. What resonates loudest is the way Butt’s work playfully gives shape to the feeling of having control over one’s own environment compromised. It’s here that revelations abound: when the exhibition allows space for visitors to give their senses over to the work, in appreciation both of what’s present and that which did not, will never, and has yet to come to be.

1 Apprehensions opened almost concurrently with a number of similarly blockbusting monographic exhibitions from UK institutions, including Rotimi Fani-Kayode at Autograph, Leigh Bowery at Tate Modern, and Peter Hujar at Raven Row, all of which have received fawning media attention.

Dylan Huw is a writer and art/language worker living in Caernarfon, Cymru (Wales). His art-critical writing has appeared in e-flux Criticism, Frieze, and Art Monthly, among others, and he was recently a runner-up for the 10th International Award for Art Criticism. Dylan also collaborates widely with Wales-based artists and organisations as a translator, editor, convenor, researcher, and critical friend. He has been the recipient of a Visual AIDS Research Fellowship (2023), Future Wales Fellowship (2022-3), and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

All photos: Ros Kavanagh