Works on this blog will be tagged by artist, medium, country, century, narrower era (if possible), artistic movement, characteristics (e.g. dominant colors in a painting)
Blending science and the supernatural, high art and gothic horror, Hamad Butt made work that was literally dangerous, in one case sparking f
I hadn't remembered the artist's name, but I saw this picture and it instantly brought back a vivid memory of seeing the installation on show (I don't remember where, but I assume it was the Rites of Passage show at the Tate in 1995), and the terrifying humour, peril, temptation, shock of it:
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.
Because seriously, you see these big glass baubles strung from the ceiling, swaying ever so slightly with the movement of air in the room, and even knowing how fragile they are, and that they're full of poisonous gas, they do tempt you to set them in motion, just once...
I'm glad I have more context now, and sad that we lost this artist so young (he died in 1994, age 32), because even without knowing more, it has stuck in my memory for thirty years.
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 [his brother] 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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