Stephen Foster, 'Introduction',
In: Familiars: Hamad Butt. Published by the Institute of International Visual Arts, London in association with the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 1996,
pp. 10-11.
The first time that I met Hamad Butt was shortly after his exhibition, Transmission at the Milch Gallery, which was remade from his installation at Goldsmiths' College for his degree exhibition. Butt was beginning to plan a new work, Substance Sublimation Units, in which iodine was heated in a vacuum to form a vapour. I invited him to make a work for the John Hansard Gallery, to coincide with the visit of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to the University of Southampton. It very soon became apparent that the iodine piece should form part of a larger exhibition and he began to develop the concept of three sculptures, using the three major halogens in the periodic table: iodine, chlorine and bromine. As the embryo of an idea began to form, the interconnected complexities of his thinking became apparent. The substances made a chemical triad, and the alchemical and archaic references were emphasised through a consistent use of triads. The exhibition was originally conceived for the unusual shape of the John Hansard Gallery, itself a kind of triangular space (although the exhibition subsequently proved to be remarkably adaptable). The chemicals were lime green (chlorine), intense orange (bromine) and deep violet (iodine), which form the triangle of secondary colours on a colour chart. The chemicals were presented in the form of a gas (vaporised chlorine), a liquid (bromine) and a solid (iodine). The works were initially defined by white shapes on the floor: a rectangle, a triangle and a circle. Butt had specialised in installations at Goldsmiths' College, and his exhibitions were unquestionably site specific - the quintessential quality of installation based art. In spite of this background as an installation artist, he disliked the term and insisted that these were sculptures, and that they addressed the debate about the condition of contemporary sculpture. His working method was very much a conceptual effort informed by his reading and thinking. He saw little difference between these two activities and the act of conceiving and making an exhibition. Once, when visiting his very large studio in Great Russell Street, I found it empty save for an easy chair. "Given the way you work", I asked, "why do you need such a large studio?" "I come here to read" was the artist's reply. Working in this way allowed him to conjure with the enormously complex interconnections that run through his work. It would also allow him to avoid getting bogged down with the practicalities of how something could be made. He would then approach experts from a wide range of fields to find out how what he had conceived could be made possible. After he had completed Familiars, he expressed the wish to work with holograms and soon reached the stage of creating all the impossibles. He had begun to explore ways of making his ideas possible, but alas, by this time he was too ill to bring the work to fruition.
All of Butt's work is characterised by a ruthless questioning of the status and nature of knowledge, and specifically that between knowledge in science and art. There is also the constant bringing together of the archaic and the contemporary, the arcane and what Basil Fawlty might have called "the bleedin' obvious". Where references have a metaphorical presence, the metaphors often appear extremely tangential, until they suddenly become crystal clear. It is in this context that the lightness of touch, the playfulness and the humour that runs through all of Butt's work becomes apparent, and the work ceases to be simply apocalyptic. In Familiars, the relationship between highly toxic, unstable chemicals, and the fragility of their presentation is a deadly serious matter. However, Butt taunts us with this factor by using chemicals held in a glass catapult; or a toy that cannot be used because it will smash and release its deadly contents, or a glass ladder that pushes the idea to a point where absurdity takes over. The sculptural works themselves are a wry comment on the style that dominated Goldsmiths' College in the late eighties - factory made, highly polished and hermetically sealed. Even his title Substance Sublimation Units obscurely pokes fun at contemporary domesticity. The sculpture is a device for sublimating substance. When heated, iodine changes from a solid to a gas. It is the only substance in the chemical world that passes from one to the other without passing through a liquid state - a process known as sublimation. The sculpture was originally conceived as a series of stacking boxes, so that theoretically you could stack as many or as few as required on top of one another, to make a sculpture to fit the height of a given room, like self-assembly kitchen units. Butt worked during a period when art had been dominated by theory, and at a point when such a situation was in crisis. Many years before, postmodernism challenged the dominant centre, in cultural terms, by concentrating on the margins of geography, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. During the 1970s and 80s, art practice was increasingly dominated by its ability to represent these issues; indeed, representation dominated presentation. However, by bringing the margins to centre stage and exploring their peripheralisation, it became increasingly clear that the end result was that these groups who did not represent a minority at all, but a huge majority, had been further marginalised, whilst the centre was strengthened and more clearly defined than ever before. It would be easy to read Butt's works in terms of 'representing' any or all of these central issues, and indeed his work clearly refers to his own ethnicity, cultural values, gender, sexuality and the condition that was to bring an end to his life. However, because of the remarkable breadth and complexity of his work, it is impossible for us to make simple readings; the work cannot be reduced to representing anything, and certainly not a simple list of contemporary social issues. We are encouraged to understand the work for its uniqueness, its invention, its presentation. Butt struggled to come to terms with his own mortality through these works, and because he did so without falling into a spiral of hopeless solipsism, they give us great hope for the future.