Hamad Butt, Transmission 1990. Tate. © Jamal Butt.
14 rooms in Modern and Contemporary British Art
Transmission explores the relationship between seeing and knowing. Hamad Butt places the supernatural and the scientific together to interrogate how both ideas and diseases can spread
Etched on each of these nine glass books is the image of a triffid, the fictional plant that blinds and eats humans. Butt borrowed the image from the cover of John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951). As you move around the circle, the triffid becomes more and less visible as the glass pages of each book turn. The books are lit by ultraviolet light. They are intended to be looked at through protective glasses. Butt said, ‘Ultraviolet light is an invisible light available in all light, and there is invisible knowledge available in all knowledge. The closer you get to it the more dangerous it becomes.’
Each book sits on a rehal (Quran stand). Books can transmit religion and knowledge, yet the title also suggests a blind or hidden exchange. Butt explained, ‘there was a play with the whole notion of blind faith, in faith in written things, which I was equating with the transmission of disease.’ He was interested in how vision is privileged above other senses. In particular, he reflected on the diagnostic gaze that aims to understand and catalogue human disease through external observation.
Transmission was Butt’s earliest exploration of the causal link between science and art, reason and danger and, ultimately, life and death. He made the work when the threat and impact of the AIDS epidemic was having a devastating effect on a generation of gay and queer people.
Butt wrote the nine phrases reproduced on the wall here. When he first displayed Transmission in the 1990 student exhibition at Goldsmith’s School of Art, he inscribed them on paper soaked in sugar solution. He then sealed the paper in a glass case, along with fly pupae. Over time, the flies hatched, ate the paper and died. For Butt, this symbolised the cycles of human history.
Hamad Butt, Transmission 1990
Transmission 1990 is an installation consisting of nine glass books resting on metal stands, each individually lit by its own ultraviolet light. The books are arranged in a circle on the floor, connected by electrical cabling, each of their nine glass pages turned in progressively ascending order. On the same page of each book the image of a single Triffid from the cover of John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), a creature bulbous at one end but with an agile, probing snout at the other, is etched into the glass. The effect created is an image of the Triffid that, although always discernible upon close inspection, moves in and out of visibility as the viewer moves around the circle. The single Triffid seems to rise to the surface of the page, taking on an almost phallic symbolism. Butt was fascinated by the image of the Triffid from Wyndham’s novel and the relationship this iconic book had with the unease of the social body. In the novel the Triffids pray upon an unsuspecting populous, blinded by an apparent meteor shower. Describing the Triffid, Butt wrote, ‘On the cover of the book, an image of a creature that is not anything as distant as the castrated male genitalia, yet it creeps to that dreaded desire as it takes the power of mobilisation itself.’ (Hamad Butt, ‘Apprehensions’, in Foster 1996, p.50.) In one of his working notebooks, part of Butt’s archive held at Tate, he wrote that, ‘The Triffid exists in exile. The alienated exile of the dangerous, ejaculating, contaminated pudenda,’ reflecting a personal exile and alienation felt by Butt himself.
1/1
artworks in Hamad Butt
Art in this room
Hamad Butt
Transmission
1990