Robert Marshall Watts (1923–1988) was an American artist best known for his work as a member of the international group of artists

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental performance art, art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finishe ...

. Born in

Burlington, Iowa Burlington is a city in, and the county seat of, Des Moines County, Iowa, United States. The population was 23,982 in the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, a decline from the 26,839 population in 2000 United States Census, 2000. Burlington ...

June 14, 1923, he became Professor of Art at

Douglass College Douglass Residential College is a non-degree-granting program established in 2007 and open to Rutgers undergraduates at any of the degree-granting schools of Rutgers University-New Brunswick. It replaced the liberal arts degree-granting Douglas ...

Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...

, New Jersey in 1953, a post he kept until 1984. In the 1950s, he was in close contact with other teachers at Rutgers including

Allan Kaprow Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American performance artist, installation artist, painter, and assemblagist . He helped to develop the " Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. ...

Geoffrey Hendricks Geoffrey Hendricks (July 30, 1931 in Littleton, New Hampshire – May 12, 2018) was an American artist associated with Fluxus since the mid 1960s. He was professor of art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, where he taught from 1956 to 2003 a ...

and

Roy Lichtenstein Roy Fox Lichtenstein ( ; October27, 1923September29, 1997) was an American pop artist. He rose to prominence in the 1960s through pieces which were inspired by popular advertising and the comic book style. Much of his work explores the relations ...

. This has led some critics to claim that pop art and conceptual art began at Rutgers. He organised the proto-fluxus ''Yam Festival'', May 1963 with

George Brecht George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnso ...

, and was one of the main protagonists, along with

George Maciunas George Maciunas (; ; November 8, 1931 Kaunas – May 9, 1978 Boston, Massachusetts) was a Lithuanian American artist, art historian, and art organizer who was the founding member and central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of ...

, in turning

SoHo SoHo, short for "South of Houston Street, Houston Street", is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, art installations such as The Wall ...

, New York, into an artist's quarter. He died September 2, 1988, of lung cancer in

Martins Creek, Pennsylvania Martins Creek is a census-designated place in Lower Mount Bethel Township, Pennsylvania located along Martins Creek (Delaware River tributary), Martins Creek. Its population was 664 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census. Martins C ...

. He was also known as Doctor Bob.

Early life

Watts attended the

duPont Manual High School duPont Manual High School is a Magnet school, public magnet high school located in the Old Louisville neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, United States. It serves students in grades ninth grade, 9–twelfth grade, 12. It is a part of the Jeffe ...

in Louisville and earned a degree in

mechanical engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines and mechanism (engineering), mechanisms that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and engineering mathematics, mathematics principl ...

at the

University of Louisville The University of Louisville (UofL) is a public university, public research university in Louisville, Kentucky, United States. It is part of the Kentucky state university system. Chartered in 1798 as the Jefferson Seminary, it became in the 19t ...

in 1944. He joined the United States Navy in December 1942 while still in college and was commissioned an

ensign Ensign most often refers to: * Ensign (flag), a flag flown on a vessel to indicate nationality * Ensign (rank), a navy (and former army) officer rank Ensign or The Ensign may also refer to: Places * Ensign, Alberta, Alberta, Canada * Ensign, Ka ...

in 1945. He served aboard the aircraft carriers

USS Guadalcanal (CVE-60) USS ''Guadalcanal'' (CVE-60) was a of the United States Navy, which served during and after World War II. She was the first ship to carry her name. She was the flagship of Task Group 22.3, a hunter-killer group which captured the German su ...

and the USS Solomons (CVE-67), and left the Navy in May 1946. He moved to New York in 1948, where he studied art at the

Art Students League The Art Students League of New York is an art school in the American Fine Arts Society in Manhattan, New York City. The Arts Students League is known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists. Although artists may study f ...

and later at

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

from where he gained a degree in the History of Art in 1951, majoring in pre-Columbian and non-Western Art. After becoming Professor of Art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, 1953, he started to exhibit works in a proto-pop style. He participated in Pop Art shows such as ''New Forms, New Media'' exhibition in 1960 at Martha Jackson's Gallery; the ''Popular Image'' exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Art in 1963; and the 1964 '' The American Supermarket'' exhibition at New York's Bianchini Gallery curated by Ben Birillo, which also featured

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (;''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''"Warhol" born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol ...

Claes Oldenburg Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions ...

, and

Tom Wesselmann Thomas K. Wesselmann (February 23, 1931 – December 17, 2004) was an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement who worked in painting, collage and sculpture. Early years Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati. From 1949 to 1951 he atten ...

.Mail Art John Held Jr
After exhibiting at Leo Castelli's Gallery in 1964, Watts turned his back on the gallery system, and concentrated instead on the

anti-art Anti-art is a loosely used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Somewhat paradoxically, anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage poi ...

of the emerging New York avant-garde centred around George Maciunas.

iswork obviously related to that of the Pop artists that I had discovered a few years before ... Watts' chromed objects closely related to Johns' cast beer cans and flashlights, for instance. Leo Castelli

Yam Festival

Watts met the artist and chemist

in 1957 after the latter saw an exhibition of Watts' work and sought his acquaintance; the two would meet for lunch every week, with Kaprow occasionally joining them, for a number of years to discuss art and to plan joint exhibitions. One of the most famous was the proto-fluxus ''Yam Festival'' (1962–63), which used mail-art to build expectations for a month-long series of happenings, performances and exhibitions at Rutgers, New York City and George Segal's farm in

New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...

. Participating artists included

Alison Knowles Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge diffe ...

Ay-O Takao Iijima (born May 19, 1931), better known by his art name Ay-O (靉嘔 ''Ai Ō''), is a Japanese avant-garde visual and performance artist who has been associated with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s. Biography Earl ...

Al Hansen Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen (5 October 1927 – 20 June 1995) was an American artist. He was a member of Fluxus, a movement that originated on an artists' collective around George Maciunas. He was the father of Andy Warhol protégé Bibbe Ha ...

Ray Johnson Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as < ...

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...

, and

Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...

. The events ran parallel to George Maciunas' Fluxus Festivals in Europe (Sept 1962 – early 1963), which had already performed some of Watts' event scores in Düsseldorf, and the two events were officially joined when Maciunas published Brecht's event scores as ''Water Yam'', the first of the Flux boxes to be published. Watts' own flux collection, ''Robert Watts Events'' was published a year later and brought together many of the mail art event scores that had been used to publicise the Yam Festival.

"I consider Yam Lecture a chain of events arranged in such a way that the sequence is quite random, no performance exactly like any other, with changing performers, costumers, actions, sounds, words, images, and so on. ..The audience puts it together the way it wishes or not at all."

"Similar ideas were at work in Yam Festival which George Brecht and I carried out last year. In effect this was a mailing to an audience, sometimes randomly chosen, of an assortment of things. Robert Watts, quoted in the Times Literary Supplement, 1964

One example of Watts' event scores around this point is ''Casual Event''; c:

''Casual Event'' (1962)

—drive car to filling station
—inflate right front tire
—continue to inflate until tire blows out
—change tire*
—drive home —*if car is newer model drive home on blown out tire According to

Henry Flynt Henry Flynt (born 1940 in Greensboro, North Carolina) is an American philosopher, musician, writer, activist, and artist connected to the 1960s New York avant-garde. He coined the term "concept art" in the early 1960s, during which time he was ...

, Maciunas ' eggedWatts not to continue 'Yam' separately from Fluxus. Maciunas was desperate to unite the whole post-Cage movement under his command.'

Fluxus

Watts' friendship with Maciunas was cemented when the latter was confined to a hospital bed throughout May 1963. To cheer him up, Watts sent him ''Hospital Events''. Maciunas enjoyed the piece so much that he published it as an early ''Fluxbox''; many of Watts' contemporary event cards were subsequently included in ''Fluxus 1'', 1963, Maciunas' first year box compiling works by the members of the international avant-garde.

"It must have been Alison Knowles who called me up to say eorge Maciunaswas in bad shape with asthma in an Air Force hospital in Germany and needed help or at least some encouragement. ... I decided to send something for entertainment, so I stuck some pistol caps on the back of old photos from an Italian magazine of WWI vintage. Robert Watts, 1980

Over the years Watts contributed a number of works to Fluxus including a ''Flux Atlas'', a collection of rocks from different countries, and a ''Flux Timekit'', a series of boxes that housed objects that existed in different time scales, such as seeds to be planted, a time-lapsed photo of a speeding bullet and a pocket watch. He also set up ''Implosions Inc.'' with Maciunas to mass-produce novelty items, and helped run the ''Flux Housing Co-Operative'', an artist-run scheme that is held responsible for the rehabilitation and gentrification of SoHo, offering cheap loft spaces to artists throughout the sixties and seventies. Watts himself was the first resident of the first working Flux Co-Op at 80 Wooster Street.

Jonas Mekas Jonas Mekas (; ; December 24, 1922 – January 23, 2019) was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". Mekas's work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals world ...

' cinematheque and Maciunas' apartment were housed in the same building which soon became the 'central Fluxus loft'. He took part in the notorious ''Flux Mass'', and was one of the very few original artists apart from Maciunas himself to have neither distanced himself from the movement, nor to have been expelled.

Posthumous reputation

Referred to as ''the invisible man of Fluxus and Pop'' by the critic Kim Levin, a term later used as the title of a solo posthumous show in Kassel, Watts remains a 'distant, aloof, and enigmatic' figure. In general his reputation has gradually recovered since the late 90s, although not without comments on some of the works' perceived sexism. As individual members of Fluxus have increasingly been singled out for re-appraisals, Watts work has been seen in a number of solo and small group shows across the US and Europe.

'There is something impersonal or phlegmatic in Watts's composition, a deliberately flattened sense of timing. This aspect of his work has not aged as gracefully as have his concerns with commodity and its absurdities' Frances Richard, 2001

His work is held in numerous collections, including The

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

, New York City,

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

, the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...

,Cloud Music
/ref> The

Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. The museum is based in the Art Institute of Chicago Building in Chicago's Grant Park (Chicago), Grant Park. Its collection, stewa ...

, The

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is an List of art museums#North America, art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at ...

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art, modern and contemporary art museum and nonprofit organization located in San Francisco, California. SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art ...

Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill, Minneapolis, Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in ...

, Minneapolis,

Centre Georges Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...

, Paris,

J. Paul Getty Museum The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in Los Angeles, California, United States, housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa. It is operated by the J. Paul Getty Trust, the world's wealthies ...

Kunsthaus Zurich Kunsthaus ( German meaning "art house") may refer to: * Kunsthaus case, 1980s political scandal in Liechtenstein *Kunsthaus Graz * Kunsthaus Tacheles * KunstHausWien * Kunsthaus Zürich See also * Art gallery * Kunsthalle A kunsthalle () is a f ...

, and

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...

, London.Doctor Bob, Flux Med
/ref>

Notes

External links

Cold War Games and Postwar Art / Claudia Mesch
* ttp://www.artpool.hu/Fluxus/Watts.html Flux Med Doctor Bobbr>Robert Watts by Frances Richard
* ttp://navylog.navymemorial.org/watts-robert-6 Robert Watts

Navy Log ''Navy Log'' is an American television drama anthology series created by Samuel Gallu that presented stories from the history of the United States Navy. This series ran on CBS from September 20, 1955, until September 25, 1956. On October 17, 1 ...

entry at the United States Navy Memorial
Finding aid for the Robert Watts papers, 1883-1989, bulk 1940-1988
by Annette Leddy,

Online Archive of California In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity, and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed as "on lin ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Watts, Robert 1923 births 1988 deaths People from Burlington, Iowa Fluxus American conceptual artists Columbia University alumni Rutgers University faculty DuPont Manual High School alumni United States Navy officers United States Navy reservists University of Louisville alumni