Robert Watts (artist)

Lantern Event; an aspect of Yam Festival, 1962, a mail art piece by Robert Watts and George Brecht; the coloured paper scores are by Watts.

Watts met the artist and chemist George Brecht in 1957 after the latter saw an exhibition of Watts' work and sought his acquaintance;[9] 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 (1962–3), 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. Participating artists included Alison Knowles, Ay-O, Al Hansen, Ray Johnson, John Cage, and Dick Higgins. 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.[10]

"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 'structure' is such that it is very flexible (nearly non-existent) and permits inclusion of anything one wished to do and any possible future changes. It is a loose and open thing. 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. Some were event cards similar to the above; others were objects, food, pencils, soap, photos, actions, words, facts, statements, declarations, puzzles, etc. Certain ones were by subscription. One might say this way of working is a way or manner of calling attention to what one wishes to talk about; or it is a way of talking about it. Or it is a way to hold up for scrutiny a range of material that ordinarily is not so directly useful for art or has not yet been so considered." Robert Watts, quoted in the Times Literary Supplement, 1964[8]

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

—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, Maciunas '[begged] Watts not to continue 'Yam' separately from Fluxus. Maciunas was desperate to unite the whole post-Cage movement under his command.'[11]

A number of versions of the Flux Timekit, 1967, by Robert Watts, collecting together objects that exist in different time scales.

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 (see ).[12] 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.[8]

"It must have been Alison Knowles who called me up to say [George Maciunas] was 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. I remember there was a photo of a priest blessing a propeller of an Italian Air Force fighter plane. The idea was to put the photo on an anvil and hit the front with a hammer until all the caps exploded. Later GM said he got a big kick out of this procedure, especially since after he exploded all the caps, he set up the photos' remains for the locals to continue the destruction. ... he said the people beat the shit out of those photos until there was nothing left but fuzz." Robert Watts, 1980[13]

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.[14] 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.[15] Watts himself was the first resident of the first working Flux Co-Op at 80 Wooster Street.[16] Jonas Mekas' cinematheque and Maciunas' apartment were housed in the same building which soon became the 'central Fluxus loft'.[17] 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.