Robert Watts and Allan K. Kaprow at Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University - Brief Article

Art in America, March, 2000 by Sid Sachs

The careers of Robert Watts (1923-1988) and Allan Kaprow (b. 1927) seem inexorably linked. Both art-history alumni of Columbia University, the two were young colleagues in the studio-art departments at Rutgers University and its sister school, Douglass College [see A.i.A., Dec. '99]. Both created Abstract-Expressionist paintings and assemblages in the early 1950s and introduced their first Happenings (Kaprow's term) and events (Watts's term) at the end of that decade. In this exhibition, organized by Benjamin Buchloh and Judith Rodenbeck, viewers were able to compare expressionistic early works by each artist before moving on to examples of their mature output.

Until recently, history has been kinder to Kaprow than to Watts. Kaprow, denied tenure at Rutgers in a dispute over a notorious pornographic concrete poem by student Lucas Samaras, went on to teach at the University of California, San Diego, and to promote Happenings internationally. Watts, in contrast, elected to become "the invisible man of Fluxus and Pop," as critic Kim Levin once called him. In 1964, Watts left the Leo Castelli Gallery after one group show--the ultimate bad career move. The visibility of his work was further compromised by his long association with the egalitarian Fluxus movement.

This exhibition provided an important opportunity to consider Watts's oeuvre outside the Fluxus constellation. Dealing more with conceptual than formal issues, his work was relatively anticommercial. Ambivalent about the ascendancy of consumerism, Watts in Addendum to Pop (1964) tried unsuccessfully to copyright the term "Pop art" in order to ban its critical use; at Columbia, 18 photocopies of documents he submitted to the U.S. Patent Office were displayed. Two series of neon-light signatures of famous artists (1963-73) caution against reducing entire careers to mere brand names.

Watts's works are sensuous, ironic, calculated, yet oddly generic; many can be seen as precursors of contemporary practices. His experimentation resulted in early uses of plastics, neon, flocking and incandescent light. His chrome-plated African sculptures and edibles, begun in 1963, predate Koons by decades; his consumer goods displayed on wall shelves now read as commodity sculptures. A row of cast and painted loaves of bread, included in the 1964 Castelli show and reviewed favorably by Donald Judd, may have influenced Judd's own serial sculptures. The clear plastic Feather Dress (1965), strategically outfitted with packets of plumes, recalls the feminist-inflected fashions of Mimi Smith (an early colleague) and Beverly Semmes.

Watts's work offers a critique of the ways that culture denatures nature and commodification spoils culture. He is long overdue for a full retrospective. [This exhibition will appear at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT from Apr. 27 to July 2.]