Watts (Robert) papers, 1883-1989 (bulk 1940-1988), bulk 1940-1988

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Summary

Title:
Robert Watts papers
Dates:
1883-1989 (bulk 1940-1988), bulk 1940-1988
Creators:
Maciunas, George, 1931-1978, Ricke, Rolfe, Silverman, Gilbert, Watts, Robert, 1923-1988, Conz, Francesco, 1935-, Brown, Jean, 1911-1994, Brecht, George, and Kaprow, Allan
Abstract:
American artist of mixed media, sculpture, and assemblage, best known as a founding member of Fluxus. The archive consists of correspondence, manuscripts, personal documents, and many photographs and slides documenting Watts' work and affiliations with artists. Also included are three works of art.
Extent:
36.5 Linear Feet (76 boxes, 9 flat file folders)
Language:
English .
Preferred citation:

Robert Watts papers, 1883-1989, bulk 1940-1988, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2006.M.27

http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2006m27

Background

Scope and content:

The collection documents Robert Watts' development as an artist and art professor, with ample evidence of his relationship with Fluxus colleagues, dealers and friends. Watts' Iowa family background is presented in photographs, correspondence, family genealogies, health histories, legal and financial papers, and clippings dating back to the 1880s; together with report cards and yearbooks, these offer a relatively clear picture of the artist's midwestern roots. Photographs portray his subsequent years in the service and in New York while a student at Columbia, with summers on Monhegan Island, while graduate school term papers and his Master's thesis on Alaskan masks reveal his early interest in artifacts.

Academic files convey Watts' career with nearly annual grant applications and project proposals. Professional correspondence is mainly between Watts and his dealers, including Francesco Conz and Rolfe Ricke, along with certain curators and collectors, such as Gilbert Silverman and Jean Brown. Personal correspondence, though containing photocopies of cards and letters from George Brecht and George Maciunas and originals from Dick Higgins, is relatively scant.

Series IV, Work files is the core of the archive, containing hundreds of drawings for completed and unrealized projects, scripts or scores, and certain completed objects such as the stamps, letterheads, and laminations. FluxMed (1987), Watts' medical graphics based on 19th century French engravings, is present in various stages of its creation. The greater portion of this series consists of source material, including postcards, clippings, and brochures for various electronic or mechanical devices that inspired Watts and that are accompanied in some cases by drawings or calculations regarding their adaptation to Watts' projects.

Series V, Photographs and slides contains fourteen photograph albums that Watts assembled. A unique record of the artist's intermingled life and art, they are arranged more thematically than chronologically. Some of these images also appear in the photograph files, including numerous images of Pamela Kraft, Watts' longtime partner and model.

Series VII, Printed matter contains nine flat files, mostly of Fluxus posters with striking graphics and abundant information on events, artists, and ideas. Also included is a comprehensive collection of clippings containing reviews or articles about Watts or his associates.

Series X, Audio visual contains all the films Watts made along with the sound tracks or music that accompanied them.

Three art objects are included in the collection.

Boxes 2, 3, 4, and 7 are sealed, pending the Estate's further consideration.

Numbers in brackets within folder entries were assigned by the Estate.

Biographical / historical:

Robert Watts, born in 1923, spent his childhood and adolescence in Iowa and Louisville, Kentucky. The son of a mechanical engineer, Watts also earned an engineering degree, but after serving in World War II, went on to study art history at Columbia University. His emphasis was the study of ancient art and architecture in the Americas and Australia; his Master's thesis was on the masks of the Alaskan Eskimo (M.A. 1951).

For several years Watts worked as an abstract expressionist painter while teaching in the engineering department at Rutgers University. By the late 1950s he had moved to the art department and had also begun to employ his engineering training in his art, initially making boxes with electro-mechanical circuitry. Rutgers colleague Allan Kaprow, sculptor-chemist George Brecht, and Watts together wrote a proposal for an experimental laboratory for multi-media art entitled "Project in Multiple Dimensions" (1957-1958). Though never funded, this proposal articulated new assumptions about art in its relation to the everyday and to increasingly accessible media technologies, soon to find expression in the happenings, events, and installations of the 1960s, and eventually in the formation of Fluxus and Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).

The everyday objects Watts reinvented as artifacts (cartons of eggs, stamps, floor mops) associated him with Pop Art, and his pieces appeared in the landmark 1963 Bianchini Supermarket Show. Philosophically, however, he was most allied with Fluxus, of which he was a founding and lifelong member. Persistently seeking ways to infiltrate commodity culture with art, Watts de-emphasized himself as creator while brilliantly illuminating infrastructural systems such as the U.S. postal service, mint, patent office or F.B.I. He worked in a wide range of novel media, including neon, laminates, Polaroid photography, video, film, sound, and light. While his studies in ancient art inform much of his work indirectly, they most distinctly appear in the African statues made of chrome. He collaborated with Fluxus associates on many events, workshops and festivals, including Yam Festival (1963) and FluxYear/Gemini (1974; 1978). In 1967, Watts and George Maciunas worked with Herman Fine to create a company called Implosions for producing and distributing ironic anti-commodities, such as disfiguring masks or transparent plastic dresses.

As an art professor, Watts was equally ingenious, establishing an Experimental Workshop at Rutgers that he took to the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1968. Believing that approaches to teaching art had to be radically changed, Watts encouraged a collaborative and spontaneous approach to creating multi-media events, some featuring recurring characters in Watts' work, like the Fur Family. In 1970 he co-edited an anthology, Proposals for Art Education.

Though most often exhibited in group shows, Watts had significant solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art and Rene Block Gallery in New York, the Ricke Gallery in Kassel, and at Multhipla and Francesco Conz Gallery in Milan. Since his death in 1988, Watts' prescience as an artist has been increasingly recognized, most influentially in a 1990 show at Leo Castelli Gallery, in Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts (1999) and in Off-Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-garde (1999).

Acquisition information:
Acquired in 2006 from the Robert Watts Estate.
Processing information:

Lora Chin did the preliminary processing of the collection, and Annette Leddy further processed and arranged it.

Processed by Lora Chin and Annette Leddy. Original inventory numbers assigned by the Estate have been retained.

Arrangement:

Arranged in eleven series: Series I. Personal, 1889-1989; Series II. Academic files, 1949-1988; Series III. Correspondence, 1960-1988; Series IV. Work files, 1939-1988; Series V. Photographs and slides, 1937-1988; Series VI. Other artists' files, 1957-1989; Series VII. Printed matter, 1883-1988; Series VIII. Books, 1940-1975; Series IX. Serials, 1961-1979; Series X. Audiovisual, 1957-1987; Series XI. Additions, 1962-1987.

Physical location:
Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the catalog record for this collection. Click here for the access policy.
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

About this collection guide

Collection Guide Author:
Annette Leddy
Date Encoded:
This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2024-12-04 09:32:00 -0800 .

Access and use

Restrictions:

Open for use by qualified researchers, with the exception of unreformatted audiovisual material. Access restricted for Boxes 2, 3, 4, and 7 (boxes sealed) pending the estate's further consideration.

Terms of access:

Contact Library Reproductions and Permissions.

Preferred citation:

Robert Watts papers, 1883-1989, bulk 1940-1988, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2006.M.27

http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2006m27

Location of this collection:
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, CA 90049-1688, US
Contact:
(310) 440-7390
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