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Art on Art

May 3, 2006- August 18, 2006

Robert Watts

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

535 W 22nd St

Robert Watts (1923–1988) was one of the least understood but most influential artists of his time. His ideas were embraced by colleagues, students, and subsequent generations of artists including Allan Kaprow and George Brecht in the 1950s, George Maciunas and Al Hansen in the 1960s, and Allan McCollum and Sherrie Levine in the last decades of his life. His chromed objects of the early 1960s uncannily foreshadowed Jeff Koons’s stainless-steel sculptures and in his neon and found-object works of the 1960s and 1970s one recognizes the roots of works by a range of contemporary artists from Mike Kelley to Maurizio Cattalan.

Throughout his artistic career, which encompassed every major art movement of his time from Neo Dada and early Pop to Conceptual Art and Post Modernism, Watts was a virtuoso of nontraditional materials. In his use of ready-made objects, jokes, puns, and cast body parts, and his lifelong determination to remain at the edges of the mainstream, Watts personified the Duchampian legacy. Despite his many important exhibitions, prestigious academic positions, grants, fellowships and other accolades, he remained an enigmatic figure who, as Benjamin H.D. Buchloh writes, “seems to have followed Marcel Duchamp’s prognosis that the artist of the future ‘. . . would have to work underground’.”

Even as Watts continued to create and exhibit exquisitely crafted objects, he remained committed to the critique of art as a commodity. Our second one-person show of works by the artist features more than twenty-five pieces in a variety of media, dating from the 1960s through the 1980s, that comment on art history, the art-making process, and the “branding” of artistic identity.

A centerpiece of the exhibition is Addendum To Pop, which consists of sixty documents that Watts obtained in 1964 from the U.S. Patent Office in an attempt to copyright the term “Pop Art.” First exhibited in 1971 at the Apple Gallery in New York, the installation includes texts by the artist and by Lawrence Alloway, the British art historian credited with coining the term in the late 1950s.

Among the other works on view are chromed cast reproductions of African tribal sculptures from the series “New Light on West Africa,” first exhibited in New York in 1976 at the René Block Gallery; selections from the 1983 series “Tree Wind Paintings,”made on targets and other papers by attaching colored markers to dangling tree limbs; and neon sculptures depicting the signatures of famous artists.

Born in 1923 in Burlington, Iowa, Robert Watts received a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Louisville and served as an engineer in the US Navy during W.W.II. He attended the Arts Students League in New York in the late 1940s and earned a Masters degree in Art History from Columbia in 1951.

During his lifetime Watts participated in numerous landmark shows including, among others, Assemblage (1961), The Machine (1968), Information (1970) and Photography into Sculpture (1970) at MoMA, Art in Motion (1961) at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, documenta 5 (1972), and Blam: The Explosion of Pop at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1984). He exhibited internationally at such venues as Galeria Christian Stein, Turin; Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne; Sonnabend Gallery, Paris; and the Castelli, Bianchini, Dwan, Janis and René Block galleries in New York.

Posthumous one- and two-person shows have included Robert Watts at the Castelli Gallery (1990), Robert Watts: l’objet photographique et autres oeuvres at Galerie Zabriskie, Paris (1990), Robert Watts: The Invisible Man of Pop and Fluxus at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel (1999), Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts: Experiments in the Everyday at the Miriam and Ira Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University and the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, and Robert Watts: Photography into Sculpture at this gallery in 2001. His work has been featured in such major international surveys as Image World at the Whitney (1989), In the Spirit of Fluxus at the Walker Art Center (1993), Les Années Pop at the Pompidou in Paris (2001), Open Ends, at MoMA (2001), Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and the Tate Liverpool (2002-2003), and The Last Picture Show at the Walker Art Center (2004).

Robert Watts is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and many other major institutions.

The exhibition was conceived by and has been organized in collaboration with the artist Larry Miller, a friend and colleague of the artist with extensive knowledge of his work and an executor of the Robert Watts Estate.

Books and DVDs related to artists in this show

Location   Gallery Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects Address 535 W 22nd St, 6th Fl New York (Chelsea) NY, 10011 United States Phone 212-255-8450 Fax 212-414-8744 Hours Tue-Sat 10-6 Nearby: All 10 galleries at 535 W 22nd St

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