In Case The Grass Fails

A small strange item of wooden furniture with low elegantly flowing legs and a fold-up lid is placed into the exhibition gallery. It is clearly no longer suited for sitting on, and a neon tube mounted onto it floods regular green light over the scene. It frames the original seat and a round bowl in the center. This inserted bowl serves as a galvanized plant pot for a small piece of grass. Here, US American artist Robert Watts grows grass for us in the museum. There is a black-and-white photograph of a piece of lawn on the lid. Perhaps intended in the sense of the title of this work—In Case the Grass Fails. Then we would still have the green light and this photograph. Robert Watts worked with a large range of very different materials. Here he combined light, photography, earth, grass, and a cast-off item of furniture to create a work of art. This is a way of working he used in many of his works. Playfully, he creates impossible objects. His choice of objects for his material collages—in this case an old toilet chair—refuses any kind of plausible narration. Our imagination is challenged, and at the same time these objects are so absurd as to refute any narrative structure. Watts trained as an engineer, which proved to be useful for the technical side of his designs and creative ideas. The pleasure Watts took in experimental combinations of film, photography, text, objects, and performance led to many new and different groups of works. He saw art as a great experiment, finding the same drive to question concepts of art in the work of Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Nam June Paik, and other Fluxus artists. As a co-founder of the legendary Yam Festival, Robert Watts became a key figure in the Fluxus movement. He himself said: "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."