COMMEMORATIVE FBI MOST WANTED

Robert Watts was an experimental artist and founding member of Fluxus, an international network of anti-establishment artists who embraced the banal, heralded the unconventional, challenged authority, and rejected the distinction between high and low art. As a result, he played a large role in re-shaping art-making techniques and expanding the field of acceptable media. For example, in 1961, he designed SAFEPOST / K.u.K. FELDPOST / JOCKPOST [W.C. FIELDS] (see MMA 2018.142.1). In so doing, he became one of the first artists to create a sheet of postage stamps within a fine arts context. To display these and other designs, he "borrowed" regulation stamp machines and set them up in galleries around New York City. By selling a single sheet for a dime, Watts encouraged audience participation as well as facilitated a playful protest against the United States government. The act of creating his own stamps was subversive for it usurped the government’s official role as official stamp maker; and, if one of these stamps was affixed to a letter, it violated counterfeit laws, challenging the regulatory function of the Postal Service.


Watts also made his stamps available for distribution through IMPLOSiONS, Inc., a novelty company established with George Maciunas and Herman Fine. The company, founded as a cash generating arm of Fluxus, was designed to sell reasonably priced mass produced items that could be distributed outside of the gallery, merging art and life. While the business did not achieve many of its production goals, one item it did realize was the stick-on temporary tattoo, a commodity that failed in its own era but came into fashion thirty years later.