Robert Watts: Photography into Sculpture and Other Works

by Donald Goddard

In 1987, a year before he died, Robert Watts made 45 Cal. Bullet Entering Light Bulb, in which a bullet, seemingly having traveled from the right nearly touches a light bulb marked by fissures of breaking. It is one of the few works of Watts' in which the objects are real--a bullet and a light bulb. Both retain their integrity of form--their hard exteriors--in very close proximity, though it seems evident (from the title and experience) that the bulb will be imminently destroyed, disintegrated, by the bullet.

Then there is something without form that may be within everything. In 1975 Watts photographed some friends visiting his house but the photographs weren't at all what he expected. The people show up only vaguely and occasionally, replaced by abstract flares of light and areas of dark. Of course, we don't have to believe Watts' story abut the eight small photos that make up the work (Topaz) along with his explanatory text in which he speculates about psychic energy, but we do have to consider it, which is all we can do with any work of art.

There are other anomalous conditions and phenomena, beyond reach, or perhaps beyond human intervention. Clouds appear in Watts' movie fragments, often on a split screen moving up on one side and down on the other, creating shapes that then disappear. The wind blows clouds, flowers, water, and grass. A naked woman moves under a sheet of plastic, as though that might give her a more definitive sense of reality. It is impossible to know the wholeness of these things. The Portrait Dress of vinyl, cellophane, thread, and polyester has sewn into it black and white photos of teeth, hands, nipples, eyelashes, etc., parts that incompletely reconstitute the female body in a garment that then covers much of the body of a real woman. Three Clouds correlates clouds, human skin, and white plexiglass by constituting them as cubes mounted on plastic laminate pedestals. Clouds are far away and unpredictable; now they are not. Women are out of reach; now one can focus on some Psalter characteristics. A piece not in this show calls upon the clouds and their movements to make music. The music is there. It just needs to be realized. A piece that is in this show, Girl with a Mole That Lights Up, wanly focuses attention away from the larger field of sexuality.