Wallace Berman and Robert Watts
Arranged Marriage
New York City, USA: Roth Horowitz, 1999
40 pp., 19.2 x 26 cm., spiral bound
Edition of 500
Arranged Marriage is often referred to as an artists' book, despite the fact that the artists - Watts and Berman - had been dead for 11 and 23 years, respectively, at the time of publication. The book was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that ran from the 28th October to the 18th of December, 1999, at the Andrew Roth Gallery.
The inventive catalogue format includes 2 tipped-in fold-outs and an invitation card bound-in at the front. Images from the exhibition are accompanied by an essay from Fluxus historian Simon Anderson, associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of “Living in Multiple Dimensions: George Brecht and Robert Watts 1953-1963,” in Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963 (1999) and “Fluxus Publicus” in In the Spirit of Fluxus (1993).
Both Berman and Watts participated in Pop Art exhibitions, but produced work that fell outside the genre's purview.
Critic Kim Levin called Bob Watts "the invisible man of Fluxus and Pop”. He participated in Allan Kaprow’s Happenings and co-produced the Yam Festival with George Brecht, a collaborative performance predating similar Fluxus activities.
Wallace Berman has been called the "father" of assemblage art and is known for creating the artists' periodical Semina. He had a small role in Dennis Hopper's film Easy Rider, and appears in the Peter Blake collage for the cover of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He died in 1976, on his fiftieth birthday.
