Robert Watts is an artist best known for his association with Fluxus, a loose international affiliation of visual and performing artists active in the 1960s and 1970s. Early in the 1960s, through his friendships with George Segal and Roy Lichtenstein at Rutgers University, he had also been associated with Pop Art. He shared Pop artists' interests in iconography and the vernacular culture, including food. He shared with Fluxus artists an approach to making "intermedia" art--in this case combining the media of sculpture with photography.
While Pop artists were interested in how consumer objects are represented, advertised, and commodified, Watts more directly appropriated the life-size everyday objects. Beginning in 1965 he made a series of "found objects"--chrome-plated ceramic plates, chocolates in candy boxes, fruits, vegetables, and other foods. Each had a humorous detail that reminded the viewer they were not "real"--such as the green, plaster peas and the photograph affixed to TV Dinner.