Jimmy Roberts’ playful and yet profound transgression and progression of genres, the way he overlaps two- and three dimensional structures that permeate the most diverse forms of media, and his critical approach to the performative elements inherent even in the differing look and feel of collages – all these were qualities that prompted the jury to award Jimmy Roberts the 2009 Follow Fluxus scholarship bestowed by the Nassau Kunstverein and Wiesbaden as State Capital of Hessen.

Each of his images displays an object that is then developed into a spatial sculpture. Here, Roberts systematically explores its relationship to the human body. In his performance, inspired by Yoko Ono’s CUT PIECE, he quite literally translates the action of touch and being touched into action, including both himself and the viewer(s). As Jimmy Roberts interprets the action, his upper body is not covered with clothes but gradually surrounded with duct tape. With each piece of tape the audience pulls off him, the artist successively exposes himself while losing pieces that quite literally and figuratively he has been stuck with. At the same time, each stripped-off strip of tape describes sequences of the press reviews of Ono’s performance 1966 in London.

“He transforms the principle of collage and decollage with wit, precision, elegance and the opportunities afforded by a contemporary visual idiom, NKV director Elke Gruhn explains, “this convinced the jury to elect him as the second Follow Fluxus – After Fluxus laureate of the NKV and the State Capital of Wiesbaden”.

This is the area where the jury believes he advances George Maciunas’ ideas. Vital for the jury’s decision was not that Roberts sees himself the way the Fluxus movement historically viewed itself, but rather that he created artworks in the vital spirit of Fluxus that refuse to be strictly pigeonholed.