Chabet: A Collective Memory
Written by Ringo Bunoan, April 2011.
A lot of the misconceptions about Roberto Chabet’s work, and Filipino conceptual art especially from the
1970s stem from this fact: many of the works no longer exist and were never documented. We only know
about them through stories. We have a rich oral history, but unfortunately, many of these stories remain
within small circles, those who are privileged enough to hear, or perhaps a better term would be those
curious enough to listen.
Chabet, though he is widely known and highly respected in the Philippines, is almost like a secret to the
outside world. Very little has been written about him, no book has ever been published on his work, and
the To Be Continued exhibition, which was just held last January in Singapore was his first exhibition outside
Manila. This can come off as a shock to many people, for how can somebody like Chabet be overlooked by
history? But art history is like that, it is not a democratic field. History is always shaped by the agendas or
frameworks of those who are writing. And for Chabet, he simply did not fit in.
Perhaps it is because Chabet’s works go against common notions or definitions of Philippine art. They have
always been seen as Western, elitist and too cerebral for many. Resistant to any form of institutionalization,
he doesn’t give any public statements, turns down interviews, and prefers his works to stand alone without
any explanations. This ‘refusal to speak’ has led to further confusion, and has even been interpreted as a
form of snobbery or arrogance. Though I see it more as strategic way of distancing oneself from the
operations of the art world, which always finds a way to co-opt alternative practices.
The art market, which completely dominates the scene in Manila is another factor. No one really bought
Chabet’s works, because Filipino collectors only buy paintings, in the most traditional sense. Chabet’s works
have been described as anti-museum because they are not collectible. As with a lot of conceptual artists, he
often uses materials, which are makeshift and ephemeral, they were never meant to be permanent. He has
always said that art is for the moment, after it becomes memory. But ‘memory is sometimes hard to
remember’. And this is another challenge, because how do we really archive something that is so fleeting and
temporary?
When I started working for Asia Art Archive in 2007, I knew then that I had to start with Chabet. I still
remember that day when we had lunch with Joy Dayrit. It was the starting point of all my research. Joy
passed on to me 9 albums of photographs of Chabet’s exhibitions and those he curated, and a folder of his
writings. I knew right away how precious they were, for they were the pictures and words that were missing
from our books on Philippine art history.
Within a year, we were able to gather over 8000 documents and digitized them, and made copies for AAA
and the Lopez Memorial Museum. Many of the materials came from Chabet, but many were also sourced
from his friends, students, galleries he worked with, collectors, museums, and other institutions. They
included photographs, slides, clippings, notes about his works, letters, and material about the numerous
exhibitions he curated of other artists.
A few months after we launched The Chabet Archive in 2009, a massive typhoon hit Manila. I said during the
launch that it was just the beginning. And true enough, a few days after the waters subsided I went to
Chabet’s house and saw thousands more of works, documents, and books, which were washed up by the
flood. Chabet was ready to lose everything at that time; he thought it would be a resonant exit. He likes the
idea of spending his last years quietly, just enjoying himself, by himself. But I betrayed him. Without his
asking, I went there everyday for weeks trying to save what I could. Still unfinished, our partial inventory has
registered already over 12,000 items.
Archiving is a dynamic process, not just a systematic method of listing and shelving objects. Beneath the
veneer of structure, order and repetition, are cracks that can offer a re-reading of the subject. When I started
reconstructing his unrealized works for the Archiving Roberto Chabet exhibition, I was really driven by this
curiosity to see what they would look like, and what it is like to actually experience them. For the To Be
Continued exhibition, nearly all of the works, except for one, were reconstructions, based on existing
documentation and memories of Chabet and those who saw the ‘original’ works and/or participated in their
creation. Re-making them is a kind of restoration, a way of filling in the gaps.
It is also an alternative way of writing history based on a collective memoir and plurality of voices. But equally
important is that is a continuation of a dialogue with him and his works. An artwork is never really finished as
much as an archive is never really complete.
About Roberto Chabet
Roberto Chabet is widely acknowledged as the father of Philippine conceptual art and arguably the most
influential contemporary Filipino artist, curator and teacher in Manila. He is known for his experimental
works, ranging from paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations made out of mostly ordinary
and found material. Breaking away from the rigid formalisms of Modernism, Chabet insists on a more
inclusive approach to art, a search for the sublime not just in abstract ideas but also in the immediacy of the
quotidian and the commonplace. In his works, abstraction and the everyday collide, creating spaces for new
meanings.
Chabet was born in 1937 and passed away in 2013 in Manila. He graduated with a degree in Architecture
from the University of Sto. Tomas in 1961, the year he also had his first solo exhibition. He is the founding
Museum Director of The Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) where he initiated the Thirteen Artist Award
in 1970, an award that supports young artists whose works show “recentness and a turning away from the
past”. It remains the most prestigious recognition to be given by a national institution to young Filipino visual
artists. After his brief tenure at the CCP, Chabet led the seminal alternative artist group Shop 6, and taught
for over thirty years at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts and at key artist-run spaces in
Manila. Since the 70s, Chabet has been curating landmark exhibitions of vanguard works by young and
emerging Filipino artists. He is the recipient of the JD Rockefeller III Fund Grant (1967- 1968), the Republic
Cultural Heritage Award (1972), the Araw ng Maynila Award for the Visual Arts (1972), and the CCP
Centennial Award of Honors for the Arts (1998).
In 2009, Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong and the Lopez Memorial Museum in the Philippines colaunched TheChabet Archive, a milestone research and digitization project covering fifty years of the artist’s
work, that provides the inspiration for the Chabet: 50 Years series of exhibitions.
About the author
Ringo Bunoan is an artist, curator and researcher based in Manila, Philippines. She received her BFA in Art
History from the University of the Philippines in 1997, and taught in the UP College of Fine Arts from 1997 –
1998. From 1999 – 2004, she led Big Sky Mind, an independent artist-run space that supported progressive
works by contemporary visual artists, filmmakers, writers, and musicians. Her works have been shown in
galleries, museums and alternative art spaces in Manila, across Asia and the Pacific and USA. In 2003, she
received the Thirteen Artist Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines and in 2007 the Silverlens
Foundation Completion Grant. Since 2007, she has been working as the Researcher for the Philippines for
Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong and initiated special research projects on artist-run spaces in Manila and
Roberto Chabet. She recently co-founded King Kong Art Projects Unlimited in Manila.