Initiated in 2008 by Ringo Bunoan, AAA Researcher for The Philippines, 'The Chabet Archive' has compiled and digitized thousands of materials donated by Chabet, various institutions, galleries, collectors, and friends of the artist. The digital files will be part of AAA’s Special Collection in Hong Kong and will also be available to local researchers in The Philippines for consultation through the Lopez Memorial Museum.

Introduction of The Chabet Archive: A Conversation

Roberto Chabet's Slideshow

Summary of Inventory (as of 28 July 2009)

Roberto Chabet's profile

Acknowledgments


Introduction
The Chabet Archive: A Conversation
by Ringo Bunoan

After more than a year of research, I am proud to present The Roberto Chabet Archive, a milestone project which has brought together and digitized over 8,000 documents – photographs, notes, letters, sketches, catalogues, brochures, invitations, videos, and clippings – covering nearly fifty years of work by the Philippines’ foremost conceptual artist. From his first solo exhibition at the Luz Gallery in 1961 to his most recent exhibition at Magnet Gallery in April 2009, the Chabet Archive is an unprecedented mapping of the artist’s body of work and his unparalleled contributions to Philippine art.

In the beginning, Chabet was unsurprisingly hesitant because archiving is a long and tedious process compelling us to summon forth old, distant memories, some of which we may have already totally forgotten and maybe some we would prefer to forget. Little by little though, he started to give me his albums of pictures for scanning. These albums were like portals back into time, I am completely fascinated by them. Instantly I knew how precious they were as they were the pictures that were missing from our art history books.

All these old snapshots are of another era – one which I was too young to experience and was only witnessing through pictures – the ‘60s and the early ‘70s, the time of the Luz Gallery, the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) and Shop 6; the ‘80s and early ‘90s at UP, galleries like Sining Kamalig, Brix, Pinaglabanan, Finale at Sunvar, and West. In one of the albums there is a picture of Chabet with his students at that time – Bert Antonio, Nilo Ilarde and Gerry Tan – outside West Gallery on West Avenue. It looked so different then, almost idyllic. Maybe it was the light of the old photographs.

Some of the albums had more recent pictures, exhibitions that I saw and was a part of. This was during the ‘90s at the SM Megamall Art Center and the alternative artist-run spaces of the late ‘90s to the present day. There were also shows at CCP and West. I learned that the first Chabet exhibition I saw at West was called ‘Other Planets’ in 1993. I was a freshman then at the UP College of Fine Arts. When I arrived, the place was packed. The gallery was on the ground floor then and it was so full of people. Everyone was talking, drinking, laughing. I remember the works were mostly black plywood panels on the walls. I distinctly recall the red neon because it was the only colour in the whole show. There was also a red crowbar. I don’t remember the other details, just the feeling, like a crack in the night.

Images and objects would re-appear throughout the years – the plywood, the neon, the shelves with their metal brackets, the crowbar, the boat, the parachute, the drum, the harmonica, the tables, the mirrors, the cane, the clipboards, the maps – Chabet’s inventory of ‘anxious’ objects waiting to collide. Ronald Achacoso, one of Chabet’s former students at UP, summed it up in the recent notes he wrote for Chabet’s exhibition earlier this year :

“the familiar array of objects and assemblages that make up Chabet’s terse but distinct visual language…act as cryptic signposts that cross reference the diverse elements and cue us into the quiet poetry of his perplexing constructs and understated romanticist streak behind the conceptualist trappings. An alchemical synthesis of myth, memory, history from which we can behold the magnificent and the marvellous veiled behind the humdrum of everyday life.”

Chabet also gave me his notes to his exhibitions and those that he curated. His writing was lucid, his choice of words resonant, metaphorical, poetic, not unlike his manner of working with space, objects and images. He curated hundreds of exhibitions for various galleries and alternative spaces and wrote numerous press releases and texts for other artists. In reality he was single-handedly the biggest promoter of young, vanguard art.

Amongst these pictures and documents were some letters. I felt like a voyeur reading them. Some were official correspondences between Chabet and CCP; some were personal letters from Fernando Zobel and Arturo Luz, and from his students Francesca Enriquez and Gerry Tan. There was also a letter from Manuel Ocampo which came with a set of email messages, the content of which was quite sensitive, involving other people. Upon Manuel’s request, these emails were the only materials which I did not include in the Archive.

At 72 years old, Chabet’s memory remains sharp and we would spend hours over lunch or coffee reminiscing, trying to recall past works, people, places, dates, and exhibitions. Other friends would join us too and there was always a lot of laughter, it didn’t seem like work at all :) .

Noted Filipino art critic, Alice Guillermo, wrote that Roberto Chabet’s works carry their own memories, and he is only their custodian. Now that I am creating his archive, I take on the pleasure and privilege of recording and passing on of his memories, his story. The Chabet Archive is not the finale of this project, rather a starting point for further dialogue and sharing.

*****

I would like to thank Roberto Chabet for trusting me with his work, and AAA and the Lopez Memorial Museum for believing in this project. I would also like to thank Gail Vicente who was extremely helpful in putting together the material. With Chabet, there was always a collective spirit and so this research would also not have been possible without the help of the people close to him – Joy Dayrit, Nilo Ilarde, Gerry Tan, Juni Salvador, Yolanda Johnson, Agnes Arellano, Fernando Modesto, Daisy Langenegger, Vita Sarenas and Sylvia Gascon, Pardo De Leon, Soler, Ronald Achacoso, Mm Yu, Poklong Anading, and many others who shared with me their stories, pictures and memories of Chabet.

I am also grateful to the museums, galleries, foundations, and libraries who gave me access to their records – the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Ateneo Art Gallery, Finale Art File, Galleria Duemila, BPI Foundation, UPCFA, UP Main Library, Businessworld – and the private collectors who welcomed me into their homes and allowed me to document their works of Roberto Chabet.

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Roberto Chabet's profile

Roberto Chabet (b.1937) is a pioneering Filipino conceptual artist whose works are a result of the process of unravelling fixed notions about art and meaning. His drawings, collages, sculptures and installations, questioning modernity, are highly allegorical. They are meditations on space, the transitory nature of commonplace objects and the collisions that occur with their displacement.

Chabet studied Architecture at the University of Santo Tomas where he graduated in 1961. He had his first solo exhibition at the Luz Gallery in the same year. He was the founding Museum Director of the CCP from 1967-1970 where he initiated the first Thirteen Artists Awards, giving recognition to young artists whose works ‘show a recentness, a turning away from the past and familiar modes of art-making’. He led the 1970s conceptual art group Shop 6 and taught for over thirty years at the UP College of Fine Arts, where he espoused a kind of practice that gave precedence to idea over form. Since the 1970s, he has also been organizing landmark exhibitions featuring vanguard works by young artists, many of whom are among the most active and innovative artists in Manila today. He is the recipient of the 1972 Republic Cultural Heritage Award, the 1972 Araw ng Maynila Award for the Visual Arts and the 1998 Centennial Honor for the Arts.

For Roberto Chabet's selected bio, please click here.

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Acknowledgements