The Philippine Online Chronicles

One arrives at the show that marks Pablo Gallery’s 1^st anniversary at Fort Bonifacio Global City wondering what the title of the show exactly is. A glance at the guestbook whose blanks are filled out by visitors w/ their contact information provides a clue: All the heading indicates are the names of the exhibiting artists: Roberto Chabet, Gerardo Tan, and Nilo Ilarde. At this point, one realizes that the show doesn’t lack a title; the names of the artists constitute the title themselves, such that “Roberto Chabet, Gerardo Tan, Nilo Ilarde” are not so much the names of the exhibiting artists but, more importantly, the names of the exhibited artists instead.

The lack of curatorial notes cannot be more telling. These notes, after all, will have to conceptually tie together the objects hanging inside the space—and where the objects inside the space no longer matter, neither will the curatorial notes. Not that curatorial notes really don’t matter; they matter, in fact, so much that even the notes’ absence in this case contributes to the show’s signifying process, their dematerialization (literally, no sheet of paper is available inside the gallery from w/c the curatorial notes may be read) deliberately pointing toward the dematerialization of every artwork on display, dematerialization being the kernel of every conceptualist’s praxis. If only for that reason, this write-up chooses not to put up any picture of any of the objects that can be seen inside the gallery.

This cannot help but be mentioned: the three artists have—despite the visceral physicality of their recent solo shows—been identified as belonging to the pedigree of that strange, amorphous thing known as Philippine conceptualism. Given that Ilarde and Tan are reputed to have been students of the much older Chabet—credited by many to be a pioneering, if not the country’s foremost, conceptualist—more malicious minds can view the exhibition as a kind of test of who between the two is the more deserving inheritor of the master’s mantle. Less malicious minds can view the show simply as attestation of the three’s respective (and of course hard-earned) places in Philippine art history—Chabet especially, having mentored, supported, and inspired many (if not most) of our young crop of artistic luminaries reaping recognition locally and abroad—for having consummately furthered the cause of conceptualism and the strategies that have been made available by and since modernism. Critical and level-headed minds, however, should acknowledge that malice might deliberately be what fuels the machinery of this exhibition, malice can be read as part of the show’s brilliantly implicit framework: That the three are exhibited rather than merely exhibiting puts to the test the very attestation that Roberto Chabet, Nilo Ilarde, and Gerardo Tan have reached a spectacular highpoint not only in their careers but in the history of Philippine art at large, and the narrative intrigue that forms the foundation of this malice can only be proof of and arrow toward this aforementioned highpoint: “the cost of celebrity,” as some have put it. Clever conceptualists that they are, the three have made a spectacle out of their own spectacular status in the context of Philippine art.

Not that the show is an exercise in egomania—not at all—altho one can posit just as productively that as an exercise in egomania the show only further highlights how the ego is socially constructed and ideologically mediated. Ultimately, it is by putting artwork on a pedestal that one grants the artist the prestige of being creator. The show’s reversal—putting the artists themselves on the pedestals—confers on them the non-prestige of being what has been created rather than being who creates: art-making, in the end, is a process of mythologizing—and conceptualism has sought primarily to boldly unmask and demystify this fact. While still there are actual, physical objects inside the gallery—small assemblages by Ilarde, modestly sized collages by Tan, meager but elegantly framed paintings by Chabet—these only point back to the artists who have made them: the assemblages, after all, are nothing we haven’t seen before from Ilarde’s existing oeuvre (altho one should note that the materials he uses in these assemblages are salvaged materials from his 1^st one-man show), the collages are nothing we haven’t seen before from Tan’s corpus of existing work either (altho one should also note that these works are likely to be extensions of an ongoing—possibly endless—series of reproductions of his own reproductions), and the paintings—while uncharacteristic of Chabet’s usually larger (not only in scale but in scope) color-fields—are priced the way his work is normally priced: exorbitant, but only seemingly so.

For how can the prices not skyrocket if a buyer or a collector pays not so much for the objects but the mythologized personalities behind the objects? (The metonym most of us take for granted as mere idiom must be brought up here, having acquired newfound literality: Just as one, for example, reads Shakespeare and not the books penned by Shakespeare, one also never says, “I own a work by Chabet.” Instead, one need only say, “I own a Chabet.”) That raised, one should keep in mind that this is no ordinary show that can take place in just any space or any gallery at just any time: “Roberto Chabet, Gerardo Tan, Nilo Ilarde” is an exhibition intended specifically for the 1^st anniversary—the glorification—of a gallery, thereby calling attention to the gallery system on w/c many artists depend, even those of Chabet’s, Ilarde’s, and Tan’s stature. Not just any gallery, mind you, but one whose own name capitalizes on and exploits the potential of personality and the process of mythologizing: Pablo. On the one hand, the name can be treated as an allusion to Pablo Picasso, the Spanish artist whose enduring work in cubism has turned him into the Modernist canon’s poster-boy of innovation. For the end of arriving at a chic gallery name—his celebrity status can only be heightened by dropping the surname, the simpler “Pablo” being in league w/ single-name brands of celebrity like Madonna, Bono, Moby, Beck, even Kyla. On the other hand, “Pablo” as a name in general has also received much ridicule on the streets of Manila, serving as a pun for the Taglish “pa-blow,” which is shorthand for asking someone to give one a blowjob. An oral pump of air that inflates the ego.

Having brought attention to the gallery, the show bravely shows that it (the gallery) is no mere receptacle for containing and displaying artworks, that it is far from being a white cube of immaculate transparency. Apart from being a mechanism of exclusion—a gatekeeper that confers upon a work its quality or status of art-ness—it in itself is a mechanism of creation: it has the power to make a name out of a person, the power to make an artist out of someone. Most importantly, it has the power to make money: why else, other than identifying the trajectory of dematerialization, would the absence of exhibition notes be complemented by the ready presence of a price sheet in the former’s place? “Roberto Chabet, Gerardo Tan, Nilo Ilarde” is a chilling exhibition that sheds light on what has become of the then-radical formulation and agenda of conceptualism: While it once resisted the objectification of art and the consequent fetishization of the art object by means of reducing (or elevating? abstracting? perhaps reifying?) it into idea, conceptualism is no longer a site of resistance against systems of capital. It has become a site of capital in itself. For the pointedness of its critique of its own place and complicity w/in the art market, “Roberto Chabet, Gerardo Tan, Nilo Ilarde” might be the most powerful Philippine conceptualist show to have been put up in recent memory.

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Credits: Photos filched from here and here.

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