Cargo and Decoy by pioneering Filipino conceptual artist Roberto Chabet was first installed over twenty years ago at The Pinaglabanan Galleries. It was the swan song of the fabled gallery in San Juan, owned by artist Agnes Arellano, before closing in 1989. Chabet, who was also the first curator of Pinaglabanan from 1984–1985, fittingly ended the tumultuous era with a note on art that cuts through illusion: presenting itself not just as a substitute for reality, but actually as a reality itself.

Questioning realism, tradition, and modernity, Chabet refers to the South Pacific cargo cults from which the title of the work is derived. Cargo cults exemplify the unusual after-effects of a first-time encounter between contrasting cultures, with an obsessive focus on the material goods brought by the foreigners. Cargo cults developed when European merchant ships first arrived in the South Pacific area. Coming from the West, which the islanders believed to be the place for the dead, they were thought to be special messengers from their gods and ancestors. Having no knowledge about modern manufacturing, the islanders believed that the goods the foreign ships carried were magical gifts from heaven.

Cargo cults further rose during the years of World War II, when the islanders came into contact with foreign Allied soldiers who brought with them or air-dropped vast quantities of various goods such as clothing, tents, canned food, medicine, and weapons. When the war ended, however, the cargo stopped coming so the islanders adopted certain measures to attract the goods once more. They built fake airplanes, ships, and control towers using sticks, straw, shells, and stones; they cleared areas and signaled fires for landing, and imitated the appearance and gestures of white soldiers—all in desperate hope that these will bring back their coveted cargo. Though most cults have dissipated after the war, one community in the islands of Vanuatu is still waiting for the return of their American soldier god who goes by the name of John Frum.

Roberto Chabet’s Cargo and Decoy is the last of a trilogy of works, which began with Russian Paintings in 1984 and House Paintings in 1986. In these works, Chabet utilizes his signature material: store-bought plywood boards. It is a material which has become not only the surface and support of his paintings, but to a large extent, its subject matter and content. In the exhibition at Pinaglabanan, a room was filled with plywood boards painted blue, cut in half, and propped between wooden sawhorses, forming an expanse of blue, wave-like V-shapes across the floor. On one hand, the work is about the material, its surface, flatness, and the use of volume and space; and on the other, they are his decoys, leading to the work’s hidden rituals and deeper meaning.

In Cargo and Decoy, Chabet points out the problematic representation of art, which is often taken as a decoy for something else that is being alluded to, rather than the real. He explained, “all art-making shares this illusory aspect with the cargo cult. Art is a surrogate—a decoy, a simulation of reality, [and] art as a surrogate is also the reality of art. You just have to accept that art is illusion-making.” He added, however, that “meaning in art tends to shift unpredictably. In the wink of an eye, the real may revert back to being a decoy. Often the art object as decoy, as illusion, seems more interesting.”

The critic Armando Manalo, in his review of Cargo and Decoy in 1989, wrote:

More than 20 years since its first installation, Chabet’s Cargo and Decoy still strikes a chord, revealing a timeless, universal aspiration for something good. As much as cargo planes symbolized the South Pacific islanders’ belief in heavenly gifts and celestial interventions, Chabet’s work holds on to the promise of art—an enlightened awareness that transcends time and space, a more expansive and more encompassing consciousness.

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