Bert Antonio would phone his brother’s house, and people would immediately know that it’s his nephew, Ethan, he was calling for. “I read the books he recommends,” he quips. He was in transit, commuting to go home, right after his shift from work. He’s in Boston, and has been for years now, “I'm a fugitive,” he speaks in short meaningful phrases. He’s never been back to Manila–not since the FART days… FART, short for the Fine Arts Running Team, an informal group led by Roberto Chabet in the 1980’s. The group included Nilo Ilarde, Bert Antonio, Gerardo Tan, Romeo Lee, Soler Santos, and other students. At Asia Art Archive, photos from that time were categorized as the “FART Exhibition: Dirty Room, Dirty Pictures,” under the Chabet Archives.¹ Antonio was part of the subversive teaching class of Chabet, in the beginnings of Roberto Chabet’s developing penchant for teaching at the College of Fine Arts in the state university. Antonio was his student, a colleague, and a friend. He recalls, “In a way, Chabet was more than an art teacher, like anyone that can be close tous–life teachers–I learn a lot from them. I admire different kinds.”

In a newspaper article written by Francine Medina in 1991, we get a glimpse of Chabet reflecting on the glory days of FART (the Fine Arts Running Team), “Most people think that when we get together, we get into serious discussions. Maybe we talk about a little bit of this or a little bit of that. We make some comments,” he says, “We were joining out-of-town races like the Los Baños uphill run in the 80’s and national (running) competitions like San Miguel and Magnolia's. I guess that how we got together.”² Reflecting on those times, Antonio recalls, “We’d be together almost every day, we were just hanging out.”

To Antonio, it seems that art requires a taste for being in an area of unknown possibilities, and a tolerance for not knowing. Like most process-based art, or works by conceptual artists, the premise may indeed have been to democratize art through different strategies of reproduction and distribution. Which is in fact a form of engagement that's less antagonistic and more experiential: such is the legacy of Filipino conceptualism.  Included is the discussion of the structures of loss, humor, rupture, memory, and authorship, which are often invisible to more empirical and academic methods³—a preference for direct engagement, rather than direct expression.

Included in the exhibition at MO_Space is Antonio’s work-in-progress, “the tv series,” a body of work mostly based on test patterns on TV. Between flickering microseconds, a frozen image arises; a brief pause–captured. There is “processing” through repetition, manipulation, juxtaposition, shaping, pairing, contrasting, and framing. In this instance, the work is not determined by its material nature but by its aura.⁴ The technical reproduction of images, shown within quantitative shifts, can be slowed down and paused, caught between frames, whereby a unique phenomenon of swiftness arises, observed in close proximity.

Another body of work, “Photo calligraphy 2” is a series comprised of gouache and acrylic on watercolor paper. An inverted collage, possibly a take-off from the fact that Chabet advocated students to paint from found images and collage exercises. Chabet mentions in a previous interview from a newspaper dated 1991, “Most of the [assigned] artworks will start out as collages. Composition doesn't get taught, but they get to learn among themselves. They have to go through some experimentation—some element of surprise. And the very important thing is they get to see changes as they go along.”⁵

–Lian Ladia

¹ “The Chabet Archive: Covering Fifty Years of the Artist’s Materials,” Asia Art Archive, 2013, http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionItem/4230.

² Medina, Francine. “Musings: Roberto Chabet.” The Manila Times, 23 October 1991.

³ Ching, Isabel. “(Un)certain Legacies: Conceptualism in Singapore and the Philippines.” Asia Art Archive, 1 July 2011. http://www.aaa.org.hk/Diaaalogue/Details/1045.

⁴ Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936.

⁵ Medina, Francine. “Musings: Roberto Chabet.” The Manila Times, 23 October 1991.