1986 / Assemblage of plywood, paper bag, tapes, metal brackets, and clocks / 91.5 x 171 cm / Artist: Roberto Chabet / Artist’s collection

Shanghai is a construction of two square pieces of plywood. The left square is framed and collaged with a crumpled paper tacked with red tapes, while the right square suspends a seesaw-like plank of wood with five round clocks on top. Attempting to get a meaning or message from this work would miss the artist’s point. Here Chabet is simply drawing the perceiver’s attention to the intrinsic quality of a material’s rawness vis-à-vis the idea of precision, such as the wood’s material grain contrasting a clockwork quality. He further contrasts the idea of randomness in a crumpled paperbag and torn pieces of tape against the essence of accuracy in the way the 90-degree frames and the 180-degree angle of the plank are engineered with an architect-painter’s exacting sense of design.

“Sometimes art has too much art. I want my work to be simple, minimize the artiness of art, taking art out of art.” This is how Chabet explains his artistic motive in doing highly experimental work. He demurs at being labeled a conceptual artist of the avant-garde, yet he has actually been pursuing this traditional Western genre for the past two decades as guru of idea art in the Philippines. Idea, effects, newness, temporariness, order, linearity, materials, processes, sensory experience—these are the values/nonvalues with which Chabet is most concerned. And these are the very strategies with which he revolts against the intellectual mediocrity and commercial craftiness of “high” art.