SYMPOSIUM
WHAT’S GOING ON (AI NO YUKUE): HOW ART MAKES SENSE
We often look to art to provide critical insight into the realities around us—to make sense of what’s going on. But, despite the strong documentary turn in the art of recent decades, we should not forget that art also has a capacity for transporting us beyond our immediate reality to reveal a heightened or alternate reality, and that it can speak most powerfully when it speaks indirectly through allegory or fabulation. What can we look for in art at a time of accelerating polycrisis, fractious geopolitics, and increased policing of speech? What can art say at a time when notions of a shared truth, arrived at through rigorous and constructive debate, have come undone and events seem to be enshrouded in a pervasive fog of cognitive dissonance?
American musician Marvin Gaye’s groundbreaking protest album of 1971, which gives this symposium its title, offers one model for understanding how seemingly remote and complex planetary issues can suddenly hit home. The inspiration for the title track came when one of its composers, Renaldo “Obie” Benson, happened to pass through California’s Bay Area on tour with his band The Four Tops in May 1969 and witnessed violent clashes between police and student protestors in Berkeley. The making of the album was subsequently informed by Gaye’s conversations with his brother Frankie, who had just returned to the US from serving in Vietnam and was struggling to reenter society while processing the traumas he experienced at war. Other songs address topics including social injustice, epidemic drug use, and ecological destruction—and they landed at the top of the American pop charts.
Throughout the album, the lyrics are simple, yet they gain force through Gaye’s experimental orchestration combining elements of soul, blues, and jazz with multitrack recording techniques that allowed the singer to split his lead vocal up into polyphonic layers and harmonies.
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
Oh, what’s going on
Gaye’s statement, couched in a question and a greeting, can also be read as a call for art—for slowing down to sit with things, talk them over, and view them from multiple perspectives. If it is disheartening that the concerns the album raises remain unresolved after five decades, What’s Going On, which was released in Japan under the title Ai no Yukue (Where love leads), is still a reminder that art endures to speak across time and tongues.
This year’s AWT Talks Symposium invites three internationally accomplished curators to discuss what’s going on in art, and how art can make sense of what’s going on in the world, through their recent and forthcoming exhibition projects. Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation in New York and Artistic Director of documenta 16 in Kassel, will present the keynote address. The discussion will be held in English and Japanese with simultaneous translation.
The AWT Talks Symposium is organized by Andrew Maerkle and Yuko Shiomi for Art Week Tokyo in conjunction with the Keio University Art Center and Keio Museum Commons.
PARTICIPANTS
NAOMI BECKWITH
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
ADAM SZYMCZYK
SPEAKER
KEIKO OKAMURA
SPEAKER
ANDREW MAERKLE
MODERATOR
LOCATION
West School Building Hall
Keio University Mita Campus
HOURS
November 7, 6pm–8pm
ADMISSION
Free. Registration will begin on Peatix starting in mid-September.
