Academic Seminar – 13th November // Andrew Hendrixson // Unspoken Requests – Art & Theology

Contemporary art is suffering from an atrophy of imagination. There is an increasingly pervasive belief that the way in which art can assure their necessity in contemporary life is by rendering itself as a didactic, visual messaging system that mostly illustrates political positions of a certain ilk. At best, this work imagines its importance lies in its “social consciousness.” At worst, it is the aestheticizing of cynicism and nurses an impulse to be reductive about human persons and their range of epistemological capacities. Art in our time is desperate to be necessary, and it is necessary, just not for the reasons it imagines.

Using the rural tent revivals of my youth, and the “unspoken requests” offered by those gathered beneath the tent as an instructive starting point, I will argue that the arts are less a means of statement and more a site of inquiry; that generative art should look more like a mind thinking than a mouth speaking. One’s laboring hands can sometimes be more articulate than one’s mouth. Art making, it turns out, may not be that far from offering unspoken requests.