MAKING SENSE

The human mind is a restless thing, always seeking new contact with the world around it. This world - strange, familiar, alluring, repellent - both nourishes and threatens the mind with an apparently infinite flux of content. The mind, desperate to maintain itself by annexing its surroundings, cannot cease its attempts to make sense of whatever it is aware of, for only in sense can the mind find rest. Once sense has been made, the mind is relieved of the need to be aware of the particularities of its object, and, as the mind passes on to new morsels, the assimilated object is left somehow less actual, less immediate, less individual. The rational impulse is to move from aesthetic (sensory) stimuli to anaesthetic (non-sensory) ends. Art may enhance or subvert this process.

Within the great flux of content that constitutes its world, the mind supposes the existence of other minds, other minds with whom it seeks to make contact so as to share the rational systems which make sense of the world and relieve the itch of sensing. In its efforts to communicate, to make sense to other minds, the mind appropriates and manipulates the content of the flux in such a way that meaning is transmitted from one mind to another. The elements of the flux involved is such transmission, be they sound, mark or object, become the elements of a language.

AUGUSTA SZRAK
18 June 2002

(First published as the introductory essay to the catalogue 'Mekingsansa, an exhibition of conceptual jewellery' (Inkscape, 2002))