Ingimar Ólafsson Waage
Álfhólsvegi 8
200 Kópavogi
símar: 6983875 & 5646649
ingimarwaage@gmail.com
Collaboration
Waage
has been in collaboration with the musicians of the art-group Aanonymous.
Interactivity of different disciplines in art have proven to be
fruitful in history, especially in the light of the influence of the arts to human cognition and
emotions. The arts expand our perception; experiencing the arts, looking at a painting or listening
to music introduces countless options of new experiences that are renewed each time the spectator
revisits the artwork.
Waage painted while listening to the music of Aanonymous and the results can be enjoyed on the website of Aanonymous:
HOME
RAGNARÖK
A human being collects information on the environment through experience and makes sense of it with
deliberation; collecting evidence, drawing conclusions, making hypotheses. These are undisputable
signs of life; signs of a living organism acting and reacting in correspondance to its environment.
The richer the experiences, the richer the deliberation. However, the human existence in harmonious
relationship with its environment, is a construct that rests on solidified experience, the
world-view has been settled but the uneasy ones that seek constantly to challenge their established
reality tend to enlarge their horizon, extend their knowledge, paradoxically, to the realization of
their own Socratic ignorance.
Any encounter with the outside reality is therefore quickly classified in accordance with earlier
experience and either used to reinforce the current world-view or discarded as an illusion or
deception. However, there are important aspects of human activities that provoke a different kind of
deliberation; namely the Arts. In her book, Problems of art (1953), Susanne Langer clarifies this phenomena when she writes that
the visual arts create a sense of spatial illusion and music creates illusion of time. This
acquaintance with is the supposed illusion is not discarded as a misconception because the powers of
the arts can ignite a reflection on previous experience and introduce new possibilities of
experiences, enriching the deliberation. This is due to direct access of the arts to our emotions
that subsequently nourish the imagination.
But in what way do the arts differ from other human endeavors? How is an artwork, say, Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers different from a florist decoration on a table? Is it the inevitable decay of the
flowers, fading colors and disappearing scent contrasted with the suggested eternity of the painting
(although the struggle of preservating the artwork will in the unforeseen future be futile)? Is it
the fame of the artist and the elevated price tag of the artwork? Or is it the imaginative
potentials proposed in the painting opposed to the almost flat and predictable reality that leaves
nothing for the seeking mind, resolute in expanding experience. While the floral decoration, in its
own natural beauty, a wonderful testimony of life in all its glory, scratches the surface of our sea
of consciousness while the painting brings about waves of fascination. Could this be due to the
tension between the particular and the general? The flowers in the vase can be classified as
particular, whereas Van Gogh’s pictorial representation of flowers is general; his rendering of a
particular vase and its containing flowers represents both the particular flower and simultaniously
all and any sunflowers, hinting at a metaphor to quantum physics; a particle can be in any position
until it is measured. The flower in the painting can be any flower until the onlooker recognizes it
and compares to his previous knowledge. Each new glance brings about new recognition that kindles
his imagination...