A Quote by Sigfried Giedion

Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted. — © Sigfried Giedion
Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted.
Only since the turn of the century has abstraction again become recognized as an artistic means of representation. It was then that one returned to the recognition of the immense role abstraction plays in the human mind by its power of concentration upon absolute essentials.
There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.
I tried to find a language for the film - not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time.
Imagine that the world is a circle, that God is the center, and that the radii are the different ways human beings live. When those who wish to come closer to God walk towards the center of the circle, they come closer to one another at the same time as to God. The closer they come to God, the closer they come to one another. And the closer they come to one another, the closer they come to God.
Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.
Digital technology, you see, is not the villain here. It simply offers another dimension. I'm not sure if it's a farther remove from reality than analogue. I think if we can speak of reality, if reality and representation can be spoken of in the same sentence, if reality even exists any more, digital is simply another way of encoding that reality.
The metaphor of the subterranean is at work in a lot of Northwest writers and artists. Zooming in closer and closer and closer, then below, to the worms and the centipede.
Sometimes the act of walking in the face of the elements helps us come to grips with reality. Or it simply exhausts us to the point of seeing the futility of resisting reality and the futility of denial.
I've come to realize that I'm a image maker, not an object maker. Images come to me as photographs because I don't have any other way of express them. I have to translate everything into still or moving pictures. I've learned that reality is not important to me. In the end it is the representation of reality that I'm striving to capture.
What Christopher Nolan and I have done with 'Superman' is try to bring the same naturalistic approach that we adopted for the 'Batman' trilogy. We always had a naturalistic approach; we want our stories to be rooted in reality, like they could happen in the same world we live in.
Fantasy is often closer to reality than what most people accept as reality.
They should set a very clear priority for the government. There is such a large penumbra of issues. The party needs to come to grips with the reality that it has to be coherent politically.
The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
Get ready for a smaller world. Soon, your food is going to come from a field much closer to home, and the things you buy will probably come from a factory down the road rather than one on the other side of the world. You will almost certainly drive less and walk more, and that means you will be shopping and working closer to home. Your neighbours and your neighbourhood are about to get a lot more important in the smaller tworld of the none-too-distant-future.
I began as a naturalistic painter. Very quickly I felt the urgent need for a more concise form of expression and an economy of means. I never stopped progressing toward abstraction.
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