"Verdichtungen - Condensations"

According to Martin Heidegger “all art is essentially poetry inasmuch as it allows the truth of being as such to be realised.” ¹
The phrase Heidegger uses for poetry in his German original is “Dichtung”, a word that is etymologically derived from “dicht”, i.e. dense, thick, impermeable. Therefore, the act of producing verse, making poetry, is, to the German mind, related to condensing and making impermeable.
If we choose to understand the mother of all art, poetry, as an act of condensed or “gedichtet” expression, all works of art are the necessary result of a process of condensation or “Verdichtung”. However, any process of condensation presupposes its start in a diffuse, even empty space: the emptiness Yves Klein² condensed in his intense blue.
It is emptiness and silence that give rise to the act of creation so that the blackness and silence of emptiness are given shape into visible and audible condensations through a process of transformation:

The Work of Art.



¹ Heidegger, Martin. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’ in Holzwege. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann 1950, p. 59. An English reference for this work is ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Off the Beaten Track. Translation by Julian Young and Kennet Hayes. Cambridge: CUP 2002.
² Yves Klein presented The Emptiness in 1958, which consisted of an enormous, completely empty, whitewashed gallery in which visitors were offered a blue cocktail.