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_{From the exhibit Private Lighterature . Townsend Center for the Humanities , University of California, Berkeley, October 25th 2006 - January 10th 2007. Dedicated to Aurélie Vialette.}

_{Special thanks to Tony Cascardi & Teresa Stojkov} 

^An artist's statement? Such a statement would encompass two issues about which, if you would so kindly allow me, I would like to express my doubts.

First, that somewhere around here there is an artist. Second, that such an artist would be able to state something besides, in addition, or as a supplement to what he has already said with some photographs and other texts.

As far as I am concerned, I am only a medievalist. Most of the most interesting medievalists I know talk about manuscripts. And since I only wish to become a more or less interesting medievalist, I beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, I will now start talking about manuscripts.

Everything started with a manuscript. I think it was the Codex Manesse , a book containing Minnesänger poems. These German, Provençal, French, and Galician-Portuguese manuscripts often have images. The most striking one in the Codex Manesse is that of a prince called Heinrich Frauenlob surrounded by musicians singing his songs; he is conducting them, under the surveillance of a portrait of his lady floating atop a shield in which we can see a portrait of his lady.

Oh my, now I also remember another quite striking manuscript, one that was offered to Marie de Bourgogne, or it could be that she ordered it. It’s a formidable codex presided over by an image. Actually, it has other illuminations, but the first one will always stupefy me: in this image, we can see Marie de Bourgogne in the act of reading the book we are looking at; she is very concentrated on her reading, and behind her image, you can see an open window. At the other side of the window, there is an image of the Virgin in the middle of a gothic church, and kneeling and praying in front of her, is Marie de Bourgogne. So, basically, this image is asking Marie to think about Marie praying to Mary while she (Marie) is reading this book. A labyrinth of reading and meditation.

Please, if you would, bear with me as I continue with some other manuscripts. The first one I want to open for you is the codex containing don Juan Manuel’s complete works. One of the texts therein is, among many other things, a collection of tales, some of them ending with the troubling sentence: “and the story of this example is as such”. The reason why it is a troubling sentence is because there is actually nothing after this assertion, nothing except the following tale, which is not the story of the previous one. This problem was solved a long time ago: in point of fact, this story is none other than an image, the only vestige of which is now this introductory sentence. I wonder why the scribes, who knew that the images were not going to be copied (they did not even allow room for them), copied the vestige anyway. Poetics of imagination.

Another book on top of this desk. This is signed by don Juan Manuel’s uncle, king Alfonso X. It’s one of his books of laws. In the first sections of the book he explains that law is text, and a very fixed text. It does not admit any kind of explanation, other than that produced by the King himself, and, in any event, the law does not admit additions or supplements of any kind. It must make sense by itself. As soon as he finished this book, he sent it to the book workshop, in order to have it copied in an appropriate fashion. He orders the set of almost thirty miniatures that share the recto and verso of the pages with the legal text. Often these illuminations do not really comment or illustrate. Rather we could say that they establish a very apparent dialectics of the law; we might say that they are constructing ideas very different from those we find in the text. For instance: although four images each represent acts of negotiating the law between Alfonso and God, there is no shadow of such an idea in the text. How could Alfonso legislate that he had received the laws from God? He did not. But the images are there, indelibly attached to the letter where they belong: Alfonso’s initial A.

Here is another one. This is just as big as the other ones. It was created by the German nun Hildegard von Bingen . She used to have visions. During these visions, she was haunted by a mixture of pain and pleasure, but she ended in extreme happiness, for the images she saw during the visions allowed her to understand the Sacred Scriptures, their Grammar, she says, their cases and declinations, she’d say, their words. Everything and anything biblical philologists had tried to understand for more than 1200 years. Hildegard was an excellent Latin writer, and a very original composer of revolutionary music. Unfortunately, she could not paint. But she wanted everybody to see what she was seeing, because that way everybody would understand what she understood, and everybody would feel the happiness she felt. She thus created thorough descriptions of her visions, which are purely abstract, so that a good painter and miniaturist could translate her words into images. That was difficult: translating the concrete was almost impossible (Lévi-Strauss understood this well), but what about translating the abstract?

This will be the last one. We owe it to another woman, Christine de Pizan . After losing both her father and her husband in a very short period of time, she decides, as she puts it in one of her books, to become a man. To do so, she goes public with what she does best, her writings, her ideas. She decides to become an educator and a writer. She conceives of each of her works as a total work of art. Christine controls the creation of each copy of her books, because she wants them to appear with all the power of her self-representation. At the beginning of each codex, she makes them paint her own image: here in the act of studying surrounded by her books; over there, with her professional turnable library; in another, she appears in front of the King, or in front of the Queen, offering her book, just as the miniaturists used to depict the classical historians, like Sallustius or Titus Livius.

They all are very disquieting, to say the least. Images that have disappeared, and of which only a text remains, vestige of their historic reality. Images that fight against the alleged inexpugnability of the text and even share the same space.

Images that manifest their purest abstraction based on concrete,grammatical descriptions, sought in order to make knowledge evident. Images that want to freeze the pulse of existence. Images that persist in saying I to a text that persists in saying you.

I beg your pardon if after all, I do not have more to say.
Nor less.