BAUM/BBC

I have some loose ends of blog posts from Venice that I wanted to put up before I forgot. One seems particularly appropriate as a linguistic bridge between Italy and Germany.

In Venice in September I had the luck of being able to live with a former Italian intern of the Guggenheim called Eleonora. Or Ele. Or principessa depending on what time of day it was. She is a student of arts management at Ca' Foscari and had exams that she had to take in the middle of September. I also had to prepare a talk to give on a painting by Arshile Gorky that's in the Gugg collection and so we headed off to the humanities faculty library to study. But this is not just any humanities faculty library, oh no. This is the Biblioteca di Area Umanistica nontheless and they very proudly state this with the snazzy acronym, BAUM. All fine and dandy. Except in German the word baum means 'tree'. So every time I saw a new poster or notice around the place I thought there was some bizarre German tree cult that had a very prominent presence around campus.

TREE

Here's a pic of us hard at work

Here's what Eleonora made of the double meaning

Who knows, perhaps they were even
aware of the double meaning as this
sign suggests.....

In my room in our flat near the Rialto bridge I made a great discovery. The landlady was obviously learning English at some stage in the 1970s and she chose to do so by using a 6 volume BBC English course. Upon flicking through I started to notice that certain parts where rather Surrealist. Take this chapter heading for example which looks just like the kind of unsettlingly credible yet utterly nonsensical sentence that might be produced from a game of cadavre exquis.

It is a game that the Surrealist group experimented with in the 1920s and one that bored groups on rainy family holidays still play today. You write down a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold it over and pass it on to the next player who writes their own phrase and so on and so forth. At the end you fold out the sheet of paper and have a progression of seemingly linked sentences that offer unexpected and surprising concatenations of surreal meaning. The idea was that by involving chance in the creative process they could produce surprisingly poetic juxtapositions drawn directly from the subconscious. There were also some great picture pages that had the same effect:

Others made me laugh for their sheer quirkiness:

And others raised a wry smile for their depiction of the beloved British weather....