Are soft toys postmodern art? The beauty of soft toys is their transcendence, their ability to recapture lost spaces of our childhood while fearlessly defying fixed boundaries of age, race, gender & nationality. Dutch artist Florentjin Hoffman recently made headlines with his giant inflatable yellow duck swimming in the sea, migrating from harbour to harbour.
This bird is a contradiction. On one hand, it is a fantasy, on the other hand it is a reality. It is both a ship and a duck, making it a ship-duck. And the ship /duck is a closed space floating in an open space. While it is inflated in a duck shape, it is also deflatable meaning it does not have a definite shape. As a site of resistance towards identity, the duck disrupts the logic of time and space. It simultaneously refers to our past (childhood) and our present (adulthood). The exaggerated size of the behemoth ducky, meanwhile, is a distortion of space. Even the sea is a superimposed bathtub.
Dwarfing the other boats surrounding it, our yellow friend creates an estrangement / alienation effect of what a toy duck should be. In other words, we now look at ducks with a new perspective :)
With its free-floating ability, it deterritorializes and reterritorializes space. Frontiers break down. The ducky symbolizes mobility, a nomadic movement across smooth spaces of the sea. It is a place without a place.
Other works by Florentjin Hoffman. So, why soft toys? You may ask. The teddy bear with a pillow and cuddle bunny transports us back to the utopia of our childhood, to a time and place of great innocence & purity. Before children are corrupted by power and politics, we live in a naive, Edenic-like existence. Once we grow up, the reality of power hits us, and adults adapt to become evil. Paradise Lost. The giant soft toys hope to recover the child within us. Paradise Regained.
For more information on the artist, pls visit:
http://www.florentijnhofman.nl/dev/projects.php
For spatial theories, pls refer to Foucault's idea of the heterotopia:
http://www.heterotopiastudies.com/
One happy family :)
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