Rubber ducks and Ships of Fools

Abstract

The trope of boat figures centrally in Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman's travelling public artwork, Rubber duck (2007–2016); in the media images of migrant refugees arriving at European destinations by boat since 2015; and in British artist Paul McCarthy's Ship Adrift, Ship of Fools (2010). Functioning as a hybrid vessel containing conceptions of global and nomadic transitivity, the image of boat forms the coalescing crux of the discourse in this article. The boat is interpreted as figuratively representing vessel transporting the nomadic individual as an autobiographical subject positioned in liminal and polycultural circumstances. Following Russell West-Pavlov, it is argued that autobiographical discourse continues to manifest as one of the most potent forms of ideology and that subjective nomadic ideology is utopianistically coloured. In the course of the article, notions of polyculturalism; rhizomatic identity: the Foucauldian notion of a Ship of Fools; minor; minority; difference; and Otherness are explored as core aspects of the constructions around autobiographical trajectory in the nomadic context.