Searching for the yellow duck. Thousand words  is a book with drawings and words. It is a visual dictionary with as many things and words as possible on a page. Sometimes they are in a setting, a context; some pages are specific topics with separate images/words; and sometimes it is only images or words. This book truly was one of my favourites. All the things in the world were in this book. It was ordered chaos. You could find and make your own stories with it. And one thing you were sure of, was of finding a little yellow duck in every scene. The duck was the fixed thing. You might not see it - the duck had a habit of hiding behind things - but it was always there. You just had to look for it.

 

In the first week of this final year studying for my master, I scanned the covers of all my books. I was hoping to give a bit of insight into my head. This obsessive act gave a glimpse, but did not give the answer. For the thesis I had to go a bit beyond the cover.

Instead of going for the multitude and deriving the answers from a large amount of different sources, I decided to concentrate on a few specific texts. One text led to another, and so this thesis follows my research in a chronological way.

 

In a way, this thesis is a search for the yellow duck 2.0. I’ve been studying at an art academy for six years and now almost at the end of two years master study. It’s about time I found the yellow duck in my work, was able to explain the thinking behind my art practice. There is a line in what I do. I can see it, and there are some elements in it I can name. But I can’t put my finger on what ties it all together. What is it that I do?

 

In 1956 A.D. Hall and R.E. Fagen write an introductory chapter for a course at Bell Telephone Laboratories. For their text they used a paper, written in 1950 by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, about the General Systems Theory. Ludwig von Bertalanffy developed his theory further and in 1968 published the book General System Theory – Foundations, Development, Applications. This book was published by the same publisher that Jack Burnham had. He picked it up, was inspired by it and in 1968 wrote Systems Aesthetics. This text, printed in Artforum, introduced the systems theory to the 1960s art world.  So it is not such a big leap from a scientific text written by mathematicians to the late ’60s art scene. These texts will be the subject of the first part of my thesis.

 

To end, I think it is good to make two points clear. First, the Duck from Venturi and Scott Brown in Learning from Las Vegas has nothing to do with mine. Their comparison to the Duck was about the form of the Duck relating literally to the function of the building with that from. Their Duck was about the appearance. It was big, it meant to be an eye-catcher and it was white. My Duck isn’t physically present. It’s small, hiding and very yellow. Second, I don’t have the ambition to write a coherent story on System Theory, Structuralism or any other theory, but I do hope to create a coherent and well-argued view on my work by linking it to different texts and by studying them, gaining new insight into my own work. So from all the theories that come up I’ll just pick what triggers my interest. And to immediately start by stealing someone else’s words: ‘I shall be satisfied if it is credited with the modest achievement of having left a difficult problem in a rather less unsatisfactory state than it was before.’

 

‘Every possible avenue of knowledge must be explored, every door tried to see if it is open. No kind of evidence need be left untouched on the score of remoteness or complexity, of minuteness or triviality. The tendency of modern enquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.’