THE END OF THE DAYDREAM141highlight the importance that any conception of realism plays in defin-
ing human/animal relations.
Roni Horn’s photographic diptych Dead Owl (1997) and her series Bird
(1998–2007) can be taken as example of a two-dimensional encounter
with animal representations employing new, speculative aesthetics. Regard-
less of the original artistic intentionality, the interest in photographing
taxidermy that has recently surfaced in contemporary practice provides
an opportunity to ask questions such as what roles taxidermy plays in
our relationship with live animals today, how speculative taxidermy op-
erates as a signifier in contemporary representational tropes, and how
taxidermy could be used as a vehicle for devising new animal epistemol-
ogies informed by human/animal studies discourses in art.
Every work of contemporary art demands its own perspective, its own
theoretical approach, and its own mode of encounter, whereas sweeping
theories that force many different works of art into one typology implic-
itly limit what can be thought and said. Likewise, it is worth noting that
speculative taxidermy objects are materializations in which animal agency
and human agency are equally engaged and shaped by the discourses,
practices, and materialities through which they encounter one another—
the encounter staged by speculative taxidermy is never just between artist
and animal. It always inscribes a transhistorical sense of agential becom-
ings defined by the formation of institutional practices and discourses.
It is this engagement in the reconfiguration of historical fragments of
knowledge, discourse, and practices that is essential for inducing ontologi-
cal mobility, the opportunity to rethink human/animal relations through a
work of art.
The epistemic reconfiguration that characterized the modern age
(1800–1950) entailed a regrouping of knowledge around pivotal questions
and statements.^10 Starting with Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olym-
pia (both from 1863), the crumbling of representation reached beyond the
polished surfaces of classical realism to delve into the modern invention
of man.^11 “The visible order” of the classical age, “with its permanent grid
of distinctions, is,” according to Foucault, “now only a superficial glitter
above an abyss.”^12 At this point, as discussed in the final chapters of The
Order of Things, the interrogation of human finitude became the essential
epistemological project of the modern age, one that painting primarily
addressed from the beginning of the nineteenth century.^13 What Foucault