THE END OF THE DAYDREAM145more recently gained international notoriety. Her professional success is
due to the fact that Horn, unlike many other artists, has managed to forge
a substantially original approach to the idiom of her medium of choice,
making her work aesthetically distinctive, but also conceptually relevant.
Horn’s critique of the rhetoric of photographic representation is in it-
self important because it questions the foundations of art, the materiality
of photography, natural history, and human perception while encompass-
ing histories of representation and the epistemic processes that are inter-
linked to these histories. This complex operation is performed by Horn
through the presentation of photographic diptychs—the juxtaposition of
two identical or slightly different images (fig. 4.2). Of this uncanny dou-
bling, Horn said: “the idea was that to create a space in which the viewer
would inhabit the work or at least be a part of it.”^29 This inhabiting, based
on experience and the viewer’s presence, is not a comfortable one. The
FIGURE 4.2 Roni Horn, Dead Owl, 1997. Two iris-printed photographs on Somerset
satin paper. Each 22 1/2 × 22 1/2 in. (57.2 × 57.2 cm). Courtesy the artist and Hauser &
Wirth. © Roni Horn.