Speculative Taxidermy

THE END OF THE DAYDREAM147

as will be seen, it is the doubling of Horn’s image that constitutes the
truly nonaffirmative element in Dead Owl.
According to the history of western philosophy, the three essential repre-
sentational modalities are the copy, the sign, and the simulacrum. I would
like to propose that the elusive charge of taxidermy mounts is substantially
defined by the collapsing of these modalities into one representational
register. Each modality influences the viewer’s perception with multiple
intertwined and overlapping signs at once—this is representational over-
load at its best. It is therefore not a surprise that photographs of taxi-
dermy should actively exacerbate this representational intensity. In this
case Foucault’s formulation of the concepts of affirmation and nonaffirma-
tion, and those of similitude and resemblance, can prove useful in better
illuminating the complexity proposed by Horn’s photographic diptychs.^30
In This Is Not a Pipe, a book about Magritte’s work (fig. 4.3), Foucault
speaks of resemblance and similitude as prominent epistemic order-
ing relationships between representation and the world, and there lies the
importance of these concepts.^31 Resemblance essentially is mimesis, the

FIGURE 4.3 René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe), 1929. Oil on
canvas, Overall: 25 3/8 × 37 in. (64.45 × 93.98 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
Los Angeles, California. © ARS, New York.