148THE END OF THE DAYDREAMrealism of classical art. It proposes an original model that hinges the rep-
resentational plane to the outside world. Here lies the essence of affirma-
tion: the viewer standing in front of the canvas can state: “this is... .” Like
the prince in the cabinet of curiosities, or the king in front of Las Meninas,
resemblance positions the viewer as the ordering agent of the world. Thus,
resemblance lies at the foundation of what Foucault calls quattrocento
painting—the quintessential anthropocentric representational paradigm
in which clarity, perspectival structuring, and lighting encapsulates a
sense of dominion over the world. Resemblance, the essence of correla-
tionism, made knowledge of things possible.^32
In opposition, similitude constitutes an arbitrary process of equation
in which phenomena are not hinged by hierarchical relationships.^33 Si-
militude essentially is a circular repetitional system of closed allusions
and references. Through a derailment of the linear connection between
the representational plane and the real world typical of resemblance, the
work of similitude, in the late nineteenth century, began to reconfigure the
canvas as a new epistemological spatialization in which the clear com-
parative vision of taxonomy began to blur.^34 It is within this context that
Foucault identifies in some of Magritte’s early twentieth-century paintings
an important aesthetic shift, one in which resemblance becomes problem-
atically intertwined with similitude. The intrusion of similitude within
the straightforward and seemingly transparent relationship between re-
semblance and affirmation in painting results in the production of copies
of copies that no longer can be distinguished from an original.
In the case of photographs of taxidermy mounts, the precarious hinging
between image and the portion of the world it represents is held together
by resemblance and is defined by an ever so slightly derailing intervention
of similitude: the repetition within the repetition caused by the photo-
graphing of taxidermy. A taxidermy mount effectively already constitutes
a representation of an animal, even before it is photographed as a three-
dimensional copy of other living animals. As Foucault claimed, “Simili-
tude circulates the simulacrum as an indefinite and reversible relation of
the similar to the similar.”^35 It is this very role played by similitude and
its ambiguous intertwining to resemblance that produces a crumbling
of affirmation in photographs of taxidermy mounts. And Horn’s Dead Owl
pries open this very crevice in the configuration of the ontological stand-
points of her images.