THE END OF THE DAYDREAM151sions of all the works of art that will become central to the next chapters.
Considered together, they provide a new set of tools devised to put art at
work for the purpose of rethinking human/animal relations within broader
biopower systems. In “Photogenic Painting,” Foucault specifically contex-
tualizes the event as that which “transmits and magnifies the other, which
combines with it and gives rise, for all those who come to look at it, to an
infinite series of new passages.”^42 I argue that is possible to conceive of the
event as an experience unleashed through the tensions presented by art-
works that comply with the specifications of the tableau-objet.
DEAD OWL: A TROUBLING TAUTOLOGYHorn’s images are strikingly realist.^43 The title of the work Dead Owl re-
inforces the self-reflexive semantic economy within the image. It actively
plays a pivotal role in problematizing the system of ambiguity by which a
lifelike owl is pronounced dead by the artist—something that we cannot
ascertain but need to consider. The text is as open as it can be: Has the
bird been killed and then resurrected by taxidermy? Or is the artist al-
luding to the symbolic k illing/resurrection operated by the camera? What
may be a taxidermy mount now appears equally likely to be alive; or what
was once alive may have been metaphorically killed by the act of being
photographed, and then representationally resuscitated.
As Roland Barthes observed, “the photograph possesses an evidential
force, and... its testimony bears not on the object but on time.”^44 It is
because of the inclusion of time in the indexical equation that both pho-
tography, as Sontag noted, and by extension taxidermy become involved
in a freezing of time that intrinsically alludes to the absent presence of
death.^45 Thus, the “return of the dead,” as articulated by Roland Barthes in
Camera Lucida, the spectrum, or the object photographed, is “returned”
essentially on the grounds of the indexical: the undeniable materiality of
its past presence in the traces. Dead Owl is deliberately constructed to
deliver a nonaffirmative riddle that grows more and more intricate as
the viewer attempts to disentangle it.
Establishing a nonaffirmative relationship between title and work, Horn’s
Dead Owl problematizes the aesthetic strategies deployed in Magritte’s