152THE END OF THE DAYDREAMfamous painting The Treachery of Images, from 1926.^46 More specifically,
it relates to the tautological problematization of the paradigm proposed
by Magritte’s 1966 reprise of that painting into the one titled The Two
Mysteries, in which a copy of the 1926 original is repainted on an easel
above which the enlarged image of the same pipe hovers. The repetition
of the pipe is here simultaneously undermined by the calligram. Thus a
transgression of the representational prescriptions of classical affirma-
tion is enacted by the interruption of the naturalized links between ob-
jects and words. Magritte and Horn appear equally invested in a defa-
miliarization of the everyday proposed through a specific dislocation of
the links between visual representation and words—their work denounces
the structuralist reliance on representational systems and the intrinsic
power/knowledge relations that language enacts in epistemology. At
stake here is a revelation of the power images have to construct reality
by pointing at the seemingly transparent ways in which we consume
representation.
The formal element of Magritte’s calligram, as Foucault pointed out,
connotes the primary school teacher’s voice: the voice of authority that
imparts institutionalized, normative knowledge to children.^47 Horn’s
Dead Owl operates a similar “choking” of the voice of affirmation. The
images deliberately rely on classical realism. However, because the image
is presented as a diptych, this statement of affirmation is derailed through
a tableau-objet proposal. What kind of affirmation is Horn attempting to
unsettle, and how does the presence of taxidermy, effective or presumed,
function within the semantic economy of this diptych? Here, too, Horn’s
image appears already freed by the artist from any textual anchoring—
the viewer’s experience is deliberately staged on uncertain ontological
grounds. But a more problematic, nonaffirmative operation is enacted by
Horn’s presentation of two practically identical images.
Magritte’s The Two Mysteries (fig. 4.5) essentially proposes a problema-
tized version of the original perceptual conundrum triggered by The
Tr e a c h e r y o f Im a g e s. This problematization was caused by Magritte’s delib-
erate denouncing of the latter as a painting. Here, too, as in Horn’s diptych,
the viewer is confronted by what Foucault classes as “similitude restored to
itself—unfolding from itself and folding back upon itself.”^48 This tautology
affirms and represents nothing. Therefore, the event proposed by Horn is
triggered, not by an obfuscation of realism, but by the essence of simili-