THE END OF THE DAYDREAM157copy. Photographing and displaying the same mount multiple times pro-
duces copies of copies with no original required for the copy to exist.
The white background against which the owl has been placed func-
tions similarly to the presence of the blackboard in Magritte’s The Two
Mysteries. The blackboard, in this instance, inscribes the affirmative rep-
resentational power of the teacher, which produces knowledge through
the institutional support of the school.^60 The surface upon which the pipe
is drawn is extremely important in asserting its affirmative value. The
double negation of its ontological status as a pipe is simultaneously chal-
lenged by the scrawl underneath it and the presence of a giant floating
pipe right above the blackboard, which Foucault claims fluctuates in a
space “without reference point, expanding to infinity,” diametrically op-
posed to the solidity of the pedagogical space.^61
Replacing a natural environment, the white background suggests the
scientific institutionalization of the natural history museum: an episte-
mological spatialization. Similitude therefore infiltrates itself in the work
of resemblance not only within the encounter with the image to which it
is juxtaposed but with the referent in the external world through the al-
ready represented taxidermy body. In opposition to the deep nature of
wildlife photography, which states “this is a wild lion” or “ this is a wild
tiger,” this owl appears forced to the foreground, in an image that simul-
taneously affirms and undermines its own status. If this is not the image
of a wild animal, then what is its real value? If the original referent is not
a living wild animal, then what is this image saying? Is the white back-
ground alluding to the epistemological spaces of science? What does the
image tell us about what we call nature?
NONAFFIRMATIVE BIRDSThe nonaffirmative dynamics Horn experimented with in Dead Owl
were further problematized in the series called Bird (1998–2007) (plate 6).
In contrast to Dead Owl, in which the taxidermy animal stares back, each
diptych in this series proposes a view of birds’ heads seen from behind. The
series proposes a subversion of the portrait genre by borrowing its dis-
tinctive framing and cropping of the upper part of the body but rotating