154THE END OF THE DAYDREAMthat challenges the viewer to provide a seemingly impossible resolution.^50
Owls are nocturnal predators symbolically linked in classical represen-
tation to “the feminine, night, the moon, death, magic and dreams.”^51
Grounded in the symbolic orders of classical representation, these asso-
ciations would easily relegate the presentation of a single image of the owl
to a network of pre-encoded cultural symbolisms. But, in front of Dead
Owl, the viewer’s urgency to symbolically read the images is halted by the
demand of solving the challenging doubling first, before the voice of sym-
bolism is enabled to speak.
In Dead Owl, both birds stare back, beyond the representational plane,
returning the gaze in a manner that only owls are capable of. The owls’ eyes
aesthetically and morphologically suggest the binocular vision of mam-
mals and consequently humans’ own. In “Why Look at Animals?” Berger
identified the “looking sideways” of most animals as a defining reason for
marginalizing them in the history of human/animal relations.^52 The elu-
sive “looking/not looking” of most animals is therefore conceived as lack—
it reaffirms a relational inability on the animal’s part. This morphological
trait was explored at length in Bill Viola’s film I Do Not Know What It Is
I Am Like,^53 a filmic critique of wildlife cinematography, in which all the
expectations for action and narrative are frustrated and reconfigured
through a syntax of extremely slow sequences in which animals seem to do
nothing. In one specific sequence, the director’s camera relentlessly closes
up on the eyes of an owl, which stares back, unperturbed. The impenetra-
bility of the animal becomes tangibly unnerving in this video work
through a substantial manipulation of conventional filmic construction of
time and space. Likewise Horn’s Dead Owl confronts the preconceived ex-
pectations of narrative structures in photography by frustrating the expe-
rience and only alluding to a narration that is never delivered. In the tradi-
tion of western art, the diptych format either promises a “before and after”
narrative sequence or proposes a dichotomic complementary relation,
such as that between good and evil, day and night, or man and woman.^54
THE STEREOSCOPIC ILLUSIONIn their ambiguous doubling, which, as seen, is intrinsically bound to si-
militude, Horn’s diptychs perform the frustration of a pivotal technical