THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER217in natural history taxidermy is essential to the illusion of livingness. As a
result, her animal bodies appear neither dead nor alive—they are some-
what suspended in a twilight of representation, frozen in an ambiguously
sensual stillness. Their abstracted body masses deliberately ask the viewer
to walk around them, yet no definitive answer is provided as to which
might be the correct viewing point. Wölfflin would have found K36 ex-
tremely frustrating. Likewise, contrary to the classical taxidermy methods
developed by Akeley and others at the turn of the nineteenth century,
which prescribe the casting of a life-size mannequin for the purpose of
accurately stretching the animal skin to lifelike effect, De Bruyckere’s
mounts propose substantial indeterminacy. In the lack of an anatomically
realistic mannequin supporting the skin, the animal body appears va-
cated of its rhetorical grandeur and the elegant stability that generally
characterizes equine bodies. K36’s muttering of the affirmative statement
“this is a horse” is confused, unclear, insecure, and as muffled as it could
possibly be (plate 10). K36 is not a horse; it’s a quasi-horse, a horse/human
coevolutional inscription stripped of its symbolic cultural constructs.
The rhetorical strategies of realism have been derailed for the purpose of
enabling surfaces to speak. Through the blunting of the animal’s ana-
tomical accuracy and through the erasure of detail, De Bruyckere thus
severs the discourse/practice links that transhistorically bind man and
horse through the erasure of that which most tangibly links them: the
concept of pure breed.
In The Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding in
Newmarket, Rebecca Cassidy carefully describes the sociocultural impor-
tance of the practice of selectively breeding horses in nineteenth-century
England. The concept of pure breed as that which embodies the unique-
ness of the animal and simultaneously that of the owner is, according to
Cassidy, equally based on the values of form and surface and their reflex-
ive impact on a presumed interiorization of ability and value fixed in
blood by cross-breeding.^61 Cassidy highlights the direct discursive links
of wealth, power, and social status to the practices that fixed the pedigree
as the intrinsic guarantor of value inscribed in aesthetic characteristics
embodied in the living animal.^62 De Bruyckere’s manipulation and the
resistance posed by the animal skin sever these links in the proposal of a
catastrophic reversal of the thoroughbred process that inscribed power,
speed, and stamina into animal form.^63 As a result, these animal bodies