218THE ALLURE OF THE VENEERappear to be ultimately annihilated—they are inert, useless to the
discourses that for centuries have crafted their bodies to construct the
superior specimen: the stallion.^64
It is in this sense that K36 is not a horse—it’s a horse/human coevolu-
tional inscription. In speculative taxidermy, the manipulated form of a
horse’s body no longer is a horse in the sense that all classical animal rep-
resentations could never equate to live animals, and in the sense that all
animal representations always involve human manipulation of animal
form. But, more specifically, these bodies are the result of the transhis-
torical power/knowledge relations that have played a key role in the emer-
gence of certain discourses and practices in human/animal relations.
As will be seen in the next chapter, the domestication of horses by no
means constitutes a straightforward narrative of reciprocal, loving com-
panionship, as some would like to believe. Fragmentations, incongruences,
and contradistinctions lie at the core of an unbalanced power/knowledge
relationship of domestication (and many other human/animal ones, of
course). In When Species Meet, Donna Haraway highlights the seamless
isopraxic continuity that animal body and human body can achieve in
horse riding. Quoting Vinciane Despret, Haraway argues that “human
bodies have been transformed by and into a horse’s body. Who influences
and who is influenced, in this story, are questions that can no longer receive
a clear answer.”^65
The undeniable materiality of the manipulated animal surface sum-
mons the long-lasting relationship between human and horses in the all
too real practices of agriculture, farming, transportation, sport, war, art,
and companionship. These practices, all underlined by the processes of
domestication, appear intertwined with a multitude of discourses, such
as those related to the division of labor, strategies of war, selective breed-
ing, evolution theories, wealth, power, recreation, psychoanalysis and
cognition, theology, zoology, and pageantry.
The indeterminacy of the nonrealistic form is never simply a negative
space. It instead lends itself to function as a screen upon which an over-
laying of images from the cinematic archives of western and war film
genres, memories of encounters with live horses, can gather. Placed in the
context of the contemporary gallery space, K36 also summons previous
representation of horses in art, including the numerous equestrian por-
traits of Roman emperors; the awkwardly flat horses of Paolo Uccello’s