THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER219early renaissance Battle of San Romano (1438–1440); the blue and orange
ones painted by Franz Marc (1911); Chana Orloff ’s art deco, horse-riding
Amazone (1915); George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket (1762); Leonardo’s studies
for Ludovico il Moro’s never realized monument (1490); Xu Beihong’s un-
bridled stallions (1940s–1950s); the trebly ambiguous equine presences in
Leonora Carrington’s Self-Portrait (1937–1938); the distinctly elegant
horses in Jan Brueghel the Elder’s paradise paintings (early seventeenth
century); the ones victoriously carrying Napoleon through history in the
paintings of Jacques-Louis David (1801); Picasso’s tragic horse at the cen-
ter of Guernica (1937); those photographed in motion by Muybridge (1887);
and the twelve live horses that Jannis Kounellis tethered to the walls of a
gallery in Rome in the late 1960s.
All these images, functioning as sedimentations of past discourses,
practices, and representations, construct a vivid archive of forming sur-
faces in human/horse relations—all vivid, but all equally failing to match
the fragmentary, nonaffirmative embodiment that De Bruyckere pres-
ents. It is this discrepancy between the past representations summoned by
the barely realist elements of K36 that bridges the “then and now” of hu-
man/animal experience. This offers the opportunity not just to free the
animal presence in a flight from classical thought but also to critically
address the past for the purpose of questioning today’s human/animal
relations.
All the works discussed in this chapter propose, in different ways, an
important shift from the different theatricality of classical and minimal
art to a nonaffirmative performativity characterized by a difficult balanc-
ing between words and the impossibility of containing the entangle-
ments of human/animal relations within the linguistic domain. Ontology
is here regularly undermined by the agency of materiality itself and the
loosened interconnectedness between materiality and language. Accord-
ing to Karen Barad, performativity is linked to the formation of the subject
and simultaneously to the production of the matter of bodies. In formu-
lating agential realism, Barad draws from Judith Butler’s account of ma-
terialization, Haraway’s notion of materialized figuration, and Foucault’s
analytic of power.^66 A theory of materialization of the body, Barad argues,
would take into account how the anatomy and physiology of the body
itself are shaped by other material forces. Barad expands Foucault’s un-
derstanding of the productivity of power to the social to incorporate