The CI Review 415

Quite apart from the problem that activists do not appear to share Sorenson’s anxiety of
influence, there emerges through the volume a more immediate concern for animal studies
practitioners, which is, as Tobias Linné and Helena Pederson phrase it, “how to create a
space and a language in academia . . . to speak about, and work to change, the situation and
experiences of animals in human society” (p. 269). Taking up this challenge means resisting
the moral solace of choosing any one of the ways of doing animal studies that seem possible
now, and in turn to allow for the possibility of better ways to come.
Thus the book raises more questions than it answers. Whose interests are served
(and whose are compromised) by the critical without the critical within animal studies?
Can animal studies scholarship be simply—rather, “critically”—enlisted in the service
of advocacy? If what is needed are more complex senses of the potentials for academics
and advocacy, then why not work together to advocate for animal studies as a legitimate
route for critical inquiry?

S U S A N M C H U G H , professor and chair of English at the University of New

England, is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (2011)—which
was awarded the Michelle Kendrick Book Prize by the Society for Literature, Science,
and the Arts in 2012—as well as Dog (2004) in the book series Animal. She coedited
The Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (2014) with Garry Marvin, and Literary
Animals Look, a special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
(2013) with Robert McKay. With McKay and John Miller, she coedits the Palgrave
Studies in Animals and Literature book series. McHugh serves as Managing Editor of
the Humanities for Society and Animals, and she is a member of the editorial boards of
Animalibus, Antennae, Animal Studies Journal, Environment and History, H-Animal
Discussion Network, and Humanimalia: A Journal of Human-Animal Interface Studies.

Peter Osborne. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London and
New York: Verso, 2013. 288 pp.

LISA TRAHAIR
For Peter Osborne, the key to understanding contemporary art is its contemporaneity.
Moreover this contemporaneity makes contemporary art postconceptual. Osborne’s book
Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art not only consummately backs up
his claims with carefully wrought arguments but also uses the idea of art’s contemporane-
ity—which distinguishes contemporary art from art simply produced in the here and
now—to endorse work by artists Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Robert Smith-
son, The Atlas Group, Gordon Matta-Clark, Amar Kanwar, Navjot Altaf, and Mona
Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, whose purpose is to engage in a critically reflective way with
the world in which we live, which is to say, the mediatized, networked, geopolitical entity we
understand as a transnational, global phenomenon.
Postconceptual art draws on the legacy of the conceptual art of the 1960s, forming
itself out of both its forebear’s insights and failures. If the historical significance of
conceptual art was its response to the overvaluation of the aesthetic dimension of art in
Greenbergian formalism, conceptual art’s attempt to establish an entirely analytical
program for itself by pursuing an art of pure conceptuality necessarily failed to rid art
of its aesthetic dimension. Postconceptual understands both that art is necessarily
conceptual and that its aesthetic dimension is ineliminable because its materiality
means that it exists in time and space. Like conceptual art, postconceptual art refuses to
adhere to the idea that the ontology of art rests in the nature of the work’s medium,
form, or style, but recognizing its dependence on such aesthetic material postconcep-
tual art takes a critical or antiaesthetic stance towards it.
416 The CI Review
Postconceptual art also understands both that the material forms of art are not
limited to traditional media but are infinitely expansive, and that the unity of an indi-
vidual work is comprised not on the basis of its identity with itself in an idealized
present but includes both the “totality of its multiple material instantiations” (p. 48) at
any particular time and the reconstruction of its borders over time. The aesthetic and
the conceptual aspects of this art are thus subject to an ongoing dialectical movement,
a dynamic interplay between the work’s actual and virtual dimensions that derive from
its contextual and historical relations.
In the course of setting out how contemporary art is necessarily postconceptual art,
Osborne parses the gamut of concepts associated with modernist aesthetics. He takes up the
mantel of the Jena Romantics as the first philosophers to claim an identity between philos-
ophy and the arts and to emphasise the “literary”—rather than the aesthetic or sensible—
aspect of art. He traces the development of that thinking in key contributions to the modern
European speculative tradition of philosophy and sees its culmination in the journalism of
Walter Benjamin and the Benjaminian-influenced late academic writing of Theodor
Adorno. The critical intention of contemporary art is understood here as that which un-
derwrites its conceptuality, and it is aimed at either the contemporary world or the limita-
tions of preceding art practices. This critical insistence warrants that the philosophy of
contemporary art be attentive to postconceptual art’s historicity.
As well as participating in the tradition of critical theory, Osborne’s method is construc-
tivist. In his (speculative, dialectical, and distributive) hands, constructivism responds in-
terpretatively both to the particular artworks under examination and to the problems
emanating from the insufficiencies of art history, art criticism, and the philosophy of aes-
thetics—problems that have contributed to the general public’s disenchantment with the
“post-conceptual tradition” he promotes. Osborne’s most important contribution to the
philosophy of modern art undoubtedly lies in his determination to redress philosophy’s
dehistoricising tendencies and his rigorous delineation of the history of misconstructions of
Kantian aesthetics right down to the present day. His schematization of the logics of various
modernisms and his periodization of mediating forms also deserve special mention, while
his capacity to synthesize the impact of new geopolitical realities on art practices—which
includes the transformation of the ontology of art—make this book an important one not
just for philosophers, art historians, and critics but new media theorists as well.

L I S A T R A H A I R is senior lecturer in film studies in the school of Arts and Media at

the University of New South Wales. She is author of The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense
and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (2007) and founding member of the
Cinematic Thinking Network. She has published essays on film in numerous
journals, including Screen, New Formations, Senses of Cinema, Film-Philosophy and
South Atlantic Quarterly. She is currently working on book entitled Understanding
Cinematic Thinking: Film-Philosophy in Bresson, von Trier and Haneke, coauthored
with Robert Sinnerbrink and Gregory Flaxman (2016). Essays relating to the
cinematic thinking project have been published in The Philosophy of Radical Equality:
Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene, edited by Alison Ross and Jean-
Philippe Deranty, Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, edited by Felicity
Colman, and Film-Philosophy Journal. Trahair coedited with Lisabeth During a
special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on “Belief in Cinema:
Themes after André Bazin” (Dec. 2012). In 2013 she coedited with Robert
Sinnerbrink a special dossier on “Thinking Cinematically before Deleuze” for
Screening the Past. She is also currently editing a collection of essays for SubStance on
“Film and/as Ethics.” Information about the Cinematic Thinking Network can be
found at cinematicthinkingnetwork.org/