The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art Scholarship Garoian, Charles R. (2013). The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice. Albany: State University of New York Press. 186 pages. ISBN 978-1-4384-4547-2.It might seem strange that I would begin a review of one book by considering another, but after reading Charles R. Garoian's The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice, it does not feel strange at all. In fact, it seems like the very that Garoian would want me to do: to extend into and forge a connection with ideas from elsewhere in order to understand differently the one at hand. First: to the book that is not the subject of this review, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin (2008, Expanded Edition), and a story told by its author, Lawrence Weschler. In Chapter Seven, Weschler recalls an afternoon that he spent at the Philadelphia Museum in the company of one of Robert Irwin's dot paintings. Standing before the painting, he was joined momentarily by a couple, one of whom (a young woman) gestured disapprovingly toward the painting and said, See, this is what I mean.Her companion smiled knowingly.She was, recalls Weschler, sick and tired of having museum walls cluttered with empty white canvas(p. 95). Leaving within moments of arriving, the couple, he says, literally not seen a thing (p. 95). Weschler asks: What might have happened if they had stopped for long enough and taken time with the work? How might they have been made different by it, if they had opened themselves to its possibilities?To open oneself to the possibilities of a work is precisely the position that one needs to take with Garoian's The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art. It is a rich, complex, and demanding book that has the potential to take its readers to places where other thinking practices become possible. Because it is a book that refuses to be known for once and for all, no review-no matter how extensive or lengthy-could ever represent the many ideas that Garoian pursues in it and the complexity with which he takes them up. It is for this reason that my review will focus on some concepts that resonated with me-concepts that I think are important for those of us who live precariously with art and its possibilities. First, however, I wish to comment briefly on the broad scope of the book.As the title suggests, The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art is an inquiry into how the trope of prosthesis can be put to work to theorize art and its conditions, including its pedagogical potentiality. For Garoian, the trope proves to be particularly productive for thinking about what art does in the contexts in which it finds and in the discourses through which it appears, differently each time. In the opening chapter, Garoian theorizes the prosthetic space of art alongside Henri Lefebvre's philosophy of space. He finds Lefebvre's concepts of perceived, conceived, and lived social spaces and the dialectical relation between all three to be particularly productive for his project. In the chapters that follow, he considers further the prosthetic space of art and its potentialities alongside the work of several other thinkers as well as in different practice contexts (the classroom, museum, research site, and studio) and across a range of discursive sites. For Garoian, the prosthetic space of art is an emergent space, never given, always possible, but never fully achievable. It seems that the prosthetic space of art Is always caught up in its own possibility of becoming possible in a way similar perhaps to what Jacques Derrida (1978) described as the yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself (p. 293). The possibility of becoming possible is an idea that seems to be infused throughout the entire book even though it is never explicitly introduced to the reader. This idea has the potential to move the current debate about the relation between contemporary art practice and K-12 art education in new directions, hence, the value of Garoian's book in this regard. …