Book review: Pulses of Abstraction: Episodes from a History of Animation

Andrew R Johnston’s Pulses of Abstraction: Episodes from a History of Animation makes a much-needed intervention in the study of cinema and animation. Claims that cinema is a subset of animation or subsumed by animation in the digital era tend to overlook the vicissitudes and variations that make up the history of animation. The ‘episodes’ that Johnston examines correct such overgeneralizations. These episodes center around artists working in the US during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and problematize conventional categorizations of their work: that it belongs to either the mechanical arts or the new media of information processing, or, likewise, that it belongs to either political modernism or formal experimentation. By locating this work in a history of animation, rather than experimental film, for instance, Johnston offers new descriptions of how artists register and shape changing understandings of time, information, and movement. The project effectively models a methodology that accounts for different media ecologies and technological and epistemological changes. While ‘abstraction’ is the through line for Johnston’s case studies, each chapter carefully maps the interrelatedness of the many aspects constituting a given assemblage. This includes phenomenological approaches to the aesthetics of technology and consideration of form as ideological in relation to modes of production. And it includes understanding media ecologies as dynamic, agential networks of humans and nonhumans. Importantly, Johnston’s approach does not homogenize distinct constellations, but brings into relief their similarities and differences. In his own words, ‘animation’s technical assemblages pulse in this fashion, changing with epistemological landscapes by acting both within and on them’ (p. 15). The book’s chapter titles, ‘Line’, ‘Color’, ‘Interval’, ‘Projection’, and ‘Code’, reflect this approach and support a related idea, namely, that instances of animation tend to revisit and re-open the basic components of cinema. Johnston’s first chapter establishes his method by examining the scratch films of Len Lye through their technicity, form, and social context. The chapter puts into dialogue an array of theorists, historians, and philosophers, including Sergei Eisenstein, Wilhelm Worringer, Clement Greenberg, Roland Barthes, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Donald Crafton, Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Through this multi-faceted dialogue, Johnston describes how Lye’s work expresses a ‘vitalistic energy’ that relies on traces of the artist’s gestural 1114368 ANM0010.1177/17468477221114368animation: an interdisciplinary journalBook review book-review2022