John G. Hanhardt has been working as a consulting curator on film and media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). He’s had an influential career as one of the pioneering curators of media art in North America, helping shape the way museums look at and receive new media within their galleries and collections -- all stemming from his perspective of film’s influence on art and culture in the 20th Century.

Hanhardt grew up in Rochester, NY and gained a love of film from frequenting the archives of the George Eastman House. At the University of Rochester he earned a B.A. studying linguistics, and nearly went to the University of Michigan to earn a masters degree in the emerging field of psycho-linguistics. Instead, his passion for film prevailed and took him to the University of Southern California to study film production. After a semester he returned east to study the history, theory, and criticism of film in NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies, where he earned an M.A.

DCist had the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Hanhardt to review his career, find out what brings him to Washington, and gain his perspective on certain issues facing new media in American art.

I read that your first job was at the Walker Arts Center in 1974.
The Walker is a great contemporary art museum. I had the opportunity to develop and run a program that established a film study collection and connected to the community at large.

How did you connect to the community at large?
We worked with the local film society and other people showing films. When filmmakers were brought to the community we’d plug them into the University or a high school to do a workshop and make them available to the community as a resource.

How did you end up returning to New York?
From my success [at the Walker] I was offered a position to take over the film program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. One of the things that I am very proud of is I essentially introduced installations to all of the exhibition spaces in the museum, and I expanded the program to embrace video and performance. My goal was to fully integrate all forms of the moving image. So, in the course of 20 years I did all the biennials and placed film as installation, video, single channel video, performance, and theatrical film in those biennials. It became a means to see the moving image alongside the other arts.

Those are often found in separate categories and I know there some are willing to keep them separate. What gave you the forethought to put them together?
I have always linked the history of cinema to all the practices that followed. Fundamentally, we are a media culture. It is how we do everything: express ourselves, shop, etcetera. While there are differences in media within those various practices, they are connected. I argue that art history of the 20th Century will be reviewed in terms of the moving image, which has changed how we make art and how we see art in the 20th Century.

Its history is in the cinema. Ironically ... you see fewer films shown in museums and more installation. So, with the [movement] in the art world toward installation, there is a tendency to forget the single channel video or the theatrical forms of film.

Which films have museums given up on?
The great history of classical cinema. The great traditions of storytelling. Vanguard forms of filmmaking – not only in the West, but globally. It is important to see this internationally, as well as across genre and discipline: from the great masters like Hitchcock and Bergman, to the avant garde, independent, documentary and experimental.

Why did you move over to the Guggenheim?
I was getting to the point where I wanted to change and think more globally. So, I was invited to join the Guggenheim as a senior curator and develop its global collection. Some of the programs I did with my associate curator, Maria Christina Villasenor, were exhibitions that broke out of the box of national cinemas and genre by saying, "Lets look at Mexican avant garde film in relationship to film from the United States. Let’s mix it up!" Because that’s the way artists always think, and that’s the way ideas move. These rigid channels the art world composes are ridiculous. We also did a big exhibition of AIDS activist videos, which were really important because they were community made video tapes about this devastating sickness of AIDS and how communities were responding to it. It was just as vital to the innovation and breaking out of form that media can do.

What brought you to D.C.?
I’d been at the Guggenheim for ten years. I recently became more and more interested in working with archives and writing. The art world is changing. The great alternative space movement and the great public support at the federal and state levels dried up. We are relying more and more on the market place. There are a lot of changes happening in the culture industry, and pressures on museums. What intrigued me about the Smithsonian is that it’s very accessible to people from around the country, it’s free of charge, and it has a new audience. SAAM wants to engage fully late 20th Century art and contemporary art. And, I’ve begun an oral history program with The Archives of America Art, interviewing artists about the moving image.

As a consultant to the museum, I did that four part lecture series [between May and June] and I’m going to be doing some screenings this coming season. I am organizing a section of the journal American Art on a subject from screen to gallery, in terms of the installation. And, I’m bringing the strongest national collection of single channel artist video tapes, which will be interesting to integrate into our galleries.

I attended two of those lectures. Are you interested in doing those again if you had the opportunity?
I love doing them. Betsy Bruin, director of SAAM, would like me to do it again. I also have another series that I’d like to put together.

NPR had a story recently about how to preserve new media as museum pieces. Hi-8 erodes. TVs burn out. The question was if the work should be preserved digitally – transferred from film to DVD, for instance. Which is more important, is it the specific medium that new media is created with, or is it the final output of that media, like the projection or display?
This is a large and complicated issue that is as much a challenge in media as it has been with other non-conventional artist materials. They don’t make Dan Flavin’s light tubes anymore. How do you preserve that kind of light? It’s like stained glass! These materials no longer exist. How do we maintain the original?

I think while the artists are still with us we should interview them to understand how their work was made, how they wanted their work to be shown, what they saw as the limits of their presentation, and we should do our best to preserve and maintain the original and make copies that adhere as much to it. I do believe that there is a quality to the original medium that is integral to what it is.

But, I also realize that the digital world is expanding. I’m involved in a project called Reframe led by Review Media in New York, that wants to make artist video available through Amazon.com for download. It is a wonderful idea and I am absolutely in favor of it. It may be the roll of museums as conservators to show film as film in their theaters. But, maybe that experience will not be preserved everywhere. Instead, you can download and have a knowledge of video and the moving image accessible, and I think that is absolutely essential. It’s great to talk about film as film, but it is important to see it. It should be as accessible as a paperback. It is the complexity of visual culture and its history being made current and reworked. We shouldn’t put the brakes on availability because it is not being shown exactly as it should be. Well, if you only want your work shown that way, only as you intended, that’s fine. But it’d be great to have it available always. I think we can be very sophisticated in how we understand and how we present it.

Recently the film world lost Bergman and Antonioni. Who is out there producing film or video that has the same mastery of touch as those two?
It’s an interesting question since both came out of a particular European place in terms of cinema, which is unlike independent film in the United States or commercial cinema. It was a cinema in between that enjoyed the support for a variety of reasons. In terms of the great figures who are still alive, that should receive that kind of recognition, ranges from Michael Snow to Bill Viola and Gary Hill.

The great answer to that question is we are all saying this about these two but we didn’t say it about Brakhage. When Stan Brakhage died I don’t think he made the front page of the New York Times. His impact and understanding of the media I think is unparalleled. I feel that he was one of the great modernists and will be seen as one of the great figures in the history of the moving image. There is an issue on how history changes our perception of the work. There are a lot of aspects of film history that are going to be totally forgotten.

Such as...
Well, I wonder about a lot of the things our culture maintains. As we look at things more globally, some histories come forward as other histories recede. In the west, centuries are important units of time for us to measure our understanding of the past. Here we are beginning a new millennium; it is 2007. How we thought of 1807 in 1907 is how we think of 1907 today. How are we going to see the past in relationship to our present, and the enormous changes that are happening in our media culture, which was shaped by the invention of cinema in the late 19th Century? The single biggest impact, gradually becoming more visible, is the impact of film on painting, sculpture, photography -- everything. We really haven’t fully understood the history of the moving image and its place in art history, or in museums where art history is represented. How do you then represent the moving image and integrate it into the gallery space?

How do you approach defining a difference between contemporary media that covers popular culture and the media that defines fine art. Do you separate the boundaries?
The tradition of film studies has been devoted to the history of classical theatrical cinema, from Griffith to Bergman, let’s say. Those history books usually have documentary, the avant garde and international cinema as side bars to the main history of the advance of cinema in the 20th Century – which is largely written from a US perspective. [Fine] art historian’s privileging of US-European art history is largely grounded in painting and sculpture. In fine art’s side bar we have the avant garde film, animation, documentary, performance, and installation. This discourse is mirrored in the academy, so you have these disciplines organized in terms of what people can write about, study, or support. The issue is for film historians to embrace the side bar of art history and for art historians to embrace the side bar of film history, and for both historians to understand the relationship between classical cinema and classical art.

To question if documentary is art or if traditional narrative is… I’ve always felt it is important to break out of this prison house of these disciplines and to see it the way it can and should be seen. When I was at the Whitney it was important, in terms of multiculturalism, to see the multiple histories that are very important: African American, Asian American, Native American, and Latino work. These are fantastic histories that form and shape what is American, also in terms of gender and sexuality, queer work, pushing the envelope of what we understand and how we represent ourselves. If we look at all of that, I think the issue is how to understand traditions of the past. At the same time, how we break out of it will give a new history to understanding the present.