Still of Maya Deren from her film Meshes of the Afternoon
For a moment I felt an intense flashback to my college days: I walked into the auditorium, took my seat, and was handed a five-page handout listing slides and films that would be shown (complete with a bibliography for the lecture). A reporter's notebook seemed suddenly small for the note-taking task.
John Hanhardt's series, "The Media Arts: A History," tracks a single mode of art over its evolution: film, video art, multimedia, new media. His focus on moving images—whether in the form of 16 mm film or DVD installation—resists an interdisciplinary approach to visual art. Contemporary artists flit from genre to genre, producing work in increasingly mixed and inconstant modes; Hanhardt focuses strictly on new media works.
Hanhardt had run through a page's worth of slides and short clips, highlighting works by Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage (among other early advents of film within a visual art context) when he produced an image from Ricky Leacock's Primary (1960). A cinéma vérité documentary film about the 1960 Wisconsin primary contest between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, Primary is a debatable choice for inclusion in a history of "avant-garde film and installation art from 1943 to 1975"—the movie is a fairly straightforward documentary. Hanhardt explains that Leacock's film marked a great formal innovation in the genre: Leacock recorded the film using a small personal camera and a sync sound recorder. It was a one-man operation, paving the way for the kind of pound-the-pavement reporting widely seen today. But Leacock's film had ramifications for film artists, not merely for film journalism.
Hanhardt's stills and clips, selected from an early era of film art, seemed to fall into three groups. Brakhage and Deren belong to an early experimental period, during which artists explored the nature and physical material of the film itself. Hanhardt suggested that this was an international trend, citing as an example Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film, Les Carabiniers, in which a film-viewing character tries to intervene in the film he's seeing on screen. This work cleared the ground for structuralists such as George Landow, Michael Snow, and Paul Sharits, who examined the way that film is consumed—the experience of the viewer during viewing. This work even led to the development of structuralist film theaters like the Anthology Film Archives. Those artists make up the formalists; another major thread within this era revolved around radical content. Viet Nam was a principal theme for artists such as Carolee Schneeman and Nick Macdonald.
Hanhardt resists the distinction between the kinds of films you see at a theater and the sort you find in a museum. Hard categorization between film and video art misses the fact that film artists are influenced by and respond to concepts and innovations in both realms. The fine art video art tradition owes work made in the commercial realm, and vice versa. Hanhardt argues that, in order to provide an accurate context for new media arts, formal and radical works should be linked rather than separated. Certainly art historians tend to cite formal developments, and a certain type of formal development, to the exclusion of radical content.
John Hanhardt is the Consulting Senior Curator for Film and Media Arts at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The last installment, "Contemporary Video and Multimedia Art Practices: A Critical Survey (1990-2006)," will take place on Tuesday, June 5, at the museum's McEvoy Auditorium.
