Gary Indiana, a polymathic art critic, actor, visual artist, playwright, and novelist, died at 74. His writing, which has gained renewed popularity and a cult following in recent years, offers a critique of an era marked by American imperialism, financialization, and a significant shift in the art world.
Noting this change, Indiana's words documented the temper of the times but also announced what was to come many decades later. "Like everything else, the art world was becoming monetized to an unprecedented degree," he explained. However, what would follow would prove to be much more sinister and deviant. "2018 feels a lot like the mid-'80s, only worse—more terrifying, more depressing, more apocalyptic, and even more urgently in need of concerted political resistance."
Emerging first as an art critic in the 1980s, Indiana quickly adopted an attitude shaped by the belief that "having a million opinions about everything comes cheap and easy, whereas actually doing something can cost you quite a lot." This became his modus operandi for years as he uncompromisingly put his words out, unafraid of causing offense. The neoliberal art system needed a reckoning, and he unflinchingly threw his literary punches.
At the time, Indiana befriended cultural figures such as Susan Sontag, John Waters, and Cookie Mueller. Joining artistic circles, although he remained reserved throughout, gave him insight into how the power dynamics in the (art) world worked, and how it should be approached. "Whenever you think about power, you have to think in terms of symptoms." It was exactly these symptoms that he focused on—in Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, he examined themes of social alienation by looking at Gianni Versace's murderer, and in Horse Crazy, he delved into into the early days of AIDS, a crisis that would later devastate the East Village art scene. His topics ranged from Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California porn industry to book-length examinations of "depraved indifference" and disregard for human life as a permanent contemporary state in his best-known trilogy, including Resentment: A Comedy, Three Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference.
The 1980s was a decade marked by global financialization and Reaganism, leading to financial disasters, unrealized dreams, and global struggles that would spill into the following decades. This was all, as per mandate, reflected in the cultural output of the time. Identity politics began to emerge more strongly, as masculinity sought a return to what seemed like a dream of power and heroism (with Die Hard ruling the big screens at the time), and the feminist movement diversified and grew out of fashion among younger women. Artists compounded their visions into what would become a postmodern assemblage of fears and desires. American imperialism continued to militarize against progressive and socialist governments worldwide while grappling with a strained domestic economy. Amidst all this, Gary Indiana was writing about culture and art for The Village Voice. "Reagan was president, Communism was dead, and the idea of doing anything that didn't make money had begun to look ridiculous to most people," he would later reflect for Artforum.
During his time at The Village Voice, he wrote about East Village's rapidly changing art scene. The art produced revived the Romantic type: tortured, misunderstood, and male ("the artist was a wild and crazy misfit, tortured by inner demons, and so forth"). The storefront galleries, a new must-have of the neighbourhood, featured this neo-expressionism of art-world wannabes.
"Often these paintings depicted emaciated, punky-looking guys with their limbs twisted and bleeding from stab wounds, and when you saw the middle-class white kids making this art, mostly good-looking boys of about twenty whose parents lived in Greenwich, you had to laugh."
This "prefabricated angst" was, for Indiana, just a "vividly decorated used car," with artists joining the capitalist rat race of who would be included and who excluded from the financial gravy train quickly passing.
Besides reflecting on neo-expressionists' struggles, Indiana also noted their counterparts, the neo-conceptualists, and their constant affective vs. intellectual positioning. Amidst this East Village phenomenon, Indiana was working around the clock, and, as he later confessed, he was "very happy when it was over."
"...the forces that were driving the art world into a frenzy were the same ones pushing the country into a so-called free-market economy, into 'privatization' and 'deregulation' and the glamorization of greed; it was truly the Dickensian moment of post–World War II America, and the art world became, briefly, a site of inflammation..."
However, soon this inflammation subdued, and the stock-market crash in 1987 shifted the art center of America from Manhattan to Los Angeles. Indiana left The Village Voice in 1988, and his writings, collected in the 2018 Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985–1988, and later in 2022 in Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021, remain a strong testament to the artistic and intellectual void of a time ruled by greed and cruelty of the art world and its crumbling morals. Cumulatively, these essays reveal the pulse of the culture in general.
"I tried to take the art I was seeing seriously, on its own terms, but also to measure it against the wider world, and this upset people a good deal... my secret agenda was to learn how to enjoy describing the look of things, the plasticity of objects, and to place things in context."
Gary Indiana was born Gary Hoisington in Derry, New Hampshire, in 1950. Growing up gay in the 1950s and 1960s was a frightening experience, and this feeling of insecurity and abuse he suffered marked much of his early years. "You lived in constant danger of real violence," he once recalled.
He enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley when he was 16, only to drop out shortly thereafter. Following a short working stint in Los Angeles, he moved to New York in 1976 to start a career as an actor and playwright. He wrote and acted in plays such as Curse of the Dog People (1980) and The Roman Polanski Story (1981), and appeared in several No Wave films, including VALIE EXPORT's The Practice of Love (1985).
"I wasn't trained, and I certainly didn't have the technique of a professional. Directors would cast me because of the way I was, not what I could pretend to be," he later explained in an interview with The Paris Review. "I had—and this maybe had something to do with how much I drank—a quality of demonic abandon."
His writing career started with pieces in Artforum and Art in America and continued in 1985 at The Village Voice, where he worked as an art critic until 1988. "I fell into art criticism late in 1983 and jumped out of it in 1988, and my subsequent lack of engagement with the art world has been more or less total." During this time, he also published two collections of short stories (Scar Tissue and Other Stories, 1987, and White Trash Boulevard, 1988), and would continue to publish novels throughout his life. Besides occasional columns and longer pieces for Artforum and Vice, his other fiction includes Rent Boy (1994) and Do Everything in the Dark (2003). Among his published nonfiction are books on Tracey Emin, Dike Blair, and Andy Warhol. In 2014, his video, Stanely Park, which examines the link between environmental destruction and governmental policies, was shown at the Whitney Biennial.
Immersed in the writings of the Frankfurt School, Marx, Engels, Fanon, and other radical thinkers, Indiana noticed that American society was deeply flawed and in need of change. This sentiment translated into his writings, with his astute and brash approach, focusing on the cultural aspects of the time more than the artworks he saw. He reflected on this in the introduction to Vile Days in 2018: "The primary task was to cover exhibitions, but much of the art being made in the '80s dealt with the world beyond four walls of a gallery, and it seemed perfectly natural to blend art criticism with commentary on the state of things."
"Anyway, I took note—insistent note—of what was going on. ...what I actually cared about was the writing itself—how to connect the ostensible subject with the nature of the time we were living through...how to convey what being alive in that moment was like."
The impact and importance of Gary Indiana and his writing is yet to be researched and celebrated in full. Vividly describing an era, he also noted the direction culture is taking today, reflecting on its negative aspects, both past and present. Lanky, nervous, and intellectual, he is essential reading for anyone wanting a glimpse into a commercialized culture in ruin.
Described as "an acerbic pixie with a great streak of humanity" by his photographer friend Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, who made numerous portraits of him, Indiana never considered himself a proper art critic, which his divergences into general cultural considerations prove. As his longtime editor Ira Silverberg explained, the art writing "made him a star in a world he hated—the amped up, hyper-capitalist art world." Instead, he was "a Marxist at heart, and he retreated into fiction."
Although he became a revered figure in art criticism, his view of himself remained modest to the end. "I call myself a 'talented amateur,'" he reflected for the New York Times in 2023. "I like to think I brought a breath of scandal, suspense, and fresh air to a period and a place, that I punctured a few follies and got things better than right at least part of the time, and I especially like to think I bailed out at exactly the right moment—that leisurely half hour before the aircraft hit the ground."