Gary Indiana


Gary Hoisington, known as Gary Indiana, was an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of "depraved indifference" that characterized American life at the millennium's end. In the introduction to the recently re-published edition of Three Month Fever, critic Christopher Glazek has coined the phrase 'deflationary realism' to describe Indiana's writing, in contrast to the magical realism or hysterical realism of other contemporary writing.

Background

Gary Hoisington was born in Derry, New Hampshire, on July 16, 1950. After a childhood rife with bullying and mistreatment, he left home when he was 16. He enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, but did not graduate. Hoisington later moved to San Francisco, and then Los Angeles; it was in LA in the early 1970s when he began using the name "Gary Indiana." In 1978, he moved to New York City.
On October 23, 2024, Indiana died from lung cancer at his apartment in the East Village of Manhattan, at the age of 74.

Writing

Indiana wrote, directed, and acted in a dozen plays, mostly during the early 1980s. He performed in small New York City venues like Mudd Club, Club 57, the Performing Garage and the backyard of Bill Rice's East 3rd Street studio. Earlier plays included Alligator Girls Go to College ; Curse of the Dog People ; A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, which was filmed by Michel Auder in 1981; The Roman Polanski Story ; Phantoms of Louisiana, and Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, written with Jack Smith for performance artist Ron Vawter. The latter was filmed in 1994 by Jill Godmilow.
In the early 1980s, Indiana contributed essays on mid-century art to Artforum and Art in America, which led to a position as the Village Voice's Art Critic from 1985 to 1988. A collection of Indiana's nonfiction writing, Let It Bleed: Essays, 1985–1995, was published in 1996.
A later play, Mrs. Watson's Missing Parts, was staged in May 2013 at Participant Inc. It drastically alters a 1922 Grand Guignol theatrical adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's novel The Torture Garden by replacing all dialogue with an "almost incomprehensible" obscenity-laden libidinal glossolalia.
In 2023, two of Indiana's books were reprinted, amid what could be considered a modern reappraisal of his work. His 1994 novel Rent Boy was reissued by McNally Jackson, under their McNally Editions imprint, and Semiotext reissued his 2003 novel Do Everything in the Dark.
In January 2025, Indiana's personal library was destroyed in the Eaton Fire.

Film

Indiana acted in several mostly experimental films by, among others, Michel Auder, Scott B and Beth B, Melvie Arslanian, Jackie Raynal, Ulrike Ottinger, Lothar Lambert, Dieter Schidor, Valie Export and Christoph Schlingensief. John Boskovich's 2001 film North features Indiana reading from the Céline novel of the same name.
Indiana's novel Gone Tomorrow reflects his experiences on set, particularly his time working on Cold in Columbia.
Speaking of his acting style generally, Indiana told an interviewer, "I wasn't trained, and 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."

Art

Indiana's video Stanley Park was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Combining footage of a former Cuban prison, the Panopticon-like Presidio Modelo, jellyfish, and cuts from the films Touch of Evil and The Shanghai Gesture, the work connects the consequences of global environmental degradation with increasingly repressive governmental practices. Used as a metaphor for state surveillance, the jellyfish was described by Indiana as "an organism with no brain and a thousand poisonous tentacles collecting what you could call data." Photographs of young Cuban men appeared next to the video.
Semiotext published 22 pamphlets for the biennial, including Indiana's A Significant Loss of Human Life, which extends the video's themes by juxtaposing the artist's experiences of Cuba as it is slowly being drawn into the global economy with commentary on the ideas of Karl Marx.
In addition to Stanley Park, publicly screened video art by Indiana includes Soap, inspired by the Francis Ponge poem; Plutot la vie, concerning the Society of the Spectacle and mass hypnosis; Unfinished Story, which records readings by and conversations between Indiana and photographer Lynn Davis; and Young Ginger.

Fiction

  • Scar Tissue and Other Stories
  • White Trash Boulevard
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  • Disorderly Conduct: The VLS Fiction Reader
  • '
  • Rent Boy
  • Living With the Animals
  • Resentment: A Comedy
  • Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story
  • Depraved Indifference
  • Do Everything in the Dark
  • The Shanghai Gesture
  • Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975–2010
  • To Whom It May Concern
  • ''Tiny Fish that Only Want to Kiss''

    Nonfiction

  • Lucas Samaras: Chairs and Drawings
  • Roberto Juarez
  • Life Under Neon: Paintings and Drawings of Times Square 1981–1988
  • Let It Bleed: Essays 1985–1995
  • Aura Rosenberg: Head Shots
  • Front Pages
  • Hunt Slonem: Exotica
  • Christopher Wool
  • Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You
  • Valie Export: Ob/De+Con
  • BFI Film Classics: Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom
  • BFI Film Classics: Viridiana
  • John Waters: Change of Life
  • The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt
  • Kathe Burkhart: Bad Girl: Works from 1983–2000
  • Paul Kostabi
  • Cameron Jamie
  • Utopia's Debris: Selected Essays
  • Paul Pfeiffer
  • Chaos and Night by Henry de Montherlant
  • Dike Blair: Now and Again
  • Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World
  • Roni Horn: Well and Truly
  • Coma by Pierre Guyotat
  • Dead Flowers
  • Bye Bye American Pie
  • Damián Aquiles
  • Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller
  • A Significant Loss of Human Life
  • Tracey Emin: Angel Without You
  • I Can Give You Anything But Love
  • Tal R: Altstadt Girl
  • Roni Horn
  • Ivory Pearl by Jean-Patrick Manchette
  • ''Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985–1988''

    Critical studies and essays on Indiana's work

  • Shopping in Space: Essays on American "Blank Generation" Fiction by Elizabeth Young, Graham Caveney
  • Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel by James Annesley
  • Christopher Glazek. "". Semiotext/Native Agents.
  • Sarah Nicole Prickett. LitHub.
  • Paul McAdory. " Gawker.
  • Harry Tafoya. " Substack.
  • Bailey Trela. " ''The Cleveland Review of Books.''