Gary Indiana (born Gary Hoisington; 1950) is 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.
Plays
Indiana has written, directed and acted in a dozen plays, mostly during the early 1980s. 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 (1979); Curse of the Dog People (1980); A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking (1980), which was filmed by Michel Auder in 1981; The Roman Polanski Story (1981); Phantoms of Louisiana (1981) and Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (1992), written with Jack Smith for performance artist Ron Vawter. The latter was filmed in 1994 by Jill Godmilow.
A more recent 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.
Film
Indiana has acted in several mostly experimental films by, among others, Michel Auder (Seduction of Patrick, 1979, which he co-wrote with the director), Scott B and Beth B (The Trap Door, 1980), Melvie Arslanian (Stiletto, 1981, where he plays a bellhop at the bellhopless Chelsea Hotel), Jackie Raynal (Hotel New York, 1984), Ulrike Ottinger (, 1984, with Veruschka as Dorian Gray and Delphine Seyrig as Doctor Mabuse), Lothar Lambert (Fräulein Berlin, 1984), Dieter Schidor (Cold in Columbia, 1985), Valie Export (The Practice of Love, 1985) and Christoph Schlingensief (Terror 2000: Intensivstation Deutschland, 1994, in which Udo Kier kills his character with a machine gun). 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 (2013) 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(e) 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 (2004–2012), inspired by the Francis Ponge poem; Plutot la vie (2005), concerning the Society of the Spectacle and mass hypnosis; Unfinished Story (2004–2005), which records readings by and conversations between Indiana and photographer Lynn Davis; and Young Ginger (2014)
Bibliography
Fiction
(1987) Scar Tissue and Other Stories
(1988) White Trash Boulevard
(1989) Horse Crazy
(1991) Disorderly Conduct: The VLS Fiction Reader (contributor) (1993) Gone Tomorrow (1994) Rent Boy (1994) Living With the Animals (editor, contributor) (1997) Resentment: A Comedy (1999) Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (2002) Depraved Indifference (2003) Do Everything in the Dark (2009) The Shanghai Gesture (2010) Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975–2010 (2011) To Whom It May Concern (limited edition artist's book with Louise Bourgeois) (2016) Tiny Fish that Only Want to Kiss