Gary Indiana
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- This page is about the person Gary Indiana. For the city, see Gary, Indiana.
Gary Indiana (real name, Gary Hoisington; born 1950) is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of numerous fiction and non-fiction books, including Do Everything in the Dark, Depraved Indifference, Rent Boy, Resentment, and Let It Bleed. His plays include "Roy Cohn/Jack Smith". His journalism has appeared in the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the London Review of Books. He is openly gay and lives in New York and Los Angeles.
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[edit] Fiction
Gary Indiana's fiction is directly contemporary, often incorporating aspects of real life criminal trials and investigations. He also appears to use thinly veiled accounts of his own life, as well as portraits of his contemporaries in his fiction. Gone Tomorrow for example seems to deal in part with his own history as a film actor, and with his experience of working with German director Dieter Schidor and other members of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's circle, though it is impossible to know to what extent events have been fictionalised.
While Three Month Fever is presented as an account of Andrew Cunanan, the man who murdered Gianni Versace, it uses fictional recreations of unknowable conversations and events to explore the nature of contemporary American obsession with celebrity and fame. More conventionally a novel, Resentment seems nevertheless to be an account, or perhaps a speculative exploration, of the case of California brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, convicted of the murder of their parents, though names and other details have been changed. This same method of a fictionalised account of real events can be found in Depraved Indifference, in which Indiana makes use of the case of Sante and Kenneth Kimes, mother-and-son con artists convicted of murdering heiress Irene Silverman. Again, names and details are changed, and this allows Indiana to explore matters such as masculinity, taboo, sexuality and violence.
Indiana seems to return to the raw material of his own life for Do Everything In The Dark, in which characters from earlier novels such as Horse Crazy and Gone Tomorrow return in older, perhaps more melancholic form.
The New York-based independent publishers Two Dollar Radio have announced via their blog that they will be publishing Indiana's next novel, The Shanghai Gesture[1]. The Shanghai Gesture is also the name of a 1941 film by Josef von Sternberg.
[edit] Non-fiction
In the early 1980s, Indiana established his name in art writing, despite a lack of formal education in art theory or practice. After writing several extended essays on, primarily, mid-century art for Art in America, Indiana joined the New York alternative weekly The Village Voice as art critic in 1985. This was a particularly influential position, given that the Voice was then one of only two New York newspapers that reviewed exhibitions while still hanging. It was at the Voice that Indiana's journalistic style — an intelligent but very personal blend of dark wit, penetrative observation and uncompromising honesty — came into its own, making him many admirers and a long list of enemies. Clear prose (notwithstanding a noted vocabulary) and a particular interest in the social and commercial context of art, set his work apart from much art writing in the period. However, the excesses and pressures of the booming 1980s art market led him to become increasingly unhappy in the position, and he left the paper in 1988.
He was largely to forego art criticism during much of the following period, concentrating instead on his literary work — his primary interest. But he has subsequently returned to art writing as a contributor to Artforum and to monographs on, among others, Cameron Jamie, Roberto Juarez and Nancy Chunn. Samples of his work for Art in America, the Voice and Artforum have been collected in the anthology Let It Bleed: Essays 1985–1995.
Today, Indiana writes on a wide variety of cultural phenomena, covering topics from art, literature and film to politics and the media. He has authored a study of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò for the British Film Institute, and in 2005 published The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt, an account of Arnold Schwarzenegger's election to the governorship of California and investigation into its broader cultural implications.
[edit] Film
Between 1979 and 1985, Indiana appeared as an actor in films by Dieter Schidor and others. His novel Gone Tomorrow reflects these experiences.
As a director, his first two feature films, Pariah (about Ulrike Meinhof) and Soap (based on a Francis Ponge poem), will be released soon. He has also written the script for The Impasse, a forthcoming Mike Hodges film starring Malcolm McDowell.
[edit] Bibliography
- Scar Tissue and Other Stories (1987) (short stories)
- White Trash Boulevard (1988) (short stories)
- Horse Crazy (1989)
- Gone Tomorrow (1993)
- Rent Boy (1994)
- Let It Bleed: Essays 1985 - 1995 (1996) (non-fiction)
- Resentment: A Comedy (1997)
- Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999) (non-fiction)
- Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom (2000) (non-fiction)
- Depraved Indifference (2002)
- Do Everything in the Dark (2003)
- The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt (2005) (non-fiction)
