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", "New York Magazine" and the "London Review of Books", among others. He lives in New York and Los Angeles.

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" [ [http://www.twodollarradio.blogspot.com/ El Radio ] ] . The Shanghai Gesture is also the name of a 1941 film by Josef von Sternberg.

Non-fiction

In the early 1980s, Indiana established his name in art writing, despite having no 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 still hanging. It was at the "Voice" that Indiana's journalistic style—an intelligent blend of dark wit, penetrative observation and uncompromising honesty—came into its own. Clear prose (notwithstanding a notable vocabulary) and a particular interest in the social and commercial context of art, set his work apart from much art writing in the period. The excesses and political pressure of the booming 1980s art market led him to become unhappy in the position, however, and he left the paper in 1988.

He was largely to forgo 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", among other publications from this period, 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. In July 2008, New York-based Basic Books published "Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World", Indiana's exploration of the iconic Andy Warhol exhibition of 1962, "32 Soup Cans". In November, the same publisher will bring out a fresh selection of essays, "Utopia's Debris: Selected Essays". Semiotexte/MIT Press is also slated to release a collection of Indiana's non-fiction work, "Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Selected Writings 1976-1994" [ [http://www.artswriters.org/grantee.php?id=43 The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant] ] .

Film

Indiana has acted in a number of films, several of them German. His novel "Gone Tomorrow" reflects his experiences on the set, particularly his time working on Dieter Schidor's 1985 film "Cold in Columbia".

Two films by Indiana have been in post-production for some time: "Pariah" (about Ulrike Meinhof) and "Soap" (based on the Francis Ponge poem) [ [http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=220&eid=333&section=essay The Criterion Collection] ] .

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)
*"Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World" (2008) (non-fiction)

Notes

External links

* [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1589/is_2002_Feb_19/ai_83375464 Interview with "The Advocate", 2002]
* [http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0206,press,32062,1.html Interview with "The Village Voice", 2002]
*imdb name|0408512
* [http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1349944,00.html Keith Ridgway on "Horse Crazy" in "The Guardian"]
* [http://www.mastersofcinema.org/bresson/TheNews.html#2005-10-29 Reader's letter to Masters of Cinema's "robert-bresson.com" site]
* [http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/indiana_content.html The Gary Indiana Papers at the Fales Library, New York University]