Gary Indiana, the prickly polymath with a dozen lives and careers to his name, has died. He was 74.
A fearsome art critic for The Village Voice, a longtime theater and avant-garde filmmaker, a formidable thinker, and a brilliant prose stylist, Indiana was known as a vanguard member of New York’s downtown bohemian demimonde. But he lived in and wrote about countercultures in LA, Cuba, and Europe.
His novels, including 1989’s Horse Crazy and 2003’s Do Everything in the Dark, explored the spikier side of the artist’s way. In the 1980s, he unflinchingly depicted a city decimated by the AIDS crisis. But he was never sentimental about life on the margins.
Later books explored friendships tanked and tainted by jealousy, thwarted and fulfilled ambition, and all the other unglamorous heartaches and disappointments that attend creative labor. In other novels, he applied this canny gaze to genre.
In a Paris Review “Art of Fiction” interview, the writer Tobi Haslett celebrated Indiana’s scope. “Indiana’s fictions take many forms—true crime, picaresque, noir, lament—but all are driven by the engine of his ruthless sensibility.”
Haslett also described the author, who cut an instantly recognizable figure when out and about, as “a mix of prince and punk.”
In a forward to Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021, the essayist Christian Lorentzen praised Indiana’s moral clarity. “His work connects the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries in ways readers and critics are only beginning to apprehend,” he said, of Indiana’s political writing.
And as for that inimitable style? “There is acid in everything Indiana writes, but it is of the sort that acts as a purifying agent, eliminating adulterants, euphemisms, phony received wisdom. His essays are humane to the core.”
On social media, authors and fans from Olivia Laing to Ryan Ruby eulogized the iconoclast, who—despite self-describing as a “talented amateur”—was always at work. When he wasn’t writing plays, Indiana was taking photographs. He was working on a new novel as of last spring.
Several of Indiana’s books were recently reissued by Seven Stories Press, Semiotext(e), and McNally Editions. And if you haven’t already, you should really pick one up.
RIP, Gary.
Image via, Timothy Greenfield Sanders, Portrait of Gary Indiana (1987)
