Gary Indiana, Acerbic Novelist and Critic, has Died Aged 74

Gary Indiana, the novelist, playwright and critic who rose to prominence in the art world as a writer for the Village Voice in the 1980s, has died aged 74.

Born Gary Hoisington in Derry, New Hampshire in 1950, Indiana briefly studied at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out to pursue a career in 'narrative porn'. After living among drug addicts in a rundown Los Angeles made famous by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Indiana moved to New York City in 1978, where he became an actor and playwright in the downtown theatre and cinema scenes.

From 1985 to 1988, Indiana served as an acerbic, fearsome art critic for the Village Voice, at once elevating the underrated and skewering the well-established. His commentary was informed yet personal, and it drew an intense readership for his reflections on the political and social situation facing artists at the time. ‘I was lucky to have a public voice in those faraway days,’ he later recalled. ‘Of course, the primary task was to cover exhibitions, but much of the art being made in the ’80s deal with the world beyond four walls of a gallery, and it seemed perfectly natural to blend art criticism with commentary on the state of things.’

His tenure at the Voice ended around the time of the publication of his first novel, Horse Crazy, about an obsessive, doomed romantic relationship during the AIDS crisis, which would destroy much of Indiana’s East Village, including Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, both of whom photographed him; Cookie Mueller; and David Wojnarowicz. By then, Indiana felt the art world he had entered as a critic was fast disappearing. ‘Too many esteemed local talents had acquired an insulating crust of uncritical coterie worship.’ He would never again review art with the same regularity and turned much of his attention to fiction and long-form essays and columns on individual artists and topics ranging from the perils of visiting Disneyland Paris to the Battle of Grozny (1999–2000). While a less active art critic, he still contributed regularly to Artforum and Vice, where he wrote brilliantly about the Obama era. 

In 1997, Indiana published Resentment: A Comedy, the first in his trilogy of crime novels. Based on the trial of Lyle and Erik Menéndez, Resentment represented an important development in Indiana’s fiction, as he tackled the American malaise of the 1990s and media frenzy for ‘true crime’. It was followed by Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999), which novelized the final days of Gianni Versace’s killer; and Depraved Indifference (2001), a bleak portrait of murder and incest.

‘There is acid in everything Indiana writes,’ Christian Lorentzen wrote for Jacobin in 2022, ‘but it is of the sort that acts as a purifying agent, eliminating adulterants, euphemisms, phony received wisdom.’ Physically quite small, his written voice was thunderous and quaking – at times even brutal in its refusal to play nicely with sacred cows in art and literature. (‘Like Voltaire, he doesn’t stand very high from the ground,’ Tobi Haslett observed in N+1.)

Indiana’s final novel, The Shanghai Gesture, appeared in 2009, followed by two collections of short stories and plays in the mid-2010s, a memoir in 2015, as well as a much-vaunted selected essays, Fire Season, in 2022. In his last years, Indiana published less often, though new pieces were often met with huge enthusiasm by a growing new fan base, which saw him as a deeply underrated American voice. He also turned his attention to photography and film, which he saw as extensions of his practice as a writer, mounting exhibitions at American Fine Arts in 2002, Participant, Inc. in 2013, Envoy Enterprises in 2015, 365 Mission Road in 2015 and Galerie Pepe in 2024. 'I think everything for me is a form of writing,' he told The Los Angeles Times. 'It's a form of tracking my own consciousness and my own experience of the world in some way.'

While many of his books were eventually reissued, Indiana was circumspect about reputation and fame; it was fame which had destroyed the careers of many great artists in the 1980s and ’90s. He spent much of his final years living between Cuba, Los Angeles and New York, the city he was always most closely associated with. 

In 2024, Indiana published one of his final pieces, ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’, a widely celebrated meditation on ageing and a swansong to youth, in Granta. It also reflected on the hardship of illness, ‘as decades of mishaps and malfunctions befalling the bag of water and bones you inhabit add up to an irreversible mess.’ He adds that ‘the sensation of chaos overmasters the most painstaking displays of order.’ In this, ageing and mortality were not so alien a subject matter for a writer who seldom shied from chaos, whether in art, politics or living.

^{Main image: Gary Indiana, author photo. Courtesy: Seven Stories Press; photograph: Hedi El Kholti}