Gary Indiana is the author of eight novels and hundreds of essays that revel in the seedier depravities of American decline: murder, fraud, incest, obsession. In his 1989 debut, “Horse Crazy,” Indiana revives Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” (1912) in Lower Manhattan, where a writer not unlike the author falls for a young artist who may or may not be hustling him. His trilogy of crime novels, “Resentment” (1997), “Three Month Fever” (1999) and “Depraved Indifference” (2002), borrows material from the high-profile murder cases of the Menendez Brothers; Andrew Cunanan (who killed Gianni Versace); and the grifter Sante Kimes, elevating the New Journalism of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer to postmodern carnivalesque. For much of his career, aside from a brief stint in semi-obscure prominence as the staff art critic of The Village Voice from 1985 to 1988, Indiana’s writing has eluded the attention of the mainstream literary establishment. But at 72, he has found a new audience. In May, Semiotext(e) will reissue “Do Everything in the Dark” (2003), Indiana’s mordant depiction of the New York art world aging into a new millennium, and “Rent Boy” (1994), his noir about a male prostitute who becomes an unwitting accomplice to an organ harvesting scheme, was brought back into print by McNally Editions in January. Now he’s at work on his first new novel in over a decade.
Today, Indiana may be best known for his fiction, but he has always been a polymath. After moving to New York from California in 1978, he quickly gravitated to the experimental theater scene downtown. Under the direction of his friend and mentor Bill Rice, Indiana staged plays at the Performing Garage, the Mudd Club, La MaMa theater, Club 57, the Kitchen and other mostly defunct venues in cahoots with such artists as Jack Smith, Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz, Jackie Curtis, Taylor Mead and Alice Neel, while also acting in films at the fringes of the No Wave and New German cinemas. Indiana’s work as a photographer and video artist, which he has exhibited at New York’s Participant Inc. and Envoy Enterprises, and 356 Mission in Los Angeles, as well as in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, foregrounds the troubling human tendency to conflate representation and experience via impressionistic travelogues, Warholian screen tests, remediated images from Hollywood classics and playful juxtapositions with the natural world.
Snow had been falling all day when I arrived at Indiana’s sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village, where he has lived and worked since 1988. The apartment was warm enough for Indiana to wear a purple T-shirt decorated with a mug shot of Prince. Heat screamed through the pipes, but this didn’t faze him: He’s learned to block out the noise. Surrounded by thousands of books and little else, we talked about the “artisanal process,” as Indiana calls it, that he has navigated across 40 years of handwritten pages that resemble, to their author, “bizarre maps of some alternate reality: lines drawn, scribbled under, over, between and in the margins.”
How do you feel about new generations of readers discovering your work?
I’m very happy about it. I think these books are reaching the audience that they’re meant for. I never got a particularly gracious reception in the literary world when they were first published, and now they’re being more widely read and respected from a literary point of view, especially the crime books. I deliberately chose to base them loosely on cases that had already been shoved down the garbage disposal, but they had a lot of resonance for me in that they were so symptomatic of America at the time that they happened. They were never written to be sold in airports, and the people who are reading them now understand that in a way that was not understood when the books came out.