Gary Indiana is an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988.
Plays
Indiana has written, directed and acted in a dozen plays, mostly during the early 1980s. Performed in small New York City venues like Mudd Club, Club 57, the Performing Garage and the backyard of Bill Rice's East 3rd Street studio, the earlier plays included Alligator Girls Go to College ; Curse of the Dog People ; A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, which was filmed by Michel Auder in 1981; The Roman Polanski Story ; Phantoms of Louisiana and Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, written with Jack Smith for performance artist Ron Vawter. The latter was filmed in 1994 by Jill Godmilow. A more recent play, Mrs. Watson's Missing Parts, was staged in May 2013 at Participant Inc. It drastically alters a 1922 Grand Guignol theatrical adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's novel The Torture Garden by replacing all dialogue with an "almost incomprehensible" obscenity-laden libidinal glossolalia.
Film
Indiana has acted in several mostly experimental films by, among others, Michel Auder, Scott B and Beth B, Melvie Arslanian, Jackie Raynal, Ulrike Ottinger, Lothar Lambert, Dieter Schidor, Valie Export and Christoph Schlingensief. John Boskovich’s 2001 film North features Indiana reading from the Céline novel of the same name. Indiana's novel Gone Tomorrow reflects his experiences on set, particularly his time working on Cold in Columbia.
Art
Indiana's video Stanley Park was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Combining footage of a former Cuban prison, the Panopticon-like Presidio Modelo, jellyfish and cuts from the films A Touch of Evil and The Shanghai Gesture, the work connects the consequences of global environmental degradation with increasingly repressive governmental practices. Used as a metaphor for state surveillance, the jellyfish was described by Indiana as “an organism with no brain and a thousand poisonous tentacles collecting what you could call data.” Photographs of young Cuban men appeared next to the video. Semiotext published 22 pamphlets for the biennial, including Indiana's A Significant Loss of Human Life, which extends the video's themes by juxtaposing the artist's experiences of Cuba as it is slowly being drawn into the global economy with commentary on the ideas of Karl Marx. In addition to Stanley Park, publicly screened video art by Indiana includes Soap, inspired by the Francis Ponge poem; Plutot la vie, concerning the Society of the Spectacle and mass hypnosis; Unfinished Story, which records readings by and conversations between Indiana and photographer Lynn Davis; and Young Ginger
