Critic Gary Indiana, 74

Gary Indiana, a writer whose acid musings on gallery shows and artists defined a era in art criticism, has died at 74. Frieze first reported his death on Thursday morning.

Indiana wrote novels, essays, and magazine columns, often bridging the gap between literary writing and criticism in the process. Although he was widely known as an art critic for the Village Voice during the mid-1980s, and even though he has continued to write literature and art criticism in the decades since, Indiana had by the beginning of the 21st century faded into relative obscurity, with many of his books going out of print. In a 2014 profile of Indiana, M. H. Miller dubbed him “one of the most woefully under appreciated writers of the last 30 years.”

But within the past decade, there has been what Tobi Haslett called an “Indiana renaissance.” Indiana’s novels are once again widely circulated, largely thanks to the publishing houses Seven Stories Press and Semiotext(e), and his criticism has been republished online and in essay collections after being largely inaccessible for many years.

When that essay collection was published, Zachary Fine wrote in Art in America, “Indiana has been at it for decades, and if contemporary literary and art criticism in America is often dismissed for its tendency toward meekness and puffery, then one solution might be for more critics to read Indiana.”

Indiana’s art, though even lesser known than his writing, has also received greater attention in the past decade after a video installation by him appeared in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

For many, however, Indiana will always be aligned with his period at the Village Voice, where he served as chief art critic from 1985 to 1988. The Voice was one of the few New York–based publications that regularly published reviews of gallery shows at the time, and one might have expected that Indiana would have continued that tradition. Instead, what he produced were columns that excoriated the art world for its obsession with power and social clout.

Sometimes, he obliquely wrote around exhibitions he was tasked with reviewing. “One review of a Julian Schnabel show was just a series of quotes culled from fashion magazines about Mr. Schnabel’s house and clothes, interspersed with reports of terrorist attacks and Stockholm Syndrome,” wrote Miller in his Gallerist NY profile of Indiana. Another involved comparing a Warhol “Mao” painting to “a gold American Express card being brandished at Zabar’s to pay for three bagels.”

According to that profile, while on the job, Indiana wrote a note to himself: “be bitchy.” The remark was emblematic of his writing more broadly.

And should there be any doubt about what Indiana thought of his own Village Voice columns, he once wrote that they were “a bunch of yellowing newspaper columns I never republished and haven’t cared about for a second since writing them a quarter century ago.”

Gary Hoisington was born in 1950 in Derry, New Hampshire. His father was a partial owner of a lumber company, his mother, the town clerk. When he was 16, he departed New Hampshire for California, with plans to study at the University of California Berkeley. He ended up bouncing around the country, living first in Boston, then in Los Angeles, where he took a day job as a paralegal and a night job at a movie theater. He changed his last name to Indiana, though he later said he ended up regretting the alias he concocted.

In 1978, Indiana moved to New York and began to write plays and films. But the money earned was not enough for him to pay off rent, so at a friend’s suggestion, he tried his hand at art criticism. He remained uncomfortable with the notion that he was a professional writer. Years later, in a 2023 T magazine interview, he described himself as a “talented amateur.”

“It took years to get people to stop writing about me as an art critic, which was something I never in a million years wanted to be in the first place, and I certainly didn’t consider myself an art critic in any conventional sense. I did it for two and a half years,” referring to his time spent at the Village Voice between 1985 and 1988. “That’s not much in a life as long as the one I’ve had.”

Although Indiana continued to write for art magazines such as Art in America and Artforum, he was also prolific as a novelist. His first novel, Horse Crazy, about an art critic in love with a mercurial younger man, was started while Indiana was still at the Voice and was published in 1989, after he left. The book has been praised for encapsulating the mode of 1980s New York, which was haunted by the AIDS epidemic and paranoia. William Boroughs compared it to the queer writings of Jean Genet, praising Horse Crazy as “fascinating to every man, no matter what his sexual tastes.”

Indiana went on to write a range of other novels, including 1999’s Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, a heavily stylized fictional retelling of the life of Gianni Versace’s murderer.

But Indiana’s writings were only one aspect of his career. He also acted in experimental films by the likes of Ulrike Ottinger, Michel Auder, and Valie Export, and he produced videos and photographs of his own. One of his videos focused on a prison in Cuba, the island nation where Indiana lived periodically over the course of 15 years, and featured shots of jellyfish, which Indiana described as animals “with no brain and a thousand poisonous tentacles collecting what you could call data.”

When that work, titled Stanley Park (2012–14) and shown on an arced LED screen, appeared in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Indiana also exhibited photographs of naked Cuban men, some in states of arousal, that he had slept with. Text overlaid on these images referred to voyeurism and the surveillance state.

Indiana has become a cult figure to many, but he did not seem much interested in the admiration he received. He spoke of his writing unglamorously, as though it were no big deal.

When T asked how he knew a piece was done, he said, “You just know. Nothing is ever completely finished, but I know when I get to the end of something that this is the last scene of the book, or this is the last shot of the video. It tells you: enough already.”