Gary Indiana
WE ARE TALKING WITH GARY INDIANA.
GI: I think that the replication of things from the past has a lot to do with everything we’re going through—I picture it just as a lot of stunned survivors coming out of an airplane crash and holding up pictures as if to say, This is where I’m coming from, or This is what I saw before. It’s like grown-up kids kind of signaling their childhood to each other: This is what I saw when I was growing up, and this is what I have in my head that I saw in a magazine or I saw in a museum or. . . .
IS: One of the things we’ve been talking about is how long a life many more people can expect to live today, with the general life expectancy being so high. But then I read the obituaries last night in Life magazine, and one other place, Time. It’s incredible because people are something like 94, 89, 87, 92, and then 35, 37—there’s this jump, have you noticed it? Every time you read obituaries.
LS: Well, in the Times obituary page now they put the age of the person right under their name, which is a totally new thing.
IS: Yes, it happened—
GI: It’s a euphemism.
LS: You know, you start looking and the age tells you whether it’s an AIDS death. A question: do you think it’s soothing or disturbing, in other words, to have the age there? I mean I see the obituary page now with more intensity than I did before.
IS: Me too. But do you mean soothing or numbing?
LS: Well, both. In other words, what effect does the obituary page have on you?
IS: For me personally, putting the ages in is the opposite of numbing.
LS: You know the old, “I looked at it, and my name wasn’t there, so I was happy.” Is it the opposite, then?
IS: For me it’s the opposite of numbing. I think of it as angering—
GI: I would say exactly the same thing. And I would say for sure, I think it’s better that they’re putting the numbers. It’s important for people like us to be angry at this moment, and it’s important eventually to find a way to do something with that anger, and I would also have to say that I feel very much as you do. I’m always afraid when I get another rush of anger and frustration that I’m doing things in my life that I’m doing because I don’t know what to do with the other, because I feel rage most of the time when I pick up the obituaries and when I read these little articles in the front of the Times that are couched in the most horrific terms. I’m much more keenly aware of certain things now than ever, I guess because I feel very defensive just as a gay man, or I should say as a gay person.
One terrible thing about this epidemic is that it has taken away the concept of having one’s own death, and made thousands of deaths into this kind of generic tragedy which is really not even perceived as a tragedy by the culture at large, which is pretty horrifying to begin with. But it’s brought me up this close when maybe in a different period it wouldn’t have been that close at this time in my life.
GI: My grandmother’s house had old things, things that had been treasured and valued, old china, old flatware, old things that had a lot of presence. My parents’ generation I think disliked all of that old stuff, and they didn’t want to be reminded about it. And so everything that they adopted themselves was new, because I think consciously or unconsciously they’d been told that they were living in the greatest country the world had ever known, they’d just won this world war, money was coming, affluence, and everything was supposed to be new suddenly. And all the things of the past, all the things that had a history of touch, that had a history in just touching them, had to be put away. I know my parents despised my grandparents’ things. They never valued them. And then these other objects that accumulated in the ’50s and ’60s were all made of these very unsensuous materials like plastic and so on, cathode tubes, and things like that somehow don’t have—they have pathos, but they don’t have history in them somehow.
I like beginnings and I think I like endings too. It’s middles that I have trouble with.
GI: I have to say that architecture gives me the creeps, and I also think it would be a horrible profession to be in because you would have to be constantly surrounded by things that you didn’t make. I mean just walking down the street would drive you up the wall. For me, it would be like living in a bookstore all day.
I just saw this new movie, Throw Momma from the Train, about writer’s block. This man is teaching a writing class to adults. You can tell from the beginning that it’s a kind of remedial writing class. The people aren’t really writers at all and they’re probably never going to really be writers. The interesting thing to me about this movie is the ending of it—by the end of the movie a lot of things have happened to even the minor characters, and one of them is this one guy whose idea of writing a book was to list the hundred women that he wanted to fuck. Earlier, when he was challenged by the teacher, he said Well it’s a coffee-table book, you have the photographs and probably a little biographical information, it’s a coffee-table book. By the end of the movie, of course, you see that this object has come to be a real object in the world. And in fact that’s now more the idea that people have of what a book is than a novel by Henry James. I know that all the romantic relationships to concepts about things like that that I grew up with are all superannuated now.
I think the first thing I wrote about art per se was about John Chamberlain and that’s something that goes right back to my childhood because he was one of the very first contemporary people whose work I saw. Where I grew up, in New Hampshire, an incredible example of art was that my uncle Leo drew a perfect portrait of his collie, which actually was wonderful. It was the first artwork I really appreciated. So you see how nothing changes as you get older.
My decision to stop doing theater plays was a very pragmatic one, partially dictated by the times. I was probably the next person that was going to be let into the grant club for doing theater at the point when Reagan started to cut the NEA back. So far we had done all my plays with money that I had raised personally from people. And I just couldn’t face the prospect of having to do that for several more years. If you don’t have money for five or six or seven years, if you don’t have any money whatsoever, you get tired. And Ross Bleckner said, Okay, now you have a choice, you can putz around for the rest of your life or you can decide on one thing you want to do—because I was such a dilettante in a way—and don’t do anything else for three years and see what happens. And that’s sort of how things went. I could see all kinds of different scenarios if, let’s say, the few times when I was much younger I hadn’t been paralyzed by rejection slips. The first couple that I got were so devastating that I just never submitted anything to magazines, I never tried to. If the Village Voice job hadn’t come along, I certainly would never in a million years have solicited it. And when it did come along I was probably more surprised than many surprised people. It never even occurred to me that anybody would put that kind of power in my hands.
LS: Do you prefer writing about imbalances?
GI: Well. I like to paint a slightly different picture. For instance, I get a lot of fun out of writing, without knowing it, about the same thing the Times has written about, and coming up with something so completely skewed from how they see things that it’s sort of unbelievable that there could be such a divergent way of looking at something. And it’s often very fundamental things—having to do with sexuality having to do with class, having to do with political things, having to do also with esthetics.
Gary Indiana, thirty-seven, writes about art for The Village Voice and other publications. His book Scar Tissue was published in 1987; this year PAJ Publications will publish his collection America Invented Everything.
