{"id":83965,"date":"2015-03-24T18:33:05","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T22:33:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=83965"},"modified":"2015-03-24T18:34:13","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T22:34:13","slug":"too-complicated-for-human-brains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/24\/too-complicated-for-human-brains\/","title":{"rendered":"Too Complicated for Human Brains"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gary Indiana\u2019s art \u201crecasts voyeurism as wonder.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"EGI<\/a>

Untitled, 1976, collage, 10″ x 8″.<\/p><\/div>\n

Gary Indiana does not have a Web site. If you Google him, you might find his writing scattered among street views and crime reports from the destitute and dangerous place he chose to name himself after. When I asked friends if they knew his art, they told me, Only that LOVE<\/small> sculpture\u2014the one by Robert Indiana\u2014or, worse, they began to sing that song from The Music Man<\/em>. Those who do<\/em> know him, though, rank him among the great American novelists, even if most of his books are out of print. When I looked, all had been checked out of the public library.<\/p>\n

Maybe someone like me\u2014curious, researching\u2014had found them first, because at sixty-five Gary Indiana is having what you might call \u201ca moment.\u201d The third solo show of his visual art opened\u00a0on Sunday night, and when I spoke to him on the phone the following day he told me three more exhibitions are scheduled this year. His books are being reissued, and a \u201ckind of memoir, though we\u2019re not calling it that,\u201d is due in September. <\/p>\n

\"EGI<\/a>

Untitled, 2012, three mounted inkjet prints, 9″ x 16″.<\/p><\/div>\n

Once I knew where to look, what I did<\/em> find was his art criticism\u2014impressive, elegant stuff, acrobatic but always firmly grounded on Lower East Side concrete.\u00a0And there\u2019s his obituary for Susan Sontag<\/a> in the Village Voice<\/em>, in which the last line\u00a0inflects the whole with retroactive profundity.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what it\u2019s like, in a way, to see his show at Envoy Enterprises on Rivington Street<\/a>: though it appears humble at first, it collects power later.\u00a0When I arrived early on opening night, it felt alarmingly spare: the gallery was nearly empty, and there were only ten works on view. It wasn\u2019t long before the space was filled by Indiana\u2019s distinctive,\u00a0delirious\u00a0laugh, and then by friends and admirers, everyone getting tipsy on not the typical white wine, but the artist\u2019s choice\u2014Kalashnikov vodka and orange juice.<\/p>\n

Maybe I had expected more because the show has two rather grandiose titles. The first,\u00a0\u201cThe Great Debate About Art,\u201d refers to a series of four shows dreamed up by the gallerist Jimi Dams, based on the book of the same name by the linguist Roy Harris. The first installment was a gimmick called\u00a0Anonymous,\u00a0<\/em>which lambasted art-world name-dropping by installing works of established artists beside emerging ones and refusing to provide identifiers. Coincidentally, Indiana had already done this twenty-nine years ago in the Voice<\/em>, when he wrote\u00a0\u201cThe No Name Review,\u201d omitting proper names as a rejection of \u201cfucking art magazines\u201d\u2014in which, as he once wrote, \u201cthe proper names just start to stand in for whatever it is you\u2019re looking at. Everybody becomes a brand in the art world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dams chose Indiana as the next logical step in antimarketability, the embodiment of a dead breed: the Renaissance man.\u00a0As a playwright, novelist, actor, critic, and artist, Indiana is, in Dams\u2019s words, \u201ca complete person.\u201d\u00a0\u201cIn the past,\u201d he explained, \u201cthe more complete you were, the more wonderful you were. Now the art world wants the \u2018professional,\u2019 a person focused on one thing. If you don\u2019t fit in a certain box everyone is lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"EGI<\/a>

Untitled, 2001, inkjet print, 10.5″ x 14.5″.<\/p><\/div>\n

This is why the second title, \u201cFrom the World of Entertainment: Collages and Prints 1974\u20132014,\u201d is particularly preposterous. Other than one piece featuring photographs shot bootleg-style from a Kurosawa film and the porn Indiana cut up for his collages, the show is more of the street than the screen. The date range suggests a span of retrospective proportions, but with the exception of two collages from the seventies, all the work comes from the aughts up to the present day.\u00a0Dams may want to erase the borders of creativity, but his gallery\u2019s\u00a0erudite\u00a0press release and flashy conceptualism confine Indiana to the white box.<\/p>\n

\"EGI<\/a>

Untitled, 2012, six mounted inkjet prints, 9″ x 12″.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cOnce you put something out in the world, it doesn\u2019t belong to you anymore,\u201d Indiana told me. But when he saw a recent photograph of a stranger seen through a hotel window hung adjacent to an early erotic collage, he admitted he was worried. \u201cI thought, God, are people just going to go on about \u2018gay this\u2019 or \u2018gay that\u2019? \u2026 I mean, I can do stuff like that. I did it in the Participant Inc. show\u201d\u2014 referring to his\u00a02013\u00a0exhibition, which featured a large silk panel printed with a photograph of a well-endowed man showering. \u201cEverybody took it as some sort of provocation. It wasn\u2019t that at all! We were trying to get a certain wet-looking effect with this silk, and that\u2019s the only image that worked.\u201d In this case, the hotel photograph had been made out of clean curiosity. As he put it, \u201cI have this fixation on people I don\u2019t know\u2014strangers in the street, people living their lives. I find them so moving.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re dealing with an artist whose work is largely unknown, any representation ends up bearing a lot of weight. Judging from what was chosen for this show, I can see that the work itself is messy. In the combines, the cut edges of each mounted board fray; in the digital photographic works, pixels spread into jagged lines,\u00a0focus is either in or out; in the video, what looked to me like camera-stabilizing technology causes the borders to lean, warping the square into deranged shapes. Indiana has shown a consistent irreverence\u00a0for\u00a0frames, peering through windows and into broken ones, leaning over the protective ledge to get his shot so that even the body frame of his subject gets deformed. Foreshortening overthrows familiarity.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have fountains of pictures of people I\u2019ve taken from balconies overhead, from all over the world,\u201d he explained. \u201cEven when you see people engaged in ordinary everyday things, there\u2019s a weirdness about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"EGI<\/a>

Untitled, 2013, inkjet print, 10″ x 15″.<\/p><\/div>\n

This sentiment extends to the collages, in which Indiana cuts up porn and leaves behind something stranger. He told me these works, made in LA, when he lived next to a porn bookstore (\u201cevery time I looked out the window, without fail, someone was in their car jerking off with a magazine spread over the steering wheel\u201d), had been lost for twenty years because he had forgotten he even made them, having left them in storage in Chatterton\u2019s Bookshop.<\/p>\n

Behind the makeshift bar, in the back room of the gallery, hangs a triptych of collages not included on the checklist, but that I find the strongest of the works on view. His choice of imagery isn\u2019t cock and tits, but hands resting on skin, bodies leaning into each other. They\u2019re erotic less in the act than in the pressure of their stilled, altered form. Movement comes from the angle of the cut, which eliminates the individualized features that force narrative and\u00a0recasts voyeurism as wonder.<\/p>\n

\u201cI travel a lot and I take a lot of pictures when I don\u2019t know who\u2019s around me, when I don\u2019t know that much about where I am.\u201d Indiana explained. \u201cAnd often what I like later on is something that\u2019s not identifiably anyplace, that shows the granular differences within the homogeneity of the modern world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indiana\u2019s work is too personal and cryptic to be documentary, but it keeps a watchful distance. It’s the kind of work that doesn\u2019t remind you of anyone in particular because it reminds you of everyone. \u201cMy work is so far from diaristic or autobiographical, and that includes my visual work, too\u2014it\u2019s sort of a record of what I\u2019ve seen, but I\u2019m really not into autobiography. My first novel was totally autobiographical, and the other ones were based sometimes very closely on things that had happened in my life, but they weren\u2019t about me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"EGI<\/a>

Untitled, 2014, inkjet print, 10″ x 15″.<\/p><\/div>\n

I found that the key to judging his work was to read it as you would characters, plot, and scene.\u00a0It\u2019s not conceptual; it\u2019s anecdotal.\u00a0Of the video, which is the most recent work in the show, Indiana said, \u201cI feel very much that that\u2019s a piece of my writing.\u201d In Havana, a man is being soaked through by a sudden downpour. Deranged by drugs or crisis, he moves as if his whole body is fixed on spitting something out, but the\u00a0narrative details\u00a0of his\u00a0soliloquy don\u2019t make it up to the window from which Indiana shoots. Though unedited in one six-minute take, the angle captures his swinging body in a way that cuts and changes it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat, to me, is the condition of people in the world today, and it\u2019s what I\u2019ve described in all of my books\u2014it\u2019s this condition of being mad and clueless in a world that\u2019s too complicated for human brains.\u201d He laughed. \u201cWhich is not to say I might not give a completely different definition of my work at another moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sarah Cowan is a freelance writer and a video editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gary Indiana\u2019s art \u201crecasts voyeurism as wonder.\u201d Gary Indiana does not have a Web site. If you Google him, you might find his writing scattered among street views and crime reports from the destitute and dangerous place he chose to name himself after. When I asked friends if they knew his art, they told me, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2384],"tags":[35,2051,17546,17544,17543,17542,17545,13916,100,9528,15169,501,11768,16190],"class_list":["post-83965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look","tag-art","tag-collage","tag-envoy-enterprises","tag-frames","tag-from-the-world-of-entertainment","tag-gary-indiana","tag-jimi-dams","tag-openings","tag-photography","tag-prints","tag-strangers","tag-susan-sontag","tag-voyeurism","tag-windows"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGary Indiana\u2019s Art Recasts Voyeurism as Wonder<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sarah Cowan on the writer\/actor\/critic\/filmmaker\/artist\u2019s latest solo show.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/24\/too-complicated-for-human-brains\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Too Complicated for Human Brains by Sarah Cowan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 24, 2015 \u2013 Gary Indiana\u2019s art \u201crecasts voyeurism as wonder.\u201d Gary Indiana does not have a Web site. 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