#gi press

[flavrsavr]

We Got the brASS: Okinawa and Vietnam editions, 1970

[356mission]

Link: Gary Indiana on KCRW’s Bookworm

When we were in the process of installing my show at 356 Mission I discovered that I could myself make these animated GIFs, these little animated photos. I could do things with those. And they require an attention span of three seconds. I thought, ‘this is something I could make an experience for a viewer with.’ 

I don’t think that we should bemoan too much the disappearance of the past because the past always disappears. There are things that are vanishing that are terrible because we see civilization itself degenerating into barbarism and savagery now. In terms of the actual effects of technology, cellphones, and this and that, I find that curmudgeons like Jonathan Franzen that believe they’re defending some great standard of civilization and we’re all degenerates because we use our cellphones, I find those people ludicrous. Real life now, we should enjoy how we’re living and not constantly beat ourselves up for living this way.

                                   - From Michael Silverblatt’s interview with Gary Indiana for KCRW’s Bookworm                                      to listen to the complete interview, click HERE

for more information about Gary’s 2015 exhibition at 356 Mission, click HERE

[356mission]

Link: Gary Indiana 356 Mission / Los Angeles

Indiana’s previous exhibitions — at American Fine Arts Co. (2002), Participant Inc. (2013) and Envoy Enterprises (2015) — comprised mostly black-and-white images, atmospheric, cinematic and opaque with poetic density, spanning a thirty-year period. The pictures at 356 Mission by contrast are primarily from 2015, color inkjet prints hung unframed, salon-style, with a casual immediacy. It wouldn’t be wrong to call them snapshots, but it belies something of the breadth of their concern. They display a curiosity for other people that, while voyeuristic, suggests a longing to know the inside of strangers’ lives.

- David Matorin in Flash Art

to read the complete review, click HERE

[356mission]

Link: 5 ART SHOWS YOU SHOULD SEE IN L.A. THIS WEEK: Gary Indiana

One film shows a man in a black shirt walking back and forth obsessively, looking disturbed and unkempt. Watching this feels voyeuristic, but there’s tenderness in Indiana’s treatment of his subjects. The show resembles diary excerpts, a record of things that moved the artist.

- Catherine Wagley in the L.A. Weekly

to read the complete text, click HERE

[356mission]

Link: Radio Hour: Gary Indiana by Los Angeles Review of Books

Laurie Winer: Nabokov says that when he started to write his autobiography that he remembered things that he had forgotten, that the doors opened. Did you find that when you wrote I Can Give You Anything But Love?

Gary Indiana: Yes, I mean things that I had completely forgotten about came back. And things that I remembered very clearly started to present themselves in a different aspect. You remember it that way but can that possibly be the way it happened? It’s tricky, memory is very tricky. I love how Nabakov killed off his mother in that memoir. Just in a parenthesis: “(picnic, lightning).”

Tom Lutz: [laughter] the greatest parenthesis ever, I think we can all agree.

GI: I hate talking about myself, I hate writing about myself, it’s embarrassing, it’s weird. But I did want to figure out, to the extent that I could, why are you wired the weird way that you are? Why am I this mess? This particular mess, I don’t mind being a mess but why am I this particular mess? How did I manage to get into this condition as a human being?

- from the Los Angeles Review of Books radio show, Radio Hour, first broadcast on October 15, 2015. 

to listen to the complete program, click HERE

Gary Indiana’s exhibition at 356 S. Mission Road has been EXTENDED through December 24, 2015. More information available HERE

[356mission]

Link: 5 Every Week, Gary Indiana

Gary, Indiana is a place. And a song n’ dance number in The Music Man.  It—or rather he—is also an artist, and just about one of the most interesting people to mix it up in the 20th century.

- Zac Pennington and Claire Evans for KPCC’s Take Two

to read the complete piece, click HERE

[356mission]

Link: Los Angeles Times: Writer Gary Indiana on why he hates the '80s, Susan Sontag and his new memoir

I think everything for me is a form of writing. It's a form of tracking my own consciousness and my own experience of the world in some way, registering it in some way. Sometimes you can't write, sometimes you don't want to write. Sometimes language is too imperfect somehow. Sometimes language doesn't convey what you want to convey. Doing photography, video or film or anything like that I always feel like I'm writing. I'm somebody who is very preoccupied with form.

                                - Gary Indiana to J.C. Gabel in the Los Angeles Times

to read the complete piece, click HERE