GARY INDIANA
GRISTLE SPRINGS
Participant Inc
253 East Houston Street - New York
21/4/2013 al 26/5/2013
Participant Inc is proud to present GRISTLE SPRINGS, the first New York solo exhibition of Gary Indiana since Extinction at American Fine Arts, Co. in 2002, featuring works in photography and video. New photographic works are comprised of combinations of images shot with a variety of digital and 35mm cameras over a thirty-year period, using the model of multiple-screen surveillance monitors and CCTV cameras as a means to organize dissociated images, insinuating that simultaneity has replaced the linear continuity of visual information. Like movie frames, some with overlaid text, these associative blocks present complex relationships between found, appropriated, and original images, suggesting narratives not inherent to the individual images themselves, but generated by association.
The exhibition premieres three videos. Soap (39 min., 2004-2012) is a series of monologues and stories concerning an object everyone has a relationship to, soap. Through the vehicle of soap, the actors talk about a variety of other subjects: family relationships, childhood, AIDS, World War II, love. Inspired by the prose poem by Francis Ponge, in Japanese, English, French, and Russian. With Alex Melamid, Walter Steding, Laura Cottingham, Bill Rice, Leslie Singer, Stephen Prina. Plutot la Vie (35 min., 2005) is one of many “scratch films” made specifically to be shown at Cabaret RAF, a vaudeville and variety show presented at irregular intervals at Passerby at Gavin Brown Space and Participant, Inc between 2004-2005. Plutot la Vie accompanied an eveningof hypnosis demonstrations and performances by a fakir and a fire artist. Assembled from degraded prints of Blonde Venus, M, I Walked With A Zombie, Criminal Lovers, Dead of Night, Triumph of the Will and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Plutot la Vie is a meditation on the society of the spectacle and mass hypnosis. Unfinished Story (2004- 2005) is an episodic video collaboration between Gary Indiana and the photographer Lynn Davis, a series of conversations and readings of works-in-progress shot in the artist’s apartment over the course of a difficult year.
Indiana has organized several events in conjunction with the exhibition, including a reprising of a group reading from de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, originally presented at Simon Watson Gallery in 1989 as a corrective to a reading at Lincoln Center in defense of free expression in the aftermath of the Rushdie fatwa that year. The writers at Lincoln Center chose to read exclusively from religious texts that had been banned or proscribed at one time or another. None read from any books that had been banned for sexual or political content, in effect the majority of banned texts during the 20th century. Patrick McGrath will host the event, incarnating Alistair Cooke of Masterpiece Theater renown. As well, we will host a staged reading of The Torture Garden, a new play written by Indiana with actors Kate Valk and Jim Fletcher.
Gary Indiana is an American writer, filmmaker, and visual artist, perhaps best known for his loose trilogy of books based on notorious criminals in the spotlight. Three Month Fever is presented as an account of Andrew Cunanan, the man who murdered Gianni Versace, using fictional recreations of undocumented conversations and events to explore contemporary American obsession with celebrity. Resentment is an account, or speculative exploration, of the case of California brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, convicted of the murder of their parents, though names and other details have been changed. Depraved Indifference makes use of the case of Sante and Kenneth Kimes, mother-and-son con artists convicted of murdering heiress Irene Silverman. Indiana uses these stories to explore sexuality, violence, money, the media – contemporary America. These three novels share aspects of satire and postmodern literary practice with much of the rest of Indiana’s oeuvre. Indiana had a solo exhibition at American Fine Arts, Co. in 2002, and is the recipient of a 2008 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
