Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984-2021, by Gary Indiana
By Micah Cash
In Gary Indiana’s 1989 novel Horse Crazy, the narrator’s sociopathic crush finally shows him his first large-scale artwork: “an arrangement of six different male types: college preppie, Kennedy-type young lawyer, bohemian, blue-collar worker, and so forth.” The narrator soon realizes all six faces belong to Ted Bundy. “Such is the ambition of American society, that a person who runs out of control in this manner can effortlessly impress those he meets as a paragon of desirable national qualities.” Indiana is forever associated with his 1985-1988 run as art critic for the Village Voice, but he is primarily an artist, and the long bibliography of plays, films, visual art, and fiction he has produced since often focuses on people “out of control.” His best-known work is a trilogy of “deflationary realist” true-crime novels. Yet there is a difference between those who commit crimes of desperation, and those who act in the relentless pursuit of power and wealth, or, like Bundy, for no reason at all. In Fire Season, a voracious, scathing collection of Indiana’s reviews and essays, Indiana has dueling subjects: the cartoon villains of the neoliberal order, and the artists making serious work in spite of it.
The trouble with America, in Indiana’s mind, is that we valorize the major criminals and condemn the minor ones. “Basic morals [are] clearly inadequate to a criminal era that begins with the Kennedy assassination and the Kitty Genovese story, and runs rampantly on to this day,” Indiana writes in a retrospective on the novels of Renata Adler. For Adler’s narrators, products of the kind of family “where the Dow Jones Averages are toasted on the father’s birthday,” nervous jokes are the only response to the shock of political consciousness. “I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time,” she quips near the beginning of Speedboat, and every word is dripping. Indiana judges this “extreme tendency to paranoia and the giggles” as a virtue, “instantly disarming in ways that Adler, speaking with relentless logic as herself, in polemical mode, is not.” Only through layers of bourgeois irony will readers hear the blazing alarm.
In Fire Season, Indiana’s intention is not disarmament. The premise of many of the longer essays – spanning subjects from JFK to the New Hampshire primary, the Boston bombing to the show trials of Dr. Kevorkian and the cops who brutalized Rodney King – is that, contrary to what we learned in history class, the American political and judicial systems are defined by callous violence and absurd theater. In his reporting, he shocks by letting people and events speak for themselves. In Indiana’s words, The Los Angeles Police Department’s defense relies on the argument that “Rodney King, though he wasn’t on PCP, manifested the supposed superhuman strength of someone on PCP, so he might as well have been on it.” The intended effect is exhaustion, but Indiana’s voice is so infectious that he gets away with it.
A tonal exception is “Northern Exposure,” an exuberant reminder from the ’92 campaign trail that the tug-of-war between sterile technocracy and deplorable populism is nothing new in American politics. Bill Clinton’s “platitudinous verbal droppings, more like noises one makes to stimulate horses than actual thoughts, also resemble bromides from a soothing commercial for Preparation H.” Safe to assume Joe Biden was taking notes, fresh off the plagiarism scandal that doomed his ’88 run. The déjà vu is strongest at a rally for television personality and right-wing nationalist Pat Buchanan. Twenty-three years before Donald Trump’s infamous escalator ride, his name could be seamlessly swapped into Indiana’s analysis of the unabashedly xenophobic stump speech: “the sorriest aspect of the Buchanan campaign is the obligation most mainstream journalists feel to declare this boor ‘interesting,’ mainly because he customarily feeds at the same trough they do.” At the time, perhaps it was radical (or at least prescient) to conclude that all the candidates in New Hampshire, as well as the press hordes that propped them up, were irredeemable. From our present view, cynicism is a stale cliche, but Indiana’s skewering is funnier and less moralistic than most. There is politics and then there is despair, and only one can be taken seriously.
In one of the sharpest pieces, the critic travels to Disneyland in Marne-la-Vallée. At the “postmodern” theme park in France (an adjective he never uses in reference to art), the TV displays “an endless montage of advertising for the very resort that surrounds us!” A kiosk worker tells him that between interminable shifts, she is forced to attend Disney University, where the propaganda is “worse than the [Nazis’].” But on his last day at Euro Disney, farmers blockade the resort’s gates with piles of burning tires in protest of American-led trade negotiations that would decimate French agricultural subsidies. This intrusion of the material consequences of cultural hegemony, annoying to employees and clientele alike, casts Indiana’s hysterical descriptions of the cartoon world in garish relief. The tourists waiting in endless lines are right to be crabby, but it’s not their children they ought to take it out on.
If the essays in Fire Season are about criminals, its criticisms are about geniuses. Myriad short reviews, arranged by Indiana himself in no apparent order, bear the mark of a critic utterly unbeholden to pitches and clicks. “Few blue-ribbon cultural products occupy my consciousness with anything like the force of my own imagination or experience,” he writes. Judging from this collection, that’s a loose interpretation of “blue-ribbon”. Indiana reviews the films of Bresson and Pasolini, the literature of Guyotat and Scheerbart, and the visual art of Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois – hardly nobodies. For readers like me who recognize those names but know little of their work, and have never heard of the dozen more artists reviewed, Indiana’s breadth is intoxicating. You can’t help but make a list. And at a time when even premier critics (like Christian Lorentzen, who provides an excellent introduction to this collection) waste their best sentences on Twitter, Indiana’s ecstatic affection for (relatively) old and obscure masterpieces are a welcome departure from interaction-driven criticism.
There is tremendous range in the near-forty pieces in Fire Season, and two of the most fascinating essays are roving formal experiments. “Weiner’s Dong,” which explores the effect of surveillance technology on private lives, begins at the Museum of Socialist Art in Bulgaria, lingers on a customer service call with Chase Bank, and ends with a perspective on the titular scandal that faults former Rep. Anthony Wiener not for sexual immorality, but for the “idiocy” of thinking he wouldn’t get caught. “Somewhat Slightly Dazed: on the art of Roni Horn” is a difficult piece, a dreamy meditation on “fictive self-identity” that mentions neither Roni Horn nor her art, but connects Breton’s Nadja, the acting of Doris Day and John Malkovich, and the impossibility of utopia to personal touchstones, like Indiana’s intimate identification with the screen version of Monica Vitti. Writing about the relationship between one’s art and one’s self, the critic at last finds a topic that refuses to be looked in the eye without a mirror. The last fragment of the essay, subtitled “I and I,” was the only time in the book that I had no idea what Indiana was talking about. But even when clarity is sacrificed, it’s exhilarating to witness him wrestling with things instead of having already figured them out.
Indiana’s style is frequently described as cool and bitchy, but it’s also playful and vulnerable; his attention to the subtle pitches of syntax and humanity is untarnished by the bleakness of his perspective. Reading him is pleasurable in the way eavesdropping on the rants and raves of a brilliant, tasteful, disaffected friend is. The gonzo reporting offers the giddy satisfaction of bloodlust while the reviews inspire us to raise the pitiful standards of our content consumption. Nearly always he leaves you feeling uneasy and longing, in defiance of his friend Louise Bourgeois’s well-known credo that “art is a guaranty of sanity.” In the insane, amoral world of Fire Season, Indiana is an acerbic and hilarious guide, guaranteed.
Micah Cash is a writer in New York City
