NEW YORK, NY.- Art is about pushing boundaries. Purists, like most people, want things to be defined. When they cannot define an artist's position, they cannot define their own, which makes them highly uncomfortable. It is however important, to encourage a wide appreciation of many kinds of art. Therefore art needs to be made accessible on all different levels from traditional to very conceptual to playful. It should be multitudinous and as kaleidoscopic as possible.
GDA2 consists of From The World Of Entertainment: Collages and Prints 1974 – 2014 a solo exhibition by Gary Indiana. The exhibition, curated by Alejandro Loureiro Lorenzo, is the second installment in the gallery’s Great Debate About Art exhibition series.
From The World Of Entertainment consists of a selection of Indiana’s work from the last 40 years, and while not attempting to be an all-inclusive retrospective, it showcases his diverse and interdisciplinary artistic practice, ranging from his output as a writer and an art critic to that of Indiana as a visual artist producing photographs, collages, films and theater.
The artist’s interdisciplinary practice is key in understanding his visual work, which is loaded with references to history, philosophy and literature. Exemplary is his use of photocopied references to the work of Arthur Rimbaud which here functions as the backdrop for collages created using pornographic magazines and ads from the 1970s, or in his 2014 Whitney Biennial contribution of curved LED screen videos inspired by the Panopticon of late 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
The photographs on view at the gallery span almost two decades and are presented in a nonchronological order, creating an installation in which pieces from different series are in dialogue, generating new narratives and referencing the multi channel set-up of modern day surveillance cameras. The exhibition also includes collages that haven’t been shown since the American Fine Arts exhibition, Extinction, in 2002.
The only time-based media work in this survey is the 2014 video Young Ginger. Consisting of unedited straight-from-the-camera footage, the video explores homology and aphasia.
Gary Indiana is an American writer, filmmaker, and visual artist. He is perhaps best known for his loose trilogy of books (Three Month Fever, Resentment, Indifference), which are based on notorious criminals in the spotlight. He also based multiple novels on fictionalized events from his own life and those of his associates and contemporaries. His history as a film actor for example, particularly his work with German director Dieter Schidor and others in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's circle, is described in Gone Tomorrow. Before he published his first novel in 1987, Indiana wrote, directed, and acted in a dozen plays. Between 1979 and the mid-1980s, Indiana acted in experimental films by Dieter Schidor, Ulrike Ottinger, and other European directors. Throughout his work, Indiana explores sexuality, violence, money, the media and contemporary America.
This is Gary Indiana’s third solo exhibition in New York, following exhibitions at American Fine Arts Co. (2002) and Participant Inc. (2013). Indiana’s visual artwork was last seen at the Whitney Biennial in 2014.
