Gary Indiana: I’m often interested in seeing how much I can remove from a story and still be able to tell it.
Roberta Smith: Oy. Possibly. Others are hobbled by it.
Indiana: That’s not always such a bad feeling, when everything just stops.
Smith: I impress and surprise some people, and I disappoint others.
Indiana: If they happen to be dead, however you depict them is going to make somebody who knew them unhappy.
•••
Smith: I often compare the shift from art magazines to a weekly newspaper with going from doing nothing but recording in a studio to doing nothing but performing live.
Indiana: Believe me, you do not want a whole generation of Knausgaards.
Smith: Not really. (Laughter) Now I guess they’re all just out of or still in graduate school.
Indiana: Maybe Rousseau or Chateaubriand or Saint Augustine can be considered exceptions, but I doubt even that.
Smith: At that time applicants to the Whitney program proposed a subject and a tutor.
•••
Indiana: I floated up to the ceiling. I looked down, and I could see it happening, but it didn’t feel like it was happening to me. Business as usual.
Smith: Openness is the key, along with a certain disinterest in your own responses.
Indiana: Court transcripts make pretty dull reading. It sounded like everyone was having a stroke.
Smith: Theory might explain the context and the context is interesting, but only up to a point.
Indiana: Afterwards I went to Vancouver and shot the jellyfish in the aquarium in Stanley Park.