I’ve had another big critical omnibus—Vile Days—sitting on my desk for the last few months. It collects a column Gary Indiana wrote for The Village Voice between 1985 and 1988. Indiana is an all-around experimentalist (playwright, actor, novelist), and the book is daffy and strange. Indiana is a very different critic from Laing. He interrogates the very point of a column on art; sometimes he writes on a gallery show; other times he weighs in on Dick Clark’s Easygoing Guide to Good Grooming.
 
The writing is antic and lovely, the judgments confident. He laments Noguchi’s “banal rice-paper and wood lanterns often found in on-campus housing for associate professors at Columbia.” In a strangely persuasive rant, he likens the artist Sherrie Levine to Bette Davis, in her performance as a has-been leading lady in the 1952 movie The Star. The columns can be gossipy, though many of the names dropped meant nothing to me, another pitfall when collating ephemera into book form.
 
But the distance of a couple of decades makes Indiana’s book valuable as historical document. I loved his 1985 dispatch on the controversy surrounding Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, “a physically abrasive, hateful piece of art,” Indiana wrote. “If its intention is to raise public consciousness of the surrounding architecture’s inhumanity, a future public intent on overcoming its oppression would start by removing Tilted Arc.”
 
A massive steel structure set inside lower Manhattan’s Foley Square, Serra’s work was hated by many of the commuters who had to stroll past it daily. When federal officials elected to cave to public pressure and remove it, the artist sued. Indiana disdains Serra’s litigiousness, then rather brilliantly changes the subject, arguing that if anything on the streets of Manhattan discomfits and challenges the populace, it’s the presence of homeless men and women. “[T]hey define the space of public sculpture in a sense that a hunk of steel emanating from a drawing board in Richard Serra’s office never could,” he wrote.
 
Vile Days is more than a record of when SoHo was for art (curious about some of the gallery addresses, I did cursory web searches: Most have decamped to Chelsea, of course, and their former homes recently hosted pop-up sample sales). It’s also a beautiful tribute to the long-gone Village Voice; those might have been vile days for the art world, but they were glory days for the media.