In the music of Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, and Dickie Landry, the simplest musical phrases become incredibly emotional. These composers spin up a short, pleasing, easily digestible melodic line, then repeat it. Then repeat it again. Then repeat it again. They shift the context surrounding the phrase, or they state it a little differently, and all of a sudden, in the same way that a word said over and over again becomes unstuck from meaning and can then be experienced in a new way, the musical phrase’s meaning will morph, too.
Landry brings these same ideas to bear as a painter. His works all center on a diamond-like shape surrounded by fields of black or white, which gives them what’s called an axonometric perspective. Seen once, the composition is an interesting device. Seen many times, while strolling through a gallery, the images it frames changing from piece to piece, the experience of the frame begins to change. The flat shapes that make up these paintings develop strange shadow-free openings and beckon to remarkable depths. And despite Landry’s insistence that they’re completely free of emotion, their cumulative effect can be profoundly moving.
- Sadie Sartini Garner
Sadie Sartini Garner x Dickie Landry
Sadie Sartini Garner (SG): I wanted to begin by talking about Louisiana. I think as Louisianans, there’s always this underlying sense that what we do should look like it’s a Louisiana product. Things should feel Cajun or feel Louisiana-ish. I was curious if you think that Cajun culture has any impact on your painting or your music-making?
Dickie Landry (DL): I don’t think the culture had anything to do with my music or my paintings. I hated swamp pop in the beginning. I totally just did not like Cajun music at the beginning, but all of that has changed over the years. I was into jazz very early. When the Korean War broke out, my brother joined the Air Force Band (a jazz band) in Waco, Texas, and I was, I’m thinking, fifth or sixth grade. It’s all a mystery. Anyway, he started sending me jazz records. So I was introduced to jazz music very early on, but that influence wasn’t from anything here.
SG: I love the story that you’ve told about growing up in Cecilia, Louisiana, and listening to the radio and hearing the heavyweight fights and that being your first exposure to Moondog and jazz and underground culture. When you were growing up, how conscious were you of outsider or underground art movements?
DL: Well, in high school, I became very interested in the abstract expressionism movement, like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. I would go to the library and look at magazines, looking for more images of that work. At that time, I was very confused about what I wanted to be when I graduated from high school. What am I going to be: a jazz musician, classical musician, classical artist?
And one day, I turned the page. When I saw what Robert Rauschenberg had done and was getting international publicity for, I said to myself, I can be anything I want to be. I don’t have to be this, I don’t have to be that. Also, my band director in the tenth grade brought me to New Orleans to see the big band, Stan Kenton Orchestra, which included June Christy, a great singer, Erroll Garner, Cándido Camero, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker.
Charlie Parker left a big impression on me. And also going to the library when I was a freshman and hearing Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, it was mind-blowing. Stravinsky, Bartok, that genre, that age, I was really into it. And then I had an art teacher at the university and he opened me up to all the American composers—Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Charles Ives, and others, and that was an eye-opener.
SG: And then you went up to New York in ’68, ’69?
DL: That’s right.
SG: And met Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, Laurie Anderson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mary Heilmann, Joan Jonas, and all these people. How did you fall into such an elite group? Or were they elite at the time?
DL: Elite? Except for Rauschenberg, who was already established, we were the newcomers, all struggling to stay alive and pay rent.
The link to all of it is the art teacher at the university in the early ’60s, Calvin Harlan, who said I should meet this young artist, Keith Sonnier. So I went and met Keith, then he graduated and I kept up with his career. After Keith went to Rutgers, he moved to New York City. And his teacher at Rutgers was Robert Morris, who then introduced him to Leo Castelli Gallery.
So in December of ’68, I went up to New York just to check the scene and have dinner with Keith. He mentioned to me that he had seen a concert by Philip Glass. He said it was not only aurally interesting, but it was also visually interesting. Phil built a square and put a continuous piece of music around it, and had a violinist perform the piece. Soon after, I went to meet Phil.
He invited me the following weekend to a dinner with Steve Reich and David Behrman, Frederic Rzewski, James Tenney, and a couple other composers. I brought my saxophone, we ate, everybody played something. And at that time, I was very interested in the avant-garde of Europe: Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, et cetera, et cetera.
When Phil finished playing, I ran to him and I said, that’s the most beautiful music I’ve heard in a long time. He invited me to join his newly formed ensemble and I’m like, hell yeah. And then through Phil I met Richard Serra and started working with them. We built Serra’s first show along with Chuck Close, Spalding Gray, and Robert Fiore at the Castelli Warehouse uptown. One day on the street Richard and Philip introduced me to Joan Jonas, and she invited usto her first performance. So I borrowed a friend’s camera and he put the film in the camera, and set all the settings. And I went and took the pictures. Well, the following day, Joan called and said, “I saw you there with a camera. Do you wanna sell your photographs?” And I’m thinking, Plumbing or photography? Duh. That was an easy decision.
So that’s how it all got started—Keith Sonnier was the key to it all. Actually, it all got started with an art teacher, Calvin Harlan, at the university who introduced me to Keith.
SG: I feel like those kinds of deep connections are so important because not only are you socializing, but you’re also inspiring one another. And it sounds like your artistic drive is sparking off of Philip’s, and his is sparking off of you.
DL: Yeah. We fed each other.
SG: Were you painting at that time?
DL: No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t even interested in painting or drawing or anything. Leo Castelli bought his artist this small Sony black-and-white video tape deck with this mediocre camera and a little mixing box. Keith and I started making videotapes. In those days, artists were making film, and in film at that time, you got a 10-minute reel. You shoot the reel, you send it into the lab, and two days, three days later, you get it back. Maybe you have something, maybe you don’t. And with video, it was instant and you could record it for an hour and edit. It was such a turn-on to the artist that Keith and other artists started using video. So I was privy to that equipment and that’s how I made my first videotapes.
SG: So those were kind of your first real visual works, workingthrough video and photography.
DL: Right. Photography and then video. I didn’t start painting till the mid ’90s. One evening, I was in Leo Castelli Gallery editing videotapes in the back room in New York. There was a Jasper Johns show up they closed that afternoon, and Leo was walking around the gallery, looking, sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. My curiosity took over and I said, “Leo, what are you doing?” “Well, I put this show together. These things will never be in the same room in the rest of art history.” And then we kept talking and Leo turned to me and said, “You like painting and art?” I said, “I love it.” He responded, “I’m gonna turn you into a painter. Think about it.” I had loved the idea of painting, but had so much going on at that time, touring with Philip in Europe, so hadn’t started painting.
In the meantime, I moved to Florida. An artist friend of mine was living with me at the time and I began making drawings on brown paper bags. At one point I looked at him and asked, “How do you think this would transfer to canvas?” And he said, “There’s a canvas, there’s gesso, there’s paint.” And when I painted my first painting, it was actually a physical turn-on.
I mean, it was like, Oh... Like, what? Because paintings come from the mind. Photographs are something that’s already visual. In painting, the idea comes from the artist’s own mind. On a visit to NYC from Florida, I met Leo and I told him I was painting. His answer: “I want to see them. Do not show them to anyone else.” Unfortunately, Leo died before he saw my paintings.
SG: I’m curious about how your paintings come together, because they’re so precise, and the lines are so geometric, it feels almost engineered to me. I’m curious what’s the role of improvisation and experimentation in your creative process?
DL: I try to keep my paintings and my music separate. I don’t listen to music when I’m painting. I don’t think about music when I’m painting. I don’t think about painting when I’m performing.
I thought I had invented something new with the shape represented across my paintings. Do you remember the old television tubes that were rounded at the top? I just squared off the top and the bottom of that shape and thought, Wow, that’s interesting. Then my first exhibition here in Lafayette, this young woman wrote a paper on the show and described the shapes as part of the axonometric system—taking a square and turning it into a hexagonal, six-sided figure.
SG: With strictly representational art, people tend to understand emotion and intention pretty easily. But when it comes to abstract art, people tend to not trust their own interpretations, their own emotions, and get kind of confused. I’m curious what you’re bringing into the work when you’re painting and about what role perception and emotion play in what you’re doing.
DL: I try to leave emotions at the door. It’s about drawing the lines and picking the color. The lines and the colors are the most important things I’m thinking about.
Emotions cloud everything up. I’m a very emotional guy and I try not to bring emotions into it. Emotions are just: good painting, bad painting. That’s as far as it goes. Or maybe that’s as far as my emotions go.
SG: Can you share more about the colors that you use in your paintings? At first, I feel like there’s like really bright kind of candy-coated colors that remind me of pop art, but then sometimes there are these earthier tones, there’s like these dark sort of turmeric-y type colors that really play with the grays and other colors in interesting ways. How do you create your color palettes?
DL: What am I thinking? Oh, God. With the big canvases, I like iridescent colors. The new small paintings have a lot of gold, silver, and copper. Picking the colors and drawing the lines are the hardest things. In my newer paintings, all the borders around the painting are black, which is a novel idea for me because everything else has been white canvas on the edges.
SG: Yeah. That must have changed the relationships between the lines in some way.
DL: Yes. And you also focus in on the black, you go in and it’s like the black nullifies the edges. You go right into the painting.
SG: That’s interesting that you say that because something that I had observed from looking at your paintings like Ogden Red Split and Red Slit, these paintings have sort of this implied sense of depth, where it feels like the panels can almost be peeled off the canvas. It feels like we’re peeking behind something in certain ways. Do you feel as though your work has a sense of three-dimensional motion to it?
DL: I hope they do. I mean, I’m looking at a painting behind my computer and if you go to look at the side of it, it’s 3-D. It actually turns in three dimensions. And that’s the idea of the axonometric style. It’s three-dimensional. And for a while, I was playing with this red split in the composition.
I’m also making these new paintings that have images of my photographs printed on the canvas, then I paint around the image. I always wanted to put images in my paintings, but back in the day, you’d have to use a lot of different chemicals and stuff. But now with the six-foot printers, I can get the help of a friend to print the photographs on the canvas, and then I’ll paint around it. I have thousands of images, and I decided to use some of the photographs of artists I’ve been friends with: Phil Glass, Bruce Nauman, Mary Heilmann, Richard Serra, and a couple other images from my videotapes. Then I surround the images with oil sticks and iridescent acrylic.
Born in Cecilia, Louisiana, Dickie Landry is a saxophonist, composer, and visual artist. The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities' 2024 Humanist of the Year, Landry’s paintings, videos, photographs, and drawings have been shown around the world at galleries and museums including Leo Castelli Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brazil Biennale, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Arthur Roger Gallery. His most recent exhibition of photographs and paintings, “Dickie Landry’s NYC 1969-1979,” was shown at Solomon Contemporary in New York, Anka Schmidt Gallery in Cologne, and the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana. A retrospective of his works was organized by the University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie, Wyoming in 2015.
Landry has performed his solo saxophone works in major venues in the USA, Canada, Europe, Russia, Cuba, Haiti, South America, India, and Japan. He has performed and collaborated with composers, musicians, artists, theatre directors, and choreographers including Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Talking Heads, Robert Plant, Robert Wilson, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Rauschenberg, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Trisha Brown. His return to Lafayette, Louisiana had him performing with Lil Band o’ Gold and True Man Posse.
Sadie Sartini Garner is a music critic and writer whose work has appeared in Pitchfork, The Ringer, The A.V. Club, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Outline, and more. She’s also a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool, studying alternative musical culture and creative writing. She was born and raised in Lafayette, LA, and lives in Long Beach, CA.
Other Plans is a contemporary art gallery located at the intersection of Dumaine and Galvez Streets in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded in 2023 by Emily Wilkerson, the gallery presents solo and two-person exhibitions by an inter-generational group of artists whose practices address the most pressing issues of our time.
A printed version of this interview was published in conjunction with Dickie Landry's exhibition of paintings at Other Plans, August - September 2024. Design by Collection of Collections and printed by constance. To receive a copy of this publication, contact us at info@otherplans.gallery.
Special thanks to Elena Johnson and Ruben Rodriguez for their support of this exhibition.