The arrangement was to meet at the Piggly Wiggly in Cecilia, Louisiana, at 5 PM; cruise by St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, where our protagonist joined a Gregorian Latin Mass choir at the age of seven; and land at the Bayou Teche pecan farm Dickie Landry continues to tend when he’s not making music or painting in the studio. It would be my first time seeing Dickie on his home turf. We initially met in New York City in the fall of 2022, when he came to perform for not one, but two, memorials: Lawrence Weiner at the Whitney Museum of Art and Richard Nonas at MoMA PS1. We became fast friends. Dickie told me of his first New York City trip as a high school graduate in 1956, when he drove across the South and up north with a friend from Lafayette in pursuit of his first love, jazz and bebop (as imparted by his older brother, John).
He returned to New York in 1969 with fellow Louisianan Tina Girouard, and they quickly absorbed a scene saturated with experimental performance, art, music, dance, and communal actions like FOOD. Landry plumbed with Philip Glass, propped steel with Richard Serra, cut houses with Gordon Matta-Clark, all the while capturing on film contemporaries including Susan Rothenberg, George Trakas, Deborah Hay, Keith Sonnier, and Joan Jonas (his black-and-white photos from that time were included in Jonas’s recent exhibition Good Night Good Morning at the Museum of Modern Art).
Landry exhibited his photography at both Leo Castelli locations in the 1970s, premiered his signature quadraphonic saxophone sounds at Alanna Heiss’s 10 Bleecker Street, and collaborated with Robert Wilson on five productions, including Einstein on the Beach; he was a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble, with whom he performed for eight years; he toured with Laurie Anderson on Home of Brave and participated with Robert Rauschenberg for the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Exchange. Landry made frequent visits home to Cecilia and Lafayette throughout. On the occasion of his current solo show at Other Plans gallery in New Orleans, our conversations took place at the artist’s studios and Dwyer’s Diner in Lafayette.
Allyson Spellacy Was your first painting exhibition in New Orleans?
Dickie Landry It was at Arthur Roger Gallery in 1996.
AS Did it feel like a breakthrough for you?
DL Of course. I was home! I had exhibited my videos and performed in museums in Europe and shown photographs in NYC, but never had a painting show in Louisiana. A word on Leo Castelli: he was very encouraging; he told me he was going to turn me into a painter! Seven years later I told Leo I was painting, and he said, “Do not show them to anyone until I see them.” Unfortunately, he died before he saw them. At 112 Greene Street I had shown a series of nine drawings based on a form I thought I had invented, only to learn it’s called axonometric. The shape is inspired by the old TV tubes with rounded top and bottom, but I square off the top and bottom. Nine palettes is how I thought about them. The first painting in the ’90s that stuck was using this form. The structure is what works.
AS You’ve been making drawings since the ’70s, right? Painting didn’t come around until later because that’s when you had the space in your life to pursue it?
DL I started drawing right out of high school; then I gave up. When I moved to Florida, my friend had an art center and said, “Why don’t you take a painting class?” So I made a painting, and it was the most awful thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Later, I had an artist living with me from Chicago, and I was drawing on brown paper bags. He offered some good cotton paper, rag. I did a couple of drawings with that same axonometric shape and asked him how it would transfer to canvas. He said, “Well, there’s the canvas; there’s the gesso; and there’s the paint.” I finished my first painting, and it was actually a physical turn on. The painting came from here. (gestures to his temple)
AS How did you meet the artists that we see in your photographs?
DL In 1964, I was at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette taking a class with an art teacher by the name of Calvin Harlan. He said, “I want you to meet this young artist. I think you might get along.” It was Keith Sonnier. We became friends immediately. Keith went on to Rutgers University, where Allan Kaprow and Robert Morris were his teachers. Morris was responsible for introducing Keith to Leo Castelli. When I got to New York, Keith said he wanted me to meet a composer, Philip Glass, who was doing interesting things with music, and also visually interesting.
When I met Philip, he had Moondog living with him, and this made a very big impression on me. The story on Moondog: we did not get electricity on the farm until I was six years old; then we got a radio. My father and I would listen to the heavyweight fights broadcast live from Madison Square Garden. After the fights, they would announce, “And now, live from the streets of New York City—jazz with Moondog!” Moondog was my first underground hero, and I got to spend a couple of hours talking to him that night. As I was leaving, Philip said that a group of composers were having dinner the following Saturday and to, “Come and bring your horn.” Not long after that, I met Joan Jonas, introduced by Phil and Richard Serra; then I met Robert Rauschenberg. That was the beginning.
AS In terms of thinking about painting and music, one of my questions was about creating compositions; but you’ve said that you’re not a composer, you’re an instrumentalist.
DL Basically, yes. The way I compose is that I go into the studio and overdub, layer; I make a pass and go on in and just stack up. That’s what I’m doing here. (gestures to the paintings) The same process. You asked before if I think one side of my brain is competing with the other; it is different, but it’s not a competition.
AS You recently performed for the opening and are featured in the current exhibition A Walk on the Wildside: ’70s New York in the Norman E. Fisher Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Jacksonville.
DL The original show was in 1980, and most of us were there for it. What a scene! It was a great community: Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson, Gianfranco Gorgoni, Lawrence Weiner, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susie Harris, and so on.
AS That mix of people and the way you all worked side by side is the heart and soul of the whole thing. MOCA Senior Curator Ylva Rouse says in her opening text for the book: “Missing today are the daredevil spirit, the jaunty expectancy, and sense of liberty that emanates from much of the artistic activities of this time.”
DL We were all struggling. We all helped each other. The 1970s was a very particular time. Things changed in the ’80s. Bob Rauschenberg liked to say, “Money changed the art world.”
AS I’m thinking of your exhibitions from the past ten years or so: from New York City galleries like Salomon Contemporary and Fort Gansevoort to institutional shows at the University of Wyoming at Laramie and the Hilliard University Art Museum at the University of Louisiana right here in Lafayette. It seems that you are always on the go: Bologna in 2022 for Mass for Pentecost Sunday and Budapest for Robert Wilson’s Oedipus; Dublin and Paris in 2023 for a solo exhibition at the Horse; and a collaboration again with Wilson at Sainte-Chapelle. You have toured and traveled incessantly. Why now in New Orleans?
DL Well, it’s in my home state. It is tremendous to be honored here this summer by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities as humanist of the year. I can’t predict what’s coming next, but New Orleans feels good right now, from my New Year’s Eve concert at Chickie Wah Wah to a personal reunion with Mick Jagger at Jazz Fest in May. We last met in Los Angeles forty-five years ago, when I took him to a Clifton Chenier concert at Verbum Dei Jesuit High School in Watts. So it’s all feeling very positive.
Dickie Landry is on view at Other Plans gallery in New Orleans until September 29.