Dickie Landry “New York: 1969-1979”

Salomon Contemporary

poster for Dickie Landry “New York: 1969-1979”

This event has ended.

Salomon Contemporary presents Dickie Landry’s New York: 1969-1979, a solo exhibition of black and white photographs by Dickie Landry that uniquely capture and define a pivotal decade in New York. During this time, the artists challenged the boundaries of art-making by experimenting with new ideas, techniques and media such as performance, site-specific large-scale installation, video, and conceptual art.

Dickie Landry’s passion for photography began in the late 1960’s. Since then, Landry has photographed numerous ground-breaking installations, seminal performances, and personal interactions with artists including Philip Glass, Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Robert Wilson, William Burroughs, Joan Jonas, Mary Heilmann, Lawrence Weiner, Susan Rothenberg, Keith Sonnier, Steve Reich, George Trakas, Tina Girouard, Jeffrey Lew, Suzanne Harris, and Christopher Knowles, among others. For many of the depicted historical performances and exhibitions, Landry’s photographs are the only documentation that exists. The moments both candid and posed are representative of the 70’s downtown New York art scene, a critical period that forever changed the playing field and paved the way for today’s contemporary artists.

The exhibition was conceived and originally presented by the University of Louisiana at the Paula and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum at Lafayette, January 14 through May 17, 2014. A catalogue accompaniment, published by University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, contains an essay by Klaus Kertess:

“Dickie Landry’s exhibition tracks a remarkable group of artists from 1969 to 1979 and documents a decade that placed new emphasis on revealing process and probing new sights and sounds and materials.

Himself a soulful player of the saxophone and a willing participant with some of those that were his peers, starting with the decade he now memorializes with this many-faceted exhibition moving from jazz to the new music lushness of Philip Glass’ rigorously structured and soulful geometries to Richard Serra’s and Keith Sonnier’s engagement with non-art materials and structures to Gordon Matta-Clark’s vivid deconstructions of architecture to the epic that emerged out of Robert Wilson’s and Philip Glass’ partnership in the epic Einstein on the Beach to the senior William Burroughs twisting and turning a basic English vocabulary into previously unheard of grottoes of drug-fueled mystery to Joan Jonas’ re-exploration of narrative that had long been banned from the avant-garde stage to Christopher Knowles the young protégé of Robert Wilson who could seldom enter a room without spreading some high jinks about such as a chorus of alarm clocks each set to go off in a different place and time to the underground blind musician Moondog who droned away almost every day on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth in his Viking drag and often ended the day in Glass’ apartment where he was provided with a meal and a cigar but not with the woman he frequently asked for, to the German sculptor Ulrich Rückreim who managed to infuse poetry into aloof boulders to Bruce Nauman who measured himself with the dance of his limbs to Lucinda Childs who was literally and figuratively walking into dance and Nancy Graves who wanted to ride the animals in African jungles before activating artificial limbs to animate their stance. Camels became her calling card.

These words can only modestly introduce the still-fresh abundance of new dance, narrative and form making that so passionately unites these artists.”
-Klaus Kertess, 2014

Dickie Landy was born in Cecilia, Louisiana and currently lives and works there. Landry’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Sao Paulo Biennial; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As an accomplished composer and saxophonist, Landry has performed at many international museums and venues including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Guggenheim, New York; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Groninger Museum, Groningen; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Documenta, Kassel; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Landry was a founding member and played with the Philip Glass Ensemble from 1969 until 1981. Throughout his career, Landry performed with Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, and Laurie Anderson and collaborated with Robert Wilson, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Wilson, Trisha Brown, Keith Sonnier, Tina Girouard, and Chuck Close. In 2012, Salomon Contemporary presented “Heart”, a recreation of Landry’s 1975 video installation (“1,2,3,4” with photographic stills) at Leo Castelli Gallery. This is Landry’s second solo exhibition at Salomon Contemporary.

Media

Schedule

from February 26, 2015 to March 28, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-02-26 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Dickie Landry

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use