Luke Savisky and Ed Hall area perfect fit: The artist’s film montages, a
staple of the band’s shows, are as recognizably unique to him as the music is
to them. Of course, you can’t stretch your full wingspan if you limit yourself
to one band.
Savisky has pushed optic frontiers for local bands ranging from folk freaks
Poi Dog Pondering to noisesters Sixteen Deluxe, Stars of the Lid, and the late
Liquid Mice, as well as out-of-towners like San Francisco’s Seemen and Thinking
Fellers Union Local #282. Avant-garde sound artists such as Ellen Fullman and
Brooks Coleman have enlisted his services as well. Savisky also created and
directs the visuals for the New York and upcoming Austin stagings of Sheelah
Murthy’s performance piece “Selling Shakti.” But at the bottom, he’s just a guy
with projectors and a keen sense of his surroundings.
Savisky’s montages, which often begin with loops of reductive geometric
shapes
or patterns that build into a network and eventually into recognizable scenery,
are ephemeral in structure and intuitive in meaning. They inevitably have the
double effect of hypnotizing with repetition and engaging the rational mind
with abstraction, although the artist is no pure aesthete. “Some shows I’ll
create a definite thematic structure, some I’ll be concentrating on a
particular neural/optical response, others I’ll try to make as boring and
tedious as possible,” he says. “I really enjoy playing with the contrast of the
instinctual and intellectual. Sometimes I’ll induce a trancy feeling… then
when everyone is fully blissing, throw a wrench into it. Like life does
sometimes.”
The clash of form and chaos in such genres as Dada and early 20th-century
Russian printmaking formed the ground for Savisky’s budding inclinations, and
as a student at UT Austin, he was introduced to multimedia by installation
artist Bill Lundberg. “He really saved my experience there and was instrumental
in the direction I took,” he says, “although he warned me against getting into
entertainment.” It was Poi Dog’s Frank Orrall who brought Savisky into that
arena, although he freely acknowledges his first show with them was a mess of
exploding slide boxes. And despite being experienced in video and
installations, he’s first and foremost a film man.
“When I was a kid, I used to ask my parents why this soap opera or TV show
looked so different from a movie; it really bugged me,” he says.
“Eventually I found out it was the difference between videotape and film. I
really like the physicality of film – I can paint or draw on it, put
fingerprints on it, burn it, destroy it… In one piece I bleed onto it, in
another I pour dirt and saliva directly into the gate. The film goes and gives,
and lives until I rip it or it rips itself off the projector. Even then, you
can pick it up off the floor, look through it, and see the same images you see
when it’s lit on the screen. It’s there in your hands.”
Projects outside the rock realm have the same eerie, displaced
verisimilitude,
often in non-traditional art spaces. One outdoor installation featured an
outdoor bedroom with floating walls and a self-copulating staircase; another
comprised mobiles of cast human limbs and heads, with filmed faces projected on
top. And anyone taking a break from the music in the Electric Lounge’s back
room during last fall’s X/XX Fringe Fest would have had the solace of Savisky’s
enveloping pond scenes, silent but for the click of the projectors.
Upcoming projects include a show for the reconstituted Moist Fist and helping
the Butthole Surfers design their live return, although Savisky says he wants
to pull back from too much rock & roll and explore 3-D and interactive art.
“I’ve been trying to avoid the dreaded `yeah, man, everybody’s doing the film
thing,’ even though it seems to be me doing most of it,” he says. Still, “Music
has and always will be a huge influence on me. It’s fun, I get to make my
friends look cool, and hear great music.”
This article appears in May 19 • 1995 and May 19 • 1995 (Cover).