Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Savitsky.
Hi Matt, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born in rural Pennsylvania and came to art through handicrafts and church music. Gay and sheltered. I was mentored by my high school art teachers, who nurtured the side of my artistic abilities that had to do with painting landscapes. I won awards which was cancelled out by coming out- but I got out. Next; Cooper Union and 9/11. Partied hard- got messy, messier. In 2007 I left NY for Philadelphia – love and fun- moved into a trinity where Ryan Trecartin lived while he was making I-Be Area. Ditched painting for performance and video- sculpture too. With Radical faeries, I become Minty and finally get into drag. Soon, heartbroken fueled, I applied to graduate school and got in – Yale and UCSD? UCSD.
Sobriety.
I focused and made big strides in my artwork- large scale video installations, fun collaborations all over and f*ck*d out drag stuff. I lived with eight (mostly) friends in the former LGBT center in Hillcrest and left for Los Angeles site unseen on Birthday 9/20/2016.
My goal of leaving jobs like retail/art handling/artist assisting/house-boying for teaching works out: one video class at University of San Diego then more classes at Cal State Fullerton, where I still work. LA is mostly driving alone-making lots of art and doing the Artist Way, changing my life. My art opportunities were coming from places outside LA; first solo at Shoot the Lobster(2017/18) -run by NY buddy Ebony Hayes at the time- I made into a 10 week sculpture/performance project with friends which allowed me to snapshot my growing social sphere. Group Relations Conferences; Jennifer Moon’s Process Group; 12 Step meetings; and a collective I formed (The Family Room Collective); Groups where I struggle to understand myself via a powerful unconscious need make others into family rather than accept the one I got.
Pandemic: I move in by myself, teach online, watch all seasons of Survivor and think more about the group unconscious. Thinking I’d go to school to become a therapist but got a big grant to keep making art. Straight and narrow. Some regrets.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’d rather not answer this.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Over the past two decades, I have developed a highly experimental and socially engaged approach to art-making, creating performance projects that probe the unconscious dynamics within groups. I incorporate material play, theatrical props, and modular film sets that become important tools by which the group or partnership can express itself. While drawings, photographs, and paintings help me chart my process with immediacy, the work’s primary form is performance videos positioned within installations both as documents and works of art.
I develop my projects around deep engagement with communities ranging from BDSM practitioners and psychoanalysts to family members, students, and members of the queer arts scene in Los Angeles. Each project functions as both a social experiment and creative platform—offering participants space to express their identities and collective intelligence in new and often surprising ways. My practice operates at the intersection of psychoanalysis, performance, and collective process—drawing on Wilfred Bion’s theories of group dynamics and Melanie Klein’s explorations of projection and identification, as well as the post-Dadaist “cut-up” and free-associative strategies of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. When asked in an interview with curator, Andrew Suggs, about how the cut-up functions in my work, I replied:
“Part of what I love about the cut up is that it’s such a beautifully simple idea. You take one thing and put it next to another thing and this third idea emerges …When you do that via specific methods you start to get really distinctive results between two things that wouldn’t have met any other way. It’s a collage principle rather than a linear construction….Once I started to work with this approach in my artwork, the whole process accelerated really quickly. And now I see the whole world in this way. “
Like in early time-based experiments by performance artists (Vito Acconci, Dara Birnbaum, Warhol), I want the video image to function as both a document of the artistic gesture and the work of art. However, using a cut up method, I create inner frames for the performances, such as windows, apertures, mirrors, or doors, that deconstruct the camera’s fixed viewpoint and draw attention to the powerful influence of the frame, challenging the ‘neutral’ gaze adopted by early conceptual performance artists. In confronting the history of conceptual performance art as a queer individual, I explore the boundary between being surveilled and being seen.
I have realized this synthesis most directly in my recent project LA TIME (2021-present), a public performance and video project designed to bring artists together in the aftermath of the pandemic. I was able to pursue the project in earnest in 2022 after receiving the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
I began LA TIME in the early weeks of the pandemic, when conventional spaces for mourning and reflection had disappeared. Confronted with an overwhelming news cycle, I turned to the newspaper as a raw material for embodied interpretation. For each work in the series I lead a small ensemble of performers who translate Los Angeles Times front-page photographs into choreographic scores. The group collectively interprets these images, layering them with personal associations to unfix them from their journalistic narrative. Each performance is filmed exactly one year after the date of its source newspaper, marking the passage of time and revealing how public attention and collective memory evolve.
The performances in and around familiar public spaces in Los Angeles are video recorded, framed by physical copies of the LA Times front pages, stripped of images and held up to the Los Angeles landscape. Employing image compositing (an in-camera cut up method), the news becomes a frame for public intervention, with gestures that range from subtle (such as cleaning up a construction site) to bold (like stretching 200 feet of red fabric along a line of palm trees on a hilltop).
By reframing journalism as performance, LA TIME creates a slower, more reflective encounter with the news—one grounded in movement, place, and shared witnessing. Returning to the theme of the cut up, I am also questioning the authoritative narrative voice-of-record against the unreported embodied experiences that shape civic life. Performance artist and writer Xandro Segade has written about the work:
“..A meditation of framing, from the formal crop to the discursive headline, the videos unravel language, politics and performance, while constructing a new reality from fragments. No digital masking, all in camera, a technical feat that speaks to the realness slipping out of our grasp.”
My practice continues to explore how improvisation, intimacy, and collective creation can expose the psychological undercurrents of social life and offer new models for artistic and communal transformation.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
I had many mother figures who helped me through the coming out process when I was young. My art teacher gave me a lot of attention, pushed me creatively and let me keep my purse in her classroom so I wouldn’t get bullied. My best friend’s mom who lived outside Philadelphia was a refuge when I was not welcome in my parents’ home. My Sunday school teacher would drive me around and talk to me about God and complex feelings like wanting to die to go be with him. My best friend in High School, Leslie, was popular, powerful. Her embrace of me confused the straights and she was my fiercest defender.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mattsavitsky.com
- Instagram: @mintymedia
Image Credits
All images courtesy of the artist.
