A young woman slowly rotates around a neon green, nylon-bristled broom pressed into the center of a ragged pink towel taped to the floor. As she revolves around it, a scraping noise crackles from a speaker set somewhere off to the side. After a long minute of methodical rotation, she picks up the broom and begins smoothing it across the towel in long strokes, as if sweeping away invisible particles. The amplified scrapes and whooshes shift with her movements, a sonic mirror to her careful choreography.
The performer creating this surreal vignette is St. Louis-based noise and performance artist Grace Smith, a.k.a. Janet XMas, a.k.a. JANET. Dressed in a sheer negligee, thong underwear, black combat boots and a leather dog collar and bracelet, Janet reads as a twisted version of those stock characters of heteronormative fantasy, the sexy maid or oversexed housewife. Yet, wielding her sexuality as she does her broom when performing, Smith appropriates the tools of domestic reproduction to her own, unproductive ends: non-narrative performance art and abstracted, grating noise.
No comments:
Post a Comment