Through video overlay on live television, Joan Braderman, actor and commentator for Paper Tiger Television, engages in a brutal deconstruction of the system of American series. She infiltrates the Dynasty soap opera in order to capture its mechanisms from the inside, working on the cogs of this “fascination machine” in order to better disrupt them. The whole point of the undertaking is based on the various ways that the artist interferes with the series: behind the image of a mask with holes, in front of the scene (thus obstructing the field of vision), or serving as a cache for a particular character. Right side up or upside down, she parasites the narrative flow, pausing it, covering it, commenting on it, summarising it, or introducing “stutters”. She thus freely promenades through it, omnipresent, filling up and emptying out the conventions and archetypes of the show's dialogues and gestures. As a bad conscience, an evil genie, both intruder and witch, her body serves as an index mockingly pointing out the emptiness on the screen: the vacuity of contemporary television.

Stéphanie Moisdon

(Extract from the catalogue Vidéo et après. La collection vidéo du Musée National d'Art Moderne. Editions Carré and Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 1992.)