i wanna be / the slit     maggie mooney

Marina Faust, an Austrian artist, has been producing complex, sensitive video works that are clearly in line with Viennese actionism. “I wanna be” is an image-less video where the background is a white screen and the sound-track  Marilyn Monroe’s unforgettable song, I wanna be loved by you,  which the artist hums at close quarters with the viewer. The video goes on to a micro-sequence – a close-up of a skirt with an exaggerated slit up the back with a techno music sound-track, a hallucinatory flash lasting a few seconds that seems to completely destroy the Hollywood myth of innocent, naive female sexuality.

“Maggie Mooney”  refers to another film character, cited by Edward J. Robinson in “Key Largo”, the well-known thriller starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Marina Faust makes her the character  in the story that she tells at frenetic speed in her characteristic diction, in German, English and French. Like in the film, where we have never seen the woman and only sense her ghostly presence, Marina Faust evokes a world of fantasmagorical memories of ordinary things, through perversions of words that are read or sung, and frames and close-ups that come much too close.

Alexandre Pollazzon