Dancing Chesthair

The title alone moves a person to smile, and it lives up to its promise. Fiona Rukschcio utilizes the music video genre as a form of advertising much like the music industry itself. Wanja Hof´s throbbing Techno-disco persiflage is accompanied by an ambivalent promotion for men´s hairy upper bodies. The ambivalence results from Rukschcio´s cunning application of a variety of methods. Cut-out torsos of the lords of creation minus limbs and heads parachute down from the sky to land on earth. The use of traditional animation techniques recalls historical, handmade animated films that in no way resemble smooth contemporary computer animation. For the background the artist additionally incorporates unspectacular travel photos and her own collages which time and again transform the sketch of a hairy man into a figure resembling a nude female artist´s model. The foreground consistently composed of naked dancing body fragments pleasurably drives the gender bending game forward. Torsos, with and without big bellies gyrate like belly-dancers. These figures multiply and assume geometric constellations reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley musical from the 1930s, and they are similarly reduced to providing material for an aesthetic arrangement of anonymous bodies. In Rukschcio´s film these are not members of a traditionally female ballet dressed in elaborate costumes, but rather "only" naked men´s chests – exhibiting various degrees of hair growth. In a society that realizes and celebrates its decadence in part by idealizing the smooth, shaved bodies of all genders, this work is an important and simultaneously humorous statement that speaks against the norm and for individual freedom. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer)
Translation: Eve Heller