This is true of Fort. The body is integrated into the sculpture, but it’s of a completely different material—alive, vulnerable, and isolated. Another video, My Temple (5:05), limns the communal possibilities of sculpture and the body. It opens on a reproduction of a classical temple in a Rhode Island park. Beyond it is a small lake. Birds chirp. Voices call in the background. The camera pans, cinematically, over a verdant meadow, resting on a cloth tarp hiding a mysterious bulk. On the soundtrack, a chorus sings polyphonic music. The cloth rises, revealing six pairs of legs, in tights of various hues, colored like Easter eggs. They dance to the wordless music under the shared cloth. Unlike the immobile, imposing stone temple, this “temple” moves with those dwelling within it. We cut to close-ups of the dancers’ mouths, pressed against the temple’s “outer wall.” Each emits, through and into the cloth, colored liquid, recalling the color of each dancer’s tights. The result is grotesque and playful; those who praise together mark their sites of praise. If Fort is passive, My Temple is about movement and dynamic expression. The camera pans back to the stone temple, where children now play on its steps. One child leaps into the grass—a spontaneous, unscripted moment symbolizing something important in Uretsky’s work. Without that stone temple, My Temple wouldn’t exist. Like the kid jumping from the hard, civic structure into the soft, living tissue of earth, Uretsky’s work leaps from traditions that have failed to account for her experience of the world. The work uses those traditions as springboard, even as it challenges them. This piece, she says, rejects “classical sculpture or a master form, replacing it with actual bodies. Bodies that are bowlegged, scrawny, chubby, queer and colorful. Because they are bodies, they won’t last very long. My Temple, or rather the lump of humanity I placed [in it], is a dying thing and in its death is more relatable than a classical sculpture or monument.”
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