the Bad Art Cafe

Mattress

Solitary & Participary
It was a pivotal moment in art, as the art critics like to say. It was protest from Colombia University in the school year in 2014/2015. It was a single woman protest and it was also a Performance art and. (some called it Endurance Art).

Emma Sulkowicz made a totem pole out of her art statement. She found a duplicate mattress to the one at Columbia U., with a blue cover, it weighed fifty pounds, and the art performance was for the student to drag the mattress all over the campus, protesting against Columbia U. decision not to charge the aggressor for any crime, or make any move toward expelling him.

The inspiration for this protest was a guy she was seeing causally who she had consensual sex with, then things got ugly. This guy pinned this girl down and raped her anally.

It took almost two years to recovered from this rape, and then she reported it to the police and to the University, but nothing happened. There wasn't enough evidence, said police and Columbia U. So there were no arrests, or probation or expelling. The guy was off the hook for this rape, and he was free to roam around campus.

Art student Emma Sulkowicz dreamed up her senior artwork thesis, and it contained one single element: an XL single Columbia U. standard issue mattress, with a blue cover. It weighed fifty pounds.

Her protest was to drag the fifty lbs. mattress everywhere while she was on campus, so everyone would know what was done to her without saying a word.

Emma made up rules for herself, which she wrote in black paint on the white walls of her art studio. One of them was that she could ask for no help dragging it around from class to class, but if someone volunteered to, she permitted herself to accept the help. A lot of people got on board with this, including her friends, other students, and once in a while, a faculty member joined in. She spent the entire school year to "Carry That Weight", and she casually remarked she developed muscles in her body she didn't know she had.

Emma vowed to drag the mattress as long as it took to get her rapist expelled. It never happened.

How this rape survivor brought attention to a very slow to stagnant follow up by the police who found nothing wrong, is really. It was only ten years ago Columbia U. threw up their hands as a response to a rapist on their campus, and today, it's so much more . . . . progressive . . . .

An art student had to create a "stunt" to call attention to the problem of sexual violence against women. But it was no stunt. It was a real protest piece, and art critics, including the art critic Robera Smith at The New York Times, who lauded it: "One of the most effective aspects of the piece is the way it fluctuates between private and public, and solitary and participatory."

In the end, the mattress graduated too. Six or seven other female grads lifted the mattress in the air as they accepted their diplomas.

The NYT art critic had this to say: "But it seems certain that the piece has set a very high standard for any future work she'll do as an artist and will also earn her a niche in the history of intensely personal yet aggressively political performance art."