Emma Sulkowicz

Sulkowicz (center right) carrying the mattress at graduation

Sulkowicz created Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) in the summer of 2014 as a senior thesis while at Yale University Summer School of Art and Music. This performance artwork was in protest against campus sexual assault and the university's handling of Sulkowicz's allegation that a fellow student at Columbia University anally raped her.[7] The university cleared the student of responsibility,[8] and the district attorney's office declined to pursue criminal charges, citing lack of reasonable suspicion.[23][14]

Sulkowicz's first effort was a video of herself dismantling a bed, accompanied by the audio of her filing the police report, which she had recorded on a cellphone.[3] The mattress later became the sole focus of the piece.[7] Sulkowicz told New York magazine:

I thought about how ... the mattress represents a private place where a lot of your intimate life happens; and how I have brought my life out in front for the public to see; and the act of bringing something private and intimate out into the public mirrors the way my life has been. Also the mattress as a burden, because of what has happened there, that has turned my own relationship with my bed into something fraught.[18]

The 50-pound (23 kg), dark-blue, extra-long twin mattress used in the performance art piece is of the kind Columbia places in its dorms, similar to the one on which she says she was raped. Sulkowicz spent the summer of 2014 creating the rules of engagement: written on the walls of her studio in the university's Watson Hall, these stated that Sulkowicz must carry the mattress whenever she was on university property; that it must remain on campus even when Sulkowicz was not there; and that Sulkowicz was not allowed to ask for help in carrying it, but could accept if help was offered.[3][24] In September that year she began carrying it on campus, which she said was a physically painful experience.[25]

During a protest organized by the student group No Red Tape on Oct. 29, 2014, hundreds of Columbia students stacked 28 mattresses on Columbia's president Lee Bollinger's doorstep. The mattresses symbolized the 28 sexual assault complaints in Columbia's Title IX case, reported New York magazine. The Columbia student group Student Worker Solidarity, who booked the space for No Red Tape, would be charged $1500 for the removal of the mattresses on behalf of the University.[26]

Sulkowicz's final thesis show, the week before graduation in May 2015, included depictions of a naked man with an obscenity and a couple having sex, printed onto a New York Times article about the student she accused. Sulkowicz said that the images were cartoons, and asked: "what are the functions of cartoons? Do they depict the people themselves (a feat which, if you've done enough reading on art theory, you will realize is impossible), or do they illustrate the stories that have circulated about a person?"[27] This work was later shown under the title Newspaper Bodies (Look, Mom, I'm on the Front Page!) as part of a group exhibition at the Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, New York.[28]

On June 3, 2015, Sulkowicz, working with artist Ted Lawson, released Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol ("This is not a rape"), an eight-minute video of Sulkowicz having sex with an anonymous actor in a Columbia dorm room.[4] The title of the piece is a reference to the caption in René Magritte's The Treachery of Images: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe". Introductory text by Sulkowicz stresses that the sex was consensual throughout, though toward the end it portrays resistance, violence and force.[29] When the video was first posted, each screen displayed the timestamp of August 27, 2012, the night of the alleged assault, but later the date was blurred.[30] Sulkowicz wrote that the work, which examines the nature of sexual consent, was not a reenactment of the alleged rape and later stated that it was a separate piece from Mattress Performance.[29]

From February to March 2016 at Coagula Curatorial in Los Angeles, Sulkowicz exhibited a piece, Self-Portrait.[31] For the first three weeks of the exhibition, Sulkowicz stood on a pedestal in the gallery, and had one-on-one conversations with visitors who would stand on an identical pedestal in front of her.[32] The exhibition featured a life-sized robotic replica of the artist that was called "Emmatron". Emmatron plays prerecorded answers to several questions Sulkowicz has been repeatedly asked, which she will no longer respond to. A few examples of questions Emmatron had answers to included "Tell me about the night you were assaulted", "Is this art piece a part of Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)?" and "What do your parents think of all this?"[33] If audience members asked these questions to Sulkowicz during their conversation, the artist would send them to Emmatron for the answers.[34]

In 2017, Sulkowicz performed a bondage performance piece titled “The Ship Is Sinking”.[35] In the piece, Sulkowicz (in high heels and bikini with the “Whitney” logo, to convey the look of a woman in a beauty pageant) is tied up, berated and hung from the ceiling on a wooden beam by a man in a suit, “Master Avery”,[35][36] as the figurehead of a ship.[37] Sulkowicz said “white cis men have the privilege of making art that can be divorced from their lives”[38] while “it’s a privilege that I don’t really have so I’m trying to work in a way that makes the best use of that position as I can.” At closing time, the museum turned off its lights, but spectators stayed and used phone flashlights to continue watching until Sulkowicz was finished.[38] Sulkowicz portrayed being able to express the pain she felt and endured, putting herself physically within the artwork.

On January 30, 2018, Sulkowicz was documented protesting at two New York City museums and a subway station. During the protest, Sulkowicz posed for several photographs in front of Chuck Close paintings at The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Close mosaic in a subway station, as well as in front of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Sulkowicz wore black lingerie, with home-made pasties made of tape, and covered her body with drawn-on asterisks. Sulkowicz stated that the protest was a response to a New York Times article from January 28, in which members of the art world, responding to allegations of sexual harassment towards artist Chuck Close, debated over the future of art created by individuals accused of improper behavior. Among the people quoted in the article was Jock Reynolds, the then-director of the Yale University Art Gallery, who stated, "Pablo Picasso was one of the worst offenders of the 20th century in terms of his history with women. Are we going to take his work out of the galleries? At some point you have to ask yourself, is the art going to stand alone as something that needs to be seen?"[39] Sulkowicz was reportedly "appalled" by the comments, asking, "are you only showing work by Harvey Weinstein?"[40] The protest was described as a "performance" in the media,[41][40] and as "performative action" by the artist.[42]

From March 10 to April 22, 2018, The Invisible Dog gallery in Brooklyn, New York hosted Sulkowicz's first gallery installation, a piece entitled The Floating World.[40] The piece consists of a series of glass orbs, suspended by ropes, containing objects of personal significance to Sulkowicz and members of her community.[43]