Carry the Weight (Will it be unbearable?) - Emma Sulkowicz
Hello to all the lovely creatures out there!
Today we'll be talking once again about how art as a concept can really "voice" social problems that are being dismissed or ignored by society. Still in a similar pattern with my previous post about Artemisia Gentileschi and the rape themes that governed her work, today I'm bringing to the table another artist with a similar concept, her name. Emma Sulkowicz.
Some of you might actually be familiar with her name as she earned a specific nickname throught her first major art project and her the nickname "Mattress Girl". Emma Sulkowicz is a political activist and performance artist and attended Columbia University where she obtained a degree in visual arts in 2015.
A few words about her first ever art performance and the increndible message she wanted to get across:
In April 2013, Sulkowicz filed a complaint with Columbia University alleging that she had been raped by Paul Nungesser, a fellow Columbia student on August 27, 2012. A university inquiry found Nungresser "not responsible". The next year, in May 2014, Sulkowicz filed a report against Nungresser with the New York Police Department. After the district attorney's office interviewed both of them, it found insufficient grounds for reasonable suspicion. Sulkowicz declined to further pursue criminal charges, saying that the NYPD officers were dismissive and had mistreated Sulkowicz.
Sulkowicz focused her senior thesis on a work of performance art entitled Mattress Performance (Carry the Weight). Starting in September 2014, Sulkowicz carried a mattress around campus and to classes receiving considerable media attention. Nungesser denied Sulkowicz's allegations of rape, citing as evidence friendly messages from Sulkowicz in the weeks following the alleged attack.
Sulkowicz decided to develope the performance piece after learning that Columbia had dismissed sexual assault charges against Nungresser by two other Columbia undergraduates. A second motivating factor was her sense that Columbia and the NYPD had dismissed the allegations without enough of a serious inquiry.
In April 2014, Sulkowicz had filed a Title IX complaint with 23 other students, alleging Columbia has mishandled sexual assault cases. Journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis described this as "the most effective, organized anti-rape movement since the late '70s.
In April 2015, Nungresser filed a Title IX gender discrimination lawsuit against Columbia, its board of trustees, its president Lee Bollinger and Sulkowicz's supervising art professor Jon Kessler, alleging that they had facilitated gender-based harassment by allowing the art project to proceed. Federal District Court Judge Gregory H. Woods dismissed the lawsuit but allowed Nungresse to refile an amended suit. The refiled complaint was also dismissed.
The initial performance piece consisted of Sulkowicz carrying a mattress wherever she went on campus during her final year as a undergraduate at Columbia University. The work was a protest against campus sexual assault and the University's handling of the sexual assault case, in which it had cleared the accused of responsibility.
She created it in the summer of 2014 as a senior thesis while at Yale University Summer School of Art and Music. 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. The mattress later became the sole focus of the piece.
In Sulkowicz's words: "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.
The 50-pound (23kg), 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 whixh 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 wherever she went on university property; that it must remain on campus even when Sulkowizc was not there; and that Sulkowicz was not alloweed to ask fro help in carryingit, but could accept if help was offered. In September that year, she began carrying it on campus, which she said was a physically painful experience.
During a protest organized by the student group No Red Tape on October 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.
As you can probably already tell from this case using art either as in an artwork standing by its own or either by immersing yourself to it the goal can remain the same: to voice what matters to you and to others, to voice injustices and make noise so it won;t be repeated again,. Art has always been a means to create noise, to make people think and even be uncomfortable with situations that it can portray. Thau is one true meaning of art and the reason i chose to discuss with you the case of Emma Sulkowicz and her art performace. She chose to not stay silent and create through her art, something that will create exactly the kind of noise she wanted, to not let people forget that even without words, only actions, silence can still be defeaning.
Thank you for reading and I'll see you ina next post!
xoxoxo
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