Carrying a mattress across a college campus appears to be a plain task, but for Emma Sulkowicz, a Columbia University student it means the difference between keeping silent and letting her voice be heard.
Sulkowicz became the victim of a sexual assault that took place on her college campus almost two years ago. Following this traumatic event, she filed a formal complaint with the university. She then had to go before a panel and give an account of her attack. After accusing her attacker in public and going through the humiliation of the trial got her nowhere, and instead only traumatized her even more. The panel found her attacker not guilty, leaving her with very few options. Sulkowicz attempted to file a report with the police but said it was so unsuccessful she just gave up on it.
“Carrying that weight” is the senior art thesis Sulkowicz came up with months after the incident happened. Her inspiration was to not only make a statement but also to elicit a powerful response. The artistic performance is admirable and groundbreaking in the effort to bring awareness to the mistreatment of sexual assaults on college campuses and everywhere else for that matter.
Through pain and agony, she made an insightful statement that can be paralleled to other acts of peaceful expression and protest. What makes Emma Sulkowicz’s statement so powerful is that it’s personal but yet has widespread outreach and impact.
By voicing her view peacefully, the topic of her performance stands out so the focus is strictly on her position of the matter and not necessarily the means by which she is expressing this. Carrying a mattress across campus has gotten a lot of attention and elicited many different responses, but the main focus has been the reason for performing such a dramatic act.
The focal point of the performance is the mattress and the act of carrying the weight of the mattress metaphorically relates to the act of carrying around the pain and humiliation of being sexually assaulted and having no action taken against it.
What constitutes what can be labeled art? Art is the full “expression or application of human creative skill and imagination” of an idea or opinion demonstrated in a visual form. The act of carrying a mattress would usually never be considered a form of art. However, Emma Sulkowicz has made it a thought provoking performance for the decades to come.
Whether or not any action is taken against Sulkowicz’s accuser is not the point of the piece. “Carrying that weight” has already made an impact in so many ways and has provoked discussion about the widespread problem of sexual assaults everywhere, most specifically the mishandling of them on college campuses. That was the goal all along.