Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)

Background

Emma Sulkowicz (born October 3, 1992) is the daughter of Sandra Leong and Kerry Sulkowicz, psychiatrists from Manhattan. She attended Dalton School on the Upper East Side, and in 2011 began her visual arts degree at Columbia University.

Sulkowicz alleges that she was slapped, choked, and anally raped in her dorm room by another student, on the first day of her second year in August 2012, during what began as a consensual sexual encounter. The student Sulkowicz accused denies the allegation, insisting that the encounter was entirely consensual. In April 2013, 8 months after the encounter, Sulkowicz filed a complaint with the university. Sulkowicz says she filed her complaint after she encountered two other female students who said they had been victimized by the same individual. One was a former girlfriend who said she was emotionally abused during their long-term relationship, and later came to view their sexual relations as having been non-consensual. The other said that on one occasion the accused student had moved toward her aggressively, grabbed her arms, and attempted to kiss her. Shortly after Sulkowicz filed her complaint, the two other students with whom she was acquainted also filed complaints with the university against the same student. Columbia ultimately cleared him of responsibility in all three cases.

The case attracted wider attention when the three female students who filed complaints gave interviews to the New York Post, which broke the story on December 11, 2013, without naming those involved. In April 2014 Sulkowicz appeared with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand at a press conference about campus sexual assault.

On April 24, 2014, 23 students filed a federal complaint against Columbia and Barnard College, alleging violations of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law upholding gender equality in federally funded institutions. Among other issues, the complaint alleged that the institutions discourage students from reporting sexual assault, that alleged perpetrators are not removed from campus, and that sanctions are too lenient. The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation in January 2015.

On May 14, 2014, Sulcowicz filed a complaint with the NYPD. The district attorney's office interviewed Sulkowicz and the student she accused in August, but did not pursue charges, citing lack of reasonable suspicion.

Creation and performance

Sulkowicz created Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) in the summer of 2014 for her senior thesis while at Yale University Summer School of Art and Music. Her first effort was a video of herself moving a bed out of a room, accompanied by the audio of her filing the police report, which she had recorded on her cellphone. The mattress later became the focus of the piece. Sulkowicz's thesis was supervised by artist Jon Kessler, a professor at Columbia. As the idea for Mattress Performance developed, Kessler and Sulkowicz discussed the nature of endurance art and the work of Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramović, Ulay and Chris Burden. Sulkowicz described the work as "an endurance performance art piece". She told the Columbia Daily Spectator: "I do think that nowadays art pieces can include whatever the artist desires and in this performance art piece it utilizes the elements of protest ..."

Purchased online from Tall Paul's Tall Mall, the 50-lb (23-kg), dark-blue, extra-long twin mattress is of the kind Columbia places in its dorms, similar to the one on which Sulkowicz alleges she was raped. She spent the summer of 2014 creating the rules of engagement, which defined the parameters of the project. Written on the walls of her studio in the university's Watson Hall, these included that she had to carry the mattress when on university property; that it had to remain on campus when she was not there; and that she was not allowed to ask for help in carrying it, but if help was offered she could accept.

In early September 2014 she began carrying the mattress on campus. A homeless man was one of the first to help. She told New York magazine: "He was the first person who helped without some sort of preconstructed belief for why they were going to help. He was like, 'Oh, look, a struggling girl—let me help her and be a nice human being.' That was probably the most honest interaction I had." She kept a diary throughout, amounting to 59,000 words at the end of the work, recording her experiences as well as the misunderstandings of commentators.

Sulkowicz said the work would end when the classmate she accused was expelled from or otherwise left Columbia, and that she would take the mattress to her graduation ceremony if necessary. In the end she carried it to their graduation ceremony on May 19, 2015, despite a request from the school that students should not bring "large objects which could interfere with the proceedings". Several women helped carry the mattress on stage. As they approached, university president Lee Bollinger, who had been shaking other graduates' hands, turned away as if to pick something up, and did not shake their hands; the university said this happened because the mattress was in the way. The next day posters appeared in Morningside Heights near the university calling Sulkowicz a "pretty little liar".

After graduation Sulkowicz said she had known the university would not expel the student she accused, and had expected to carry the mattress for nine months, the length of a pregnancy, which was an important part of the work: "To me, the piece has very much represented [the fact that] a guy did a horrible thing to me and I tried to make something beautiful out of it."

Lawsuit by the accused student

Emily Bazelon called Mattress Performance a nightmare for the student Sulkowicz accused. His name was written on campus bathroom walls and distributed on flyers, and he was shunned by other students and subjected to threats. On the National Day of Action in November 2014 protestors took mattresses to one of his classes. He described Mattress Performance as harassment "explicitly designed to bully" him into leaving Columbia. Reporter and columnist Naomi Schaefer Riley accused Sulkowicz of "shaming without proof" in an editorial published in the New York Post.

The parents of the student Sulkowicz accused criticized the university, including its decision to let Sulkowicz take the mattress to the graduation ceremony: "This has been a deeply humiliating experience. ... A university that bows to a public witch-hunt no longer deserves to be called a place of enlightenment, of intellectual and academic freedom."

In April 2015 the accused student filed a Title IX lawsuit against Columbia University, its trustees, university president Lee Bollinger, and Sulkowicz's senior-thesis supervisor, Jon Kessler, alleging they exposed him to gender-based harassment and a hostile educational environment in allowing the project to go forward. The accused student said that in so doing they damaged his college experience, emotional well-being, reputation and career prospects. His lawyers argued that Columbia allowed Sulkowicz to create a "public persona surrounding her false allegations, which has led to the posting of videos and other proposed performances depicting [the plaintiff] as a rapist" even though the university cleared him of any wrongdoing. Among examples of what they described as "public harassment", they cited Sulkowicz's public display of drawings which they said depicted the genitals of the student she accused as part of her project (Sulkowicz left open the question of whether these drawings were of the student or stories about the student), as well as depictions of the alleged sexual assault, as violations of Columbia's gender-based misconduct policy, which prohibits "unwelcome remarks about the private parts of a person's body" and "graffiti concerning the sexual activity of another person". The lawsuit alleged that Columbia was responsible because the university sponsored and supervised the project. The university's lawyers say the university is "not responsible or liable for her conduct".

On August 28, 2015, Columbia's lawyers asked that the case be dismissed, citing First Amendment protections and arguing the student's lawsuit suggests Columbia was obligated "to silence Ms. Sulkowicz, preventing her from speaking publicly on the issue of sexual assault on college campuses—an issue of national concern". The case was heard by Judge Gregory H. Woods of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, who dismissed the suit on March 12, 2016. The student filed an amended complaint on April 25, 2016. In July of 2017, the university announced that it reached a settlement with the student; terms of the settlement were not disclosed. The university said in a statement: "Columbia recognizes that after the conclusion of the investigation, Paul's remaining time at Columbia became very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience. Columbia will continue to review and update its policies toward ensuring that every student — accuser and accused, including those like Paul who are found not responsible — is treated respectfully and as a full member of the Columbia community."

Praise

Numerous art critics responded positively to Mattress Performance. Artnet cited it as "almost certainly ... one of the most important artworks of the year", comparing it to Ana Mendieta's Untitled (Rape Scene) (1973) and Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus's Three Weeks in May (1977). Performance artist Marina Abramović praised it. The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described it as "strict and lean, yet inclusive and open ended, symbolically laden yet drastically physical", writing that comparisons to the Stations of the Cross and Hester Prynne's scarlet letter were apparent. Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York magazine, included it in his list of the best 19 art shows of 2014, calling "clear, to the point, insistent, adamant ... pure radical vulnerability".

The political response was marked too. Nato Thompson, chief curator of Creative Time, said he could not think of another case where art had triggered a movement in the way Mattress Performance had. Hillary Clinton told the DNC Women's Leadership Forum in September 2014: "That image should haunt all of us ..." In October Columbia students carried 28 mattresses on campus, one for each student who joined the federal Title IX complaint, then left them outside the university president's home; they were fined $471 for the clean-up. A month later a group called "Carry That Weight" organized a "National Day of Action to Carry That Weight", during which students carried mattresses on 130 US campuses and several elsewhere. Sulkowicz received the National Organization for Women's Susan B. Anthony Award and the Feminist Majority Foundation's Ms. Wonder Award.

In January 2015, New York's U.S. senator Kirsten Gillibrand invited Sulkowicz to attend the 2015 State of the Union Address. Families Advocating for Campus Equality said the invitation was "undeserved and violates the principles of confidentiality and gender equality of Title IX", and that Sulkowicz had "failed to establish any wrongdoing" on the part of the student she accused.

In 2015, Sulkowicz was included in The Forward's Forward 50 as one of the year's fifty most influential Jewish-Americans.

Inspired activism

On October 29, 2014, dozens of Columbia students carried 28 mattresses around the school's Morningside Heights campus, one for each student who joined the federal Title IX complaint, then left them outside the home of Lee Bollinger, president of the university. A month later a group called "Carry That Weight" organized similar protests in 130 campuses in the US, and several around the world, including the Central European University in Budapest, calling for a "National Day of Action to Carry That Weight".

Criticism

Social critic Camille Paglia described Mattress Performance as "a parody of the worst aspects of that kind of grievance-oriented feminism", adding that a feminist work "should empower women, not cripple them".

The accused said in a December 2014 interview with The New York Times that the mattress performance is not an act of artistic expression, but instead one orchestrated to bully him and force him to leave Columbia. He said that on the National Day of Action, protesters followed him around, carrying mattresses to one of his classes and taking his picture. He also said that he was not permitted to use written communications between himself and the alleged victim as evidence, and expressed disbelief that anyone could believe he was guilty even after his accusers failed to meet what he deemed the low burden of proof in the university hearing process. He also stated that since Sulkowicz's protest serves as her senior thesis, it is being supervised and implicitly endorsed by a Columbia faculty member. His lawyer added that Senator Gillibrand failed to adequately investigate his accuser's account before appearing with her and that she "[took] a fictional event and [built] an entire platform around it".

Asked by German Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin about her feelings on the treatment of her son at Columbia, the accused student's mother Karin said, "This is a feeling of lawlessness." His father Andreas said that he sometimes fears his son will leave the school as a "cynic" and a "suspicious man".

The New York Post's Naomi Schaefer Riley criticized Sulkowicz's work as "shaming without proof" and accused her and her supporters of "saving themselves from having to answer any questions and destroying men's lives with lies and innuendo". In his article "If anything's art, art's nothing", National Post columnist Robert Fulford compared Sulkowicz's work to that of Megumi Igarashi and concluded, "if everything is art, then art can be used for anything. And in the process meaning and value dissolve and art becomes hopelessly debased."

Glenn Reynolds, law professor at the University of Tennessee, wrote on his political blog Instapundit: "It would have been nice if Senator Kirsten Gillibrand hadn't joined the lynch mob, embracing Sulkowicz and calling the accused a 'rapist' even after he was cleared by two different proceedings (one of which required only a preponderance of the evidence to convict)."

Sulkowicz's accusation itself has been subject to criticism. Families Advocating for Campus Equality said that Sulkowicz "failed to establish any wrongdoing by the student she accused", and columnist and political analyst Mona Charen said, "it seems highly likely that Sulkowicz is shading the truth."

Newspaper Bodies (Look, Mom, I'm on the Front Page!)

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. She 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?” 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.

Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol

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 herself having sex with an anonymous actor in a Columbia dorm room. 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. 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. She wrote that the work, which examines the nature of sexual consent, was not a reenactment of the alleged rape and later stated that it's a separate piece from Mattress Performance.

Self-Portrait

From February to March 2016 at Coagula Curatorial in Los Angeles, Sulkowicz exhibited a piece, Self-Portrait. 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. The exhibition also featured a life size robotic replica of the artist that was called "Emmatron". Emmatron plays prerecorded answers to several questions Sulkowicz has been repeatedly asked that 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? If audience members asked these questions to Sulkowicz during their conversation, the artist would send them to Emmatron for the answers.