Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz, 21, says she was raped in her own bed at the beginning of her sophomore year. This week, two years after the alleged assault, Sulkowicz, a visual-arts major, has made a promise to carry her mattress around campus every day as part of her senior thesis. It is, she says, a symbol of the burden sexual-assault survivors carry with them every day.
“The act of carrying the mattress from inside my room out into the light has mirrored the way my life has changed, as I’ve brought my personal story out into the light,” Sulkowicz told TIME. “This project is a way to heal one of the most difficult things that happened to me. As I will build muscle and get stronger, hopefully I will also build emotional strength.”
Sulkowicz started the performance-art project on Tuesday, and she said she is determined to continue carrying the mattress wherever she goes — to class, the library, the gym — as long as her alleged rapist is still on campus. That means her project could last until graduation day in May 2015 — unless her alleged assailant is either expelled or chooses to leave the school. Last year, Sulkowicz and two other women reported the same person to the university. All three cases were dismissed.
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You are right about the part that you don’t understand art… it’s absolutely about more than just entertainment.
Oof yeah I always feel bad for the folks that see the crazy freestyle runway shows and think they’re being clever by recognizing how impractical the costumes are.
Art is so much more than purely entertainment and it’s insulting that you even typed these words out to question a rape victim.
Yeah, this is totally about being entertainment /s
Art is often about expression. Yes it can be about entertainment, but to describe something like Strange Fruit as entertainment feels wrong, it’s beautiful and haunting, but it’s a song that cries out for justice against the suffering that inspired its creation. This performance art piece is also a demand for justice.
Your gonna be real upset when you hear about Guernica (Picasso)
@6_Electrons@lemmy.world got so upset about their comment being rightfully called out that they sent me this lovely little note:
Thought it would be best to make your message to me public knowledge. Say it with your chest.
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Calm down, recognize you were wrong and needed to learn something. that’s all I got got. best of luck.
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You’re the only one who misunderstood it. She doesn’t need to change herself to please you.
maybe it’s time to Crack open that old dictionary there chief. see what the words your mad about mean. because I have a whole ass art degree and you couldn’t possible be more wrong. your take is based on nothing but pure unadulterated ignorance. art is NOT entertainment, it’s expression, and the most significant art is history is about terrible things that happened to help you feel terrible about it. from Jesus being tortured to death by Roman soldiers to the Nazi war machine being tested on rural Spain for no reason in particular, art is very much allowed to be about suffering, politics, protest, and criticism of horrifying acts. stop being proud that your ignorant, learn something, or if you REALLY INSIST on being this ignorant on purpose, STOP TAKING ABOUT THE SHIT YOU CLAIM YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT
If you have no problem putting your name to such messages, why the DM?
I’m the scourge when you’re calling people dumb fucks? Right-o.
Maybe she is proud of what she does and wants to put that forward. Maybe for her art is the easiest way to express her emotions and hence why she calls it that.
What is your hypothesis? Do you think she is taking advantage of something that happened to her just to advance her career? Or do you think she is actually making it up to farm popularity?
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Being an artist and a rape victim are not mutually exclusive. Being an artist does not diminish her being a victim or advocating for rape victims.
I don’t understand why you equate the word artist with just entertainment. Yes entertainment could be consequence of art but often it is not the motivating reason. For many it is a way to express their feelings, like music or like poetry.
Art is touted as one of the only things capable of making a bullheaded society see reality differently. You think such a key piece of experience would be confined to entertainment?
the performance was carrying the mattress, and having to publicly face the added weight of being known as a rape victim or an accuser, there is a difference in people’s mind.
the performance was not getting raped.
Art is not inherently entertaining. Art can be many things. It can be something meant to invoke certain feelings, including negative ones, and it can be a commentary on something the artist finds important. Protest art falls in that category. The performance, carrying around the mattress, makes a concept that is abstracted for many people into something tangible and easy to empathize with. I’d be pretty outraged if a school forced one of its attendees to carry around that physical weight arbitrarily. I should be outraged that they’re making her carry the emotional weight of attending the school alongside her rapist.
Art can be used for education, too, though, in my experience as an educator, entertainment and education are naturally synergistic with each other. You cannot educate without a degree of enfurthurance to the lesson, the force behind scaffolding information as that is a combined process of teacher and student enthusiasm, yet raw entertainment is rather mindless and starts to lose interest in infancy, where noise-intensity signal processing begins to lose weight in attentional algorithms once a mind begins producing ongoing an syntatical placement of a self in relation to its environment, obviously. Ie, the human attentional coordination algorithms are tuned neither to raw information download nor highest immediate priority for situational attunement.
IMO, as a poet, I feel there is a “puzzle solving” aspect to my craft. I set limitations, mine mostly working on simple rhyme schemes in near pixel-perfect line length for a visual effect, and I produce a message to fit those parameters. Here is a lipogram I did, titled Nervana:
Art facilitates an aspect of intrigue to the human psyche, and it is intrigue that drives a factor within intention-setting. The awareness of this, combined with the will to defeat the banal “self” results in a divergent narrative from which one derives identity from. In my personal anecdotal experience of this, my unconscious and thus intuition became informed of general archetypal concepts to reality over the course of my adolescence, with a currently noteworthy example being how I conceptualized a part of my reality around the movie Dreamcatcher, based on a Stephen King novel.
There was my memory warehouse, but there was “other” living within it, meaning I wasn’t fully in control. I would once visit “other” in my astral projection/lucid dreaming experiments in my early twenties on an island constructed by “other” that had symbolic qualities, most importantly one visitation where the rendering of reality tore itself asunder so the entire graphonceptation of what can be considered physical reality asymptoted forwards, inwards you can say, towards the central mind of consciousness.
I saw God. God opened Hid third eye. He saw into me to then see all of me and I caught glimpse, but shit quickly catalyzed to null in which I was blinded by the emptiness. And all was quiet. Then I was itchy, to then realize and wake up to the trepid quasitruth that I was being eaten by vampires. But there was only me. I was destroying myself. And I woke in the dampest, coldest sweat I can recall myself experiencing from a nightmare or other nightly verzore intrusion.
But this just what I teach. I don’t tell people where to go hides neon sign saying Live Nudes but everybody who needs to fibd a gerv ber wonb did a prurn trogdn ometr order of the thirst dong dickery doo I’m coming fur or somvf trades godf refernl lol. Obviously.
Jesus Christ
I am.