The Mattress That Stayed

In September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz began carrying a blue mattress around Columbia University as a performance artwork and senior thesis. As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett recounts in an October 8 Guardian feature, it resembled the dormitory mattresses at the university, where Sulkowicz said a fellow student had raped her two years earlier. Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) made her protest physically cumbersome. Other people could help carry it, and many did.

Cosslett reports that the work is circulating virally again in response to a rape allegation at Cornell University. That is a separate university and a separate allegation, not a continuation of the Columbia case. Her cultural feature establishes the reported renewed attention; it does not establish the truth of the current allegation or adjudicate either institution’s conduct.

What returns with the image is a question about the audience. Once you can recognise the burden, what changes about your relationship to it?

A burden with handles

The mattress gave solidarity a practical form. In Cosslett’s account, Sulkowicz said she would carry it for as long as the student she accused remained at Columbia. She carried it through graduation, with others helping her take it on stage.

An image of that action can travel much farther than the object. It can reach someone who has never encountered this work, or give someone language for an experience they have struggled to describe. Renewed attention is not inherently empty. Being able to recognise an experience outside your own can matter enormously.

But circulation changes the available gesture. Beside the mattress, someone could take some weight. On a screen, someone can share an image of people taking weight. The second action may help. It is not the first.

The temptation is to let the resemblance settle the account: I recognised the injustice, I expressed the appropriate feeling, therefore I have answered it. A very efficient arrangement for the person without the mattress.

That is a risk in spectatorship, not a diagnosis of everyone who shares the work. Nor should people disclosing harm have to produce an unforgettable image before anyone will listen.

What the image cannot do

Cosslett places Sulkowicz within a much longer history of art responding to sexual violence. One example is Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s 1977 In Mourning and In Rage: a funeral motorcade to Los Angeles city hall, followed by public statements, made with activists and some victims’ family members. The work brought mourning into a setting where it could become a public demand.

These works should not be required to do the jobs of an investigation, a support service or an institutional complaints process. Art can make an experience harder to ignore. It cannot, by itself, determine a case or ensure that someone receives care. To demand that it deliver all of those things is another way of placing the weight on the person making the harm visible.

Coherenceism’s obligation not to purchase order with someone’s silence is useful here. An institution’s calm is not sufficient evidence that it is functioning well. Neither is an audience’s outrage. The test lies in what affected people can actually access: support without a publicity requirement, a fair process, protection from retaliation and an intelligible response.

Those are standards to ask about, not findings about the cases in Cosslett’s feature. They move the question beyond whether an image has successfully made us feel something.

The mattress can return to public view without the world having stood entirely still. Its return is neither proof that nothing changes nor reassurance that attention will finish the work. It offers a smaller, less flattering invitation: after recognising the weight, look for the people still expected to carry it—and ask what help they actually want.