Just when you thought you'd never have to read about Emma Sulkowicz and her mattress again!
You were probably saying to yourself: OK, she graduated from Columbia lugging that darned "rape" mattress across the stage during commencement ceremonies–so aren't her fifteen minutes of fame up?
But nooo–Emma Sulkowicz is still on the scene. And in fact, within only weeks of her graduation she's managed to top that senior-thesis art project of hers that consisted of carrying her dorm mattress around campus to protest an alleged rape by a fellow student in her dorm room at the beginning of the fall semester in 2012.
Sulkowicz has just released a video that purports to reenact (or sort of reenact) that alleged rape blow by blow, as it were. Actually it's only a half-reenactment; Sulkowicz seems to be playing herself, but an actor, face blurred (fortunately for him), plays the part of Sulkowicz' assailant. Sulkowicz' much-photographed blue-covered mattress also has a starring role. The eight-minute video, artily titled in French Ceci n'est pas un viol and directed by Ted Lawson, a friend of Sulkowicz's, is um, graphic. Actually, you might call it pornographic, as the couple, after doffing their clothing with astonishing speed, engage in a number of voluntary sex acts–lovingly (as it were) filmed from four different simultaneously running cameras at different angles–before her partner gets nasty and starts slapping the Sulkowicz character around and apparently penetrating her against her will.
NSFW is an understatement for the Sulkowicz video–and you might think there was something salacious about it if you hadn't been informed over and over that, like Sulkowicz's campus mattress stunt, it has a Higher Artistic Purpose. You can click onto the video from this website, which consists of a stern, if slightly incoherent "trigger warning" purportedly written by Sulkowicz herself:
Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol is not about one night in August, 2012. It's about your decisions, starting now. It's only a reenactment if you disregard my words. It's about you, not him.
Do not watch this video if your motives would upset me, my desires are unclear to you, or my nuances are indecipherable.
You might be wondering why I've made myself this vulnerable. Look—I want to change the world, and that begins with you, seeing yourself. If you watch this video without my consent, then I hope you reflect on your reasons for objectifying me and participating in my rape, for, in that case, you were the one who couldn't resist the urge to make Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol about what you wanted to make it about: rape.
The weasel words ("it's only a reenactment if you disregard my words") are there for an obvious reason: Although the split-screen video contains timestamps that appear to date the sex scene to August 27, 2012, the date that Sulkowicz says she was raped by Paul Nungesser, who also just graduated, Nungesser was cleared by Columbia of sexual-assault charges and is in fact suing the university for allowing Sulkowicz to proceed with a project designed to shame him and turn him into a campus outcast. Nungesser has released massive text, e-mail and Facebook correspondence indicating that the pair's relationship remained amicable and perhaps even amorous well after the alleged rape.
In an interview with Artnet, Sulkowicz insists that in making the video, she was just an artist trying to make art: I" don't know that it's why I want to be an artist, but it's why I'm forced to be an artist."
Maybe so. But I'll bet she's also the only sex-videotape artist to be invited by a sitting U.S. senator to a president's State of the Union address.