Sinking Ship - The Thing About...Art & Artists - Emma Sulkowicz

Emma Sulkowicz is causing an uproar once again. She inadvertently became one of the faces of the movement against rape culture on college campuses with her Columbia thesis project, which saw her carry a dorm mattress around campus in protest in the school’s handling of her sexual assault complaint. It also earned Sulkowicz her fair share of critics, who question both her motives and her accounts of her assault. Sulkowicz’s new work almost seems to be crafted specifically to troll her critics. For the new piece, titled The Ship Is Sinking, she wore a white bikini adorned with the Whitney logo. An S&M professional who goes by “Master Avery,” playing a character called “Mr. Whitney,” bound Sulkowicz tightly and hung her from the ceiling on a wooden beam, periodically whipping and insulting her. The title of the The Ship Is Sinking was inspired by Bertolt Brecht, who wrote “They are like a painter adorning the walls of a sinking ship with a still life.” (In preparation for the piece, Sulkowicz even drafted a news article in which the Whitney Museum of American Art was sinking, presented as a handout at the show, depicting the museum as a literal sinking ship.) • Performance by Master Avery as “The Whitney” and Emma Sulkowicz as the “Independent Study Program” (ISP). In The Ship Is Sinking, The Whitney positions the ISP as the figurehead of a ship, referencing the Whitney Museum’s ship-like architecture and proximity to water. Extrapolating from Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 essay “Writing the Truth; Five Difficulties,” this work considers the limitations of political art in the US by posing the question: What good is art hung on the wall of a sinking ship? http://www.emmasulkowicz.com Music: Bark – John Deley and the 41 players Easy jam - Kevin MacLoad