“Carry That Weight” is both singular and representative of a time of strongly held opinions and objections and righteous anger on all sides, a time when, not surprisingly, political protest and performance art are intersecting in increasingly adamant ways.

You can see this merging in the Guy Fawkes masks worn by members of Anonymous, a loose international network of hactivists, at protests against, for example, the Church of Scientology or the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. You can also see it in some of the performance-like protests that greeted the opening this month of the David H. Koch Plaza at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or those that were carried out last spring in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum to call attention to the general plight of laborers in the United Arab Emirates who are expected to build its latest outpost there. There are numerous other instances: Protests in London in 2011 against the Tate’s accepting sponsorship from BP included a performer splashed with oil, lying naked on the floor of the great hall of Tate Britain like a bird caught in an oil spill.

Ms. Sulkowicz’s effort is somewhere near this intersection, but not at its center. Combining aspects of endurance, body and protest art and participatory relational aesthetics, it is a highly specific work of art in its own right, carefully conceived and carried out by one person expending considerable thought, time and energy for a very long time (up to eight months). It comes from a history that includes the relatively solitary ordeals of Vito Acconci, Tehching Hsieh and Marina Abramovic, but also relates tangentially to more extreme physical acts of political resistance — the fasts of jailed suffragists in early-20th-century Britain come to mind.

“Carry That Weight” might be called an artwork of last resort. It is the culmination of two years of pain, humiliation, frustration and righteous anger that began in 2012. On the evening of the first day of classes of her sophomore year, Ms. Sulkowicz said, she was anally raped in her dorm room by a fellow student with whom she had had consensual sex twice before, according to the police report.