Buy a Slap for Christmas!

Still looking for that special Christmas gift idea? We got one for you! How about buying a slap on eBay? Recently featured in a Hyperallergic essay by Rob Walker, Professor Lanfranco Aceti’s project, The Slap aka He Who Gets Slapped, is a performance and digital artworks series. As the online element of the artwork is part of the #exstrange curatorial project, Walker’s essay further examines the artwork as it considers “critical artistic perspectives on and provocations within the online market.” 

Curated by Marialaura Ghidini and Rebekah Modrak, The Slap was conceived by Professor Aceti as a moment of action, response, and reflection. For a fee of $500, the artwork provides the public with the ‘opportunity’ to physically/virtually slap, “a worker, protester, Muslim, and migrant,” standing atop a nineteenth-century ‘preaching’ box (also known as a soap box). Posted online via eBay, interested consumers can engage in the transaction of the product and subsequently witness the actualization of the slap via FaceTime and/or Skype. The performance, itself, is part of a larger collection of artworks titled, Soma, which is inspired by the contemporary social tensions and labor crises that have characterized authoritarian regimes and post-democracies across the world. 

“Obviously this sort of listing reframes eBay itself, converting the potential transaction into something a lot more complicated than the neat, near-mindless fusion of supply and demand.” Walker continues, “#exstrange aims to disrupt—to use a word popular among internet capitalists—assumptions about commercial exchange, virtual connection, and the contexts in which art can live, among other familiar paradigms.” The Slap, in the context of the #exstrange project, reflects not solely on the violence and isolationism of contemporary nationalisms, but also on the misgivings of a globalization process defined heavily by its economic function, which has completely discarded socio-political and cultural-ethical issues. 

Sold online in the form of a receipt, this performance first realized in 2015 has been re-presented in 2017. It is possible, once again, to order a slap and punish the embodiment and identified cause of all that is supposedly wrong with our contemporary societies: “a student, a worker, a protester, a Muslim, and a migrant.”

For more information about Professor Aceti’s project and to watch The Slap video please visit here.

Hyperallergic’s review on the project can be found here.