For BANGED, the feminist artist Angela Washko engaged with pickup artist Roosh V, the “web’s most infamous misogynist” according to numerous press outlets and author of the BANG series (guidebooks for men outlining strategies for picking up women). Washko originally intended to interview women who have had sexual encounters with Roosh V and to publish their side of the story—an approach she discarded when Roosh V and his followers learned of the project through online announcements after Washko received the Rhizome Internet Art Microgrant.
“I knew the project would from then on have to be in conversation with Roosh V himself. After his awareness was publicly communicated I became critical of my own black-and-white extremist approach. To introduce more of the nuance that is often ignored in conversations about pick up artists within stratified spheres of the internet, I decided to reach out to Roosh with the hopes of additionally conducting an interview with him.
After over a month of emailing him a question or two every few days, I was able to convince him to do a digitally mediated interview over Skype. I published the interview through ANIMAL NY and it was widely distributed, through Roosh’s community, my digifeminist community and other broader mainstream audiences.
Debate over the sincerity of the gesture, my artistic credentials, my intentions, empathy & internet bubbles, exploitation, and whether or not members of his community wanted to bang me ensued. A flood of insults, support, and harassment broke through my email, social media, online forums and comment sections of mainstream media sites. Roosh V proceeded to frame my project as a desperate attempt to have sex with him and suggested that I was stalking him. Members of his community suggested that they were going to have a meeting with me where I live. [...] At some point I had to re-calibrate the project due to the terrain” (Angela Washko, “an explanation of the work in question”).
The seven-month investigative art project resulted in a two-hour video interview with Roosh V, two books documenting the project, along with performances and installations. The artist describes the book series “as a testament to our contemporary condition of increasingly disparate bubbles that exist online and elsewhere—creating their own vernaculars and developing radically different ways of viewing the world. It is also a document analyzing reactions to Washko’s experience shifting from activism to ethnography in spaces of extreme hostility toward women and feminists” (Angela Washko, “BANGed,” website).
Produced with Lulu but sold via the artist’s website, the book series comes in an edition of 300 with a signature and handwritten edition number. Our copies, however, were ordered directly from Lulu’s webshop and lack these alterations.
“The book tells this story from the perspective of the artist” (Angela Washko, “BANGed,” website). It documents some of the writing Washko published during her work on BANGED and the transcript from her interview with the pick-up artist himself. The cover appropriates the design and format of Roosh V’s book BANG, also published through Lulu, but adds a paratext in pink that suggests an edited version of the original as well as a shift in perspective from Roosh V to the women allegedly seduced.
“The book tells this story from the perspective of everyone invested in the project except for the artist herself ” (Angela Washko, “On Public Opinion,” website). It offers perspectives from radically polarized communities by documenting public posts and comments on Washko’s art project BANGED: from mainstream news sites and the pickup artist’s community forums, to Twitter and the artist’s Facebook feed.
