Zoë Buckman
at PAPILLION

Zoë Buckman, Every Curve (2016). Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and PAPILLION. Photo: MJ Glover.

A feminist friend and I once spent several consecutive nights driving aimlessly around town to the tune of Eminem, and the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.” Self-conscious self-awareness thinly disguised our own unwillingness to confront the high misogyny and violence in these lyrics. For whatever reason, unchecked pleasure felt more liberating than prohibition.

At PAPILLION, Zoë Buckman explores Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur’s similarly misogynistic (though occasionally respectful) lyrics about women. Many of these have been painstakingly embroidered onto ‘50s-era undergarments which hang throughout the space—the female body markedly missing from them.

Buckman evinced a memorable pathos for Biggie and Shakur at an informal talk the day of her opening, noting both as “victims of their time and place.” Regardless, sex and sexual reproduction dominate each rapper’s figuration of women, with little room to breathe on either side. Perhaps this explains Buckman’s abundance of constrictive garments—the billowing, colorful translucency of each swaying in space belying the discomfort of actually wearing them. One wonders at the parallel between misogyny as a central pillar of rap’s lyrical bravado versus the real-time horror of its actual playing out.

Buckman’s pairing of archaic, intimate garmentry, with lyrics like “I don’t give the bitch enough to catch the bus” sewn in looping, spiraling script, is both jarring and unresolved, even as content and form echo seductively out of the past. Buckman mines a vein of intimacy-pointing-outwards directly referencing another moment in the 1990s, when lingerie as outerwear was “a thing” (c.f. Salt N Pepa c. 1993, Lil’ Kim whenever). As fashion, it’s both come-hither and demystification, and no coincidence that many of the women who embraced this style did so from a place of power rather than pandering.

Music works in the distance between ideas, stories, and lived reality. As such, it’s perhaps no surprise that Shakur’s storied feminism in private misaligned so often with his public lyrical persona—or for that matter, that a young feminist might tune in and turn it up.

Zoë Buckman: Every Curve runs March 12-April 30, 2016 at PAPILLION (4336 Degnan Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90008)

Zoë Buckman, Every Curve (2016). Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and PAPILLION. Photo: MJ Glover.

Zoë Buckman, Every Curve (2016). Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and PAPILLION. Photo: MJ Glover.

Zoë Buckman, Every Curve (2016). Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and PAPILLION. Photo: MJ Glover.

Zoë Buckman, Every Curve (2016). Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and PAPILLION. Photo: MJ Glover.

Zoë Buckman, Every Curve (2016). Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and PAPILLION. Photo: MJ Glover.

Zoë Buckman, Every Curve (2016). Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and PAPILLION. Photo: MJ Glover.

Aaron Horst is a writer and architect based in Los Angeles. He has written for Carla, Art Review, and Flash Art.

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