![]() In 1983, Hujar introduced Lankton to Monroe. She also met photographers Nan Goldin and Peter Hujar, eventually modeling for both of them. Her dolls of drag star Divine and transsexual downtown icons Candy Darling and Teri Toye reflect her love and admiration for this community. She attended the drug-fueled parties at Mudd Club, one of the city’s major nightlife destinations where queer underground artists reigned (it was a hotspot, in particular, for Andy Warhol’s circle). Her dolls were starved for our attention.”ĭespite her struggles with her body and gender identity, in downtown Manhattan, Lankton finally found a community where she fit in. It’s what Greer fed on, even when she ate no other food at all. As he once wrote, “No artist is down on her luck when she has her art. Yet Hilton Als views Lankton’s art as her saving grace after significant trauma. Such representations reveal Lankton’s haunting perspective on the indignities of having a body. But when Lankton’s figures aren’t excessively thin, they are notably heavy, with skin pooling in layers at the midsection. The dolls’ skeletal frames, with their protruding ribs and sharply exaggerated features, make them appear less like humans and more like the undead, and also reflect Lankton’s own struggles with anorexia. Another figurine has clearly suffered violence: She’s scarred, ragged, and bald, with binding around her lower legs. ![]() The doll, which Lankton situated within a tangle of gray thread in a black stroller, is pale, with long hair and a penis. Several explicitly hermaphroditic figurines, such as Albino Hermaphrodite in a Baby Carriage (1984), probe conceptions of gender. ![]() Her figures from the early 1980s, some presented in cages, are particularly gaunt and chilling. Whatever the truth may be, Lankton sublimated the horrors of the surgery-which was risky and experimental at the time-and its aftermath into her dolls. Lankton herself was vague on the subject when a publication asked her how long she’d been transsexual, she answered, “I guess since I was born, but I’ve been a woman since I was 20.” A very different story about the event, though, is circulating in the media: Lankton was the one who wanted the operation, and her father helped raise funds by asking his congregation for donations. Monroe believes her mother forced her into the operation because she felt a trans daughter was preferable to a gay son. In 1979, while studying at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Lankton underwent a sex change operation. With their help, she entered and won minor creative contests around the Midwest. While they were never comfortable with their daughter’s self-presentation, Lankton’s parents did, however, support her early artistic ambitions. She enjoyed playing with dolls and gravitated towards girls’ clothing from a young age, but Lankton’s parents, Monroe said, prohibited the activity as inappropriate for a little boy, so she resorted to making her own puppets from pipe cleaners and socks. She was born Greg Lankton in Flint, Michigan, in 1958, to a religious household (her father was a Presbyterian minister). ![]() That’s not to say that there isn’t agreement on some details of Lankton’s life. In death, Lankton has become a kind of funhouse doll herself her public perception is ripe for manipulation, susceptible to the motivations and whims of various parties. Monroe offers one perspective on Lankton’s story, while the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh-an institution that currently holds much of her archives-promotes another. Yet designer Paul Monroe, whom she married in 1987, also remembers her as a “happy-go-lucky individual filled with giggles and romance.” As he recently told Artsy by phone, “I don’t like when she comes across as gloomy.” Monroe is now living in actress Lena Dunham’s guesthouse in Los Angeles, at work on a book and HBO documentary about Lankton, who died in 1996 (Dunham is a producer on the film).īut the artist’s legacy is tenuous. Looking through Lankton’s singular artistic output is a deeply affecting, if morbid, experience. The artist’s incarnation of Jackie Kennedy, for example, is a voluptuously coiffed doll in the infamous pink suit and pillbox cap the first lady wore the day her husband was shot. Death meets fashion in the late artist’s doll of storied Vogue editor Diana Vreeland: Lankton composed a photograph in which the figurine, in a chic black outfit and red lipstick, smokes a cigarette in front of a tombstone that reads “MRS VREELAND HAS DIED.” Indeed, many of Lankton’s works resurrect such glittering celebrities, but evoke the lanky, grotesque characters of an Otto Dix painting. Abjection and glamour collide in Greer Lankton’s hand-sewn dolls, photographs, and illustrations.
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