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Was she a great artit (according to Vasari)? - Maybe

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Was she a great artit (according to Vasari)? - Maybe

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Born male (yes... but is a trans woman)

Realism (kind of... she depicts reality and bodies, with all of their flaws)

Rich patron (not really, she worked for and with many other queer artists, like David Wojnaworicz, but they were not rich or really that powerful)

introduced new techniques or taught others (no)

Drama (oh boy yes... with drug addiction, being a trans woman, living as queer during the AIDS crisis, and being sexually assaulted by her grand father at 5 years old, she certainly has drama)

Tragic end (yes, she died of a drug overdose in 1996)

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Many - if not all - of Greer Lankton's dolls seem to express the abjection of the trans woman's body. Perhaps a comment on society's position on beauty in rapport to trans femininity? She often depicts figures undergping surgery, giving birth, with elongated arms or missing limbs, blood spatters, and severly underweight (also a reference to the glorification of skinyness, until it becomes "too skiny" --> an impossible standard for women).

In some of her photography, she seems to be inspired by surrealism. She will divide the body of birthed children, or contort the dolls and add different light filters on them.

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Lankton's works seems to contradict Berger's opinion on the nude. To him, once an interpretation of nakedness is made by an artist, it is a nude - wearing it's own skin as a disguise. However Lankton's dolls' vulnerability (seen in there context/poses) as well as their body - which defies all beauty standards for white women - seem to suggest that this would be nakedness rather than the nude. They are not wearing a costume, and do not submit to the viewer. Equally, they are in no way sexual.

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Just as the rennaissance and medieval paintings from the reading, Lankton's bodies are imbued with symbolism. They are extremely thin, with bold makeup and often placed in vulnerable positions where we can see their genitals. This is a comment on both societal beauty standards for women, but also how the world seems to claim ownership over the femal body, especially trans women.

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Greer Lankton does not use blood that much, but she often tints certain extremities of the body with a blood-like red (for example, the lips, penis, rib cage). This is to show the vitality of her dolls. By adding the appearance of blood rushing underneath the skin, she can give life to her dolls. This makes them leave a stronger impact on the viewer.

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This is another example of Greer's dolls made of wire and papier mache, but this one is a minifigure. Greer incorporates a lot of religious iconography and symbols into her works. Growing up as a presbyterian, her father the priest of their church, Lankton has experience perseccution from the Christian community.

She often compares the sacrifice and story of Jesus to the experience of trans femininity. She was cast out of her community, just as Jesus was cast out of his. Equally, Jesus's death can be seen as an invagination, because of the piercing through the skin (also found in JESUS'S CHA CHA HEELS, 1986).

The figure incarnates Candy, another trans woman. However, the dolls appears to be much older than Candy would have ever been, dying at the age of 30 like many other trans women at the time. Thus, the doll is also a comment on the fact that "the future" for trans women is a commodity.

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Evans, Hew, and Hew Evans. “Greer Lankton: An Artist’s Life in the Village of the Dolls - Village Preservation.” Village Preservation - Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, 9 Dec. 2021, www.villagepreservation.org/2021/12/09/greer-lankton.

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Greer Lankton: An Artist’s Life in the Village of the Dolls - Village Preservation

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Greer Lankton (she/her, April 21, 1958 - November 18, 1996) was an East Village-based multidisciplinary artist who worked in illustration, photography, and sculpture. She’s mostly known for creating lifelike paper-mache dolls of celebrities, and she explored themes around celebrity iconography, beauty standards, and the white feminine ideal. While not all of her dolls were of

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Greer Lankton's final piece, her magnum opus, before her death. This installation was, like many of her works, an immersive experience inviting the audience to walk into her life. Deeply personal, she details her struggles as a transgender woman, a victim of sexual assault, and a drug addict.

All throughout the installation, we can see her complicated relationship to her body. The figure on the right, lying in bed, is named "More Morphine" details her struggles with heroine and anorexia. Dismembered body are strewn throughout the recreation of Lankton's Chicago appartment, highlighting her experience with gender dysphoria as well as anorexia.

This piece (or collection) is ment to make the viewer feel uncomfortable, as she was. It is all about going against societal norms: being transgender, drug addiction, being queer, not wanting to go to rehab for her anorexia. She says she has "been Anorexic since 19 and plan[s] to continue and you know what [she says] FUCK Recovery, FUCK PSYCHIATRY Fuck it all because [she's] over it"

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Although this exhibit was installed after Lankton's death, as she died of a drug overdose in 1996, it features not only her prowesse in sculpture, but also in photography.

Her dolls made of wire and paper mache are fluid and dynamic. Their wire structure allows them to be posed at will, making the pieces versatile and, sometimes, relatable.

Lankton's photography is often overlooked, shadowed by her more immersive installations. However, her photography is deeply intimate. She captures the dolls often in vulnerable positions/situations (such as lying naked) and from up close. She thus makes the dolls seem sympathetic and forces their emotions onto the audience, despite them being highly uncanney.

The exhibit holds deeper meaning than just the art though, as it displays photos of many of her works lost to the public after the AIDS epidemic. It represents how the epidemic not only ravaged the queer communitie's members on a personal level (killing approximately 700 000 people in the US alone), but also had devastating impacts on the communitie's culture and art scene.

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Company Gallery, Greer Lankton, Doll Party DSF4851

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IN THE BLIND SPOT OF THE CIS GAZE  McKenzie Wark on Greer Lankton at Company Gallery, New York. www.textezurkunst.de/en/129/mckenzie-wark-greer-lankton-in-the-blind-spot-of-the-cis-gaze.

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IN THE BLIND SPOT OF THE CIS GAZE McKenzie Wark on Greer Lankton at Company Gallery, New York

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McKenzie Wark on Greer Lankton at Company Gallery, New York

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Mattress Factory. “It’s All About ME, Not You | Mattress Factory.” Mattress Factory, 20 May 2024, mattress.org/exhibition/its-all-about-me-not-you.

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It’s All About ME, Not You | Mattress Factory

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Fateman, Johanna. “Greer Lankton’s Lonely Dolls.” The New Yorker, 28 Nov. 2022, www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/greer-lanktons-lonely-dolls.

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The artist's enthralling portraits showcase figures of her own making.

The photographer Nan Goldin, remembering her friend and portrait subject Greer Lankton, wrote that Lankton "created magical kingdoms." Lankton, who died in 1996, at the age of thirty-eight, was a trans artist who was part of New York City's East Village scene. She sewed, constructed, and painted exquisitely ragtag and ever-evolving, often human-size characters, which she brought to life in window displays at the boutique Einstein's, in diorama-like sets and gallery installations, or in her own apartment. Capturing these worlds in enthralling, funny, and gutting photos, she developed a kind of candid, intimate portraiture practice of her own.

Dozens of these images are found in the exhibit "Greer Lankton. DOLL PARTY" at Company Gallery (on view through December 3rd), hung on the black walls of the gallery's lower level. It's the artist's first solo exhibition in New York since her 2014 retrospective at Participant Inc. That landmark show assembled a group of her dolls, which had not been seen publicly for years; many of the artist's sculptures disappeared, at least for a time, dispersed among friends and collectors in a community and art world devastated by AIDS. This show, like a delayed coda, shifts the focus to Lankton's image-making, casting her poseable figures as fluid actors, appearing in spontaneous snapshots and shifting tableaux.

Some of the works here, such as ones based on Jackie O. or Diana Vreeland, comment on so-called high society, while others, such as tributes to the performers Ethyl Eichelberger and Divine, sketch Lankton's countercultural cosmology. "Candy Darling at Home," from 1987, is a vision of courtly opulence, showing Lankton's extra-long-limbed representation of the Warhol superstar in a richly textured sitting room, bejewelled and dressed head to toe in a Hermès-inspired print. A simpler, full-length portrait of the same doll, from 1987, depicts her nude but for a boa in hot pink.

Earlier pictures show a different facet of Lankton's figurative preoccupations, a strain of work inflected by surrealism and horror. "Hermaphrodite," from 1981, with its nightmarish blue cast, is an explicit, spread-legged, natal image of a doll, shot as if standing at the foot of a birthing bed. Photos of dolls undergoing surgery, disassembled (as in "Ballerina" and "Red Womb," from the same year), along with a selection of some of Lankton's smaller creations-disembodied genitals, a belly button, the spiked papier-mâché torture device of "Jesus's Cha-Cha Heels"-almost form their own show within a show. The cluster of fraught works seems to narrate, in fragments, a journey of embattled embodiment.

Most of the photos are presented as digital prints, but also on view is a selection of Lankton's beautiful Polaroids. The loveliest have the look of miniature paintings. A tiny instant photo, from 1986, of Lankton's severe Peggy Moffitt doll-heavy-lashed with a bowl cut, based on the famed nineteen-sixties model-is lit like a Rembrandt, with the doll's face and gesturing hand emerging from the dark. The strikingly composed triptych "Jackie Kennedy," from the previous year, has a doubled image at its center, an eerie mirror view, featuring the artist's version of the former First Lady, dressed as she was the day her husband was killed. She wears the famous pink suit, the roses of her bouquet occupying the foreground like dark, bloody spots.

Although Lankton frequently chose icons and celebrities as subjects, her brightest star was Sissy, an autobiographical doll whose physical transformations and daily life paralleled Lankton's own. Lankton developed and deconstructed Sissy throughout her career. In "Sissys Bedroom," from 1985, she appears both louche and vulnerable: splayed out on a comforter, her form as attenuated as an Egon Schiele, the doppelgänger wears nothing except scarlet stockings-not even a wig. "Sissy Modeling Paul Monroe's Piano Hat," from 1986, is a relatively rare closeup, in which a music-themed millinery design rests heavily on Sissy's tilted head.

Pictures of Sissy are of special importance because, even though many of the dolls pictured here have been located and exhibited in recent years, she-a magnum opus of sorts-has never been found. It's fitting, then, that "Sissy and Cherry on the Stoop of Einsteins" is the first image you encounter in this treasure of a show. Wearing a maid's uniform, in the company of a little white dog (real, not sewn), Sissy sits smoking, as if distractedly presiding over Lankton's magical kingdom, in a vignette of jarring, indelible charm.

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Johanna Fateman reviews an exhibition in New York City of Greer Lankton's eerie, distinctive photography, much of it revolving around the late trans artist's exquisitely ragtag doll creations.

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Greer Lankton documented her process of medically transitioning (from hormones to surgery) in a diary.