Edited by Francis Schichtel, Jordan Weitzman, Nan Goldin. Text by Hilton Als.
Lankton's iconic and startling doll sculptures as we have never seen them before: through her own eyes
This is the first monograph on the trans visionary artist Greer Lankton (1958–96), whose lifelike doll sculptures shocked 1980s New York. Lankton's dolls, which she began making as a child and produced obsessively until her death at age 38, were a means to explore her fraught relationship with the human body. In the book's 100 photographs, all shot by Lankton herself, these figures take on a life of their own, kvetching at a party, strolling along a beach, or lounging on a stoop in the East Village. Among this extraordinary cast of oddballs—usually femme, often freakish, always radiating a glamorous confidence—we find characters of Lankton's own invention alongside well-known icons such as Divine, Coco Chanel, Andy Warhol and even Lankton herself. Born in 1958 to a Presbyterian minister in Michigan, Greer Lankton moved to New York in 1978 and became a rising star of the downtown scene. There, her deviant elegance was immortalized in photographs by Peter Hujar, David Armstrong and Lankton's close friend Nan Goldin, who described her as "one of the luminaries of the East Village renaissance: beautiful, glamorous, wild and hysterically funny." Lankton's work was a neighborhood fixture, in exhibitions at the gallery Civilian Warfare and in regular window displays at Einstein's Boutique, and was also celebrated farther afield, in era-defining group shows at PS1 and the Venice Biennale. Her final work, an immersive installation created for the Mattress Factory in 1996, remains on permanent view.
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With voluminous hair and an adoring Eros around her neck, the mystique of Candy Darling is rendered in doll form in this enigmatic work by Greer Lankton (1958–1996). Darling is only one of many characters depicted in Greer Lankton: Could It Be Love, the first-ever monograph on this visionary trans artist and a thorough labor of love from publisher Magic Hour Press. Not only fabricated, but photographed, by Lankton herself, the images narrate her community’s fraught relationship with the body, their grotesque forms weaving together autobiographical narratives of disordered eating, depression, drug addiction and AIDS. With garish expressions, irreverent confidence and dark humor, the characters—both famous figures and original creations—tell a visual story of both Lankton’s own psyche and the 1980s East Village scene. Even among that illustrious circle, which included Peter Hujar, David Armstrong and Nan Goldin (who contributes an essay to this book), Lankton was a thrilling artist, who had obsessively perfected her dollmaking skills as an escape into others’ lives since childhood. Hilton Als puts it succinctly in his essay, describing, “her dolls’ attenuated limbs stretching this way and that, and those incredible faces, the manifestation of some dream of femaleness, usually, that reflected Greer’s own ideas about her own femaleness, a hard journey that didn’t make her any happier but gave her herself, a maker of females in her own emotional image.” continue to blog
Published by Magic Hour Press. Edited by Francis Schichtel, Jordan Weitzman, Nan Goldin. Text by Hilton Als.
Lankton's iconic and startling doll sculptures as we have never seen them before: through her own eyes
This is the first monograph on the trans visionary artist Greer Lankton (1958–96), whose lifelike doll sculptures shocked 1980s New York. Lankton's dolls, which she began making as a child and produced obsessively until her death at age 38, were a means to explore her fraught relationship with the human body. In the book's 100 photographs, all shot by Lankton herself, these figures take on a life of their own, kvetching at a party, strolling along a beach, or lounging on a stoop in the East Village. Among this extraordinary cast of oddballs—usually femme, often freakish, always radiating a glamorous confidence—we find characters of Lankton's own invention alongside well-known icons such as Divine, Coco Chanel, Andy Warhol and even Lankton herself.
Born in 1958 to a Presbyterian minister in Michigan, Greer Lankton moved to New York in 1978 and became a rising star of the downtown scene. There, her deviant elegance was immortalized in photographs by Peter Hujar, David Armstrong and Lankton's close friend Nan Goldin, who described her as "one of the luminaries of the East Village renaissance: beautiful, glamorous, wild and hysterically funny." Lankton's work was a neighborhood fixture, in exhibitions at the gallery Civilian Warfare and in regular window displays at Einstein's Boutique, and was also celebrated farther afield, in era-defining group shows at PS1 and the Venice Biennale. Her final work, an immersive installation created for the Mattress Factory in 1996, remains on permanent view.
