Could It Be Love (Magic Hour Press) is the first monograph of the American artist Greer Lankton, which is co-edited by archivist Francis Schichtel, publisher Jordan Weitzman and artist Nan Goldin, with the artist’s own images of her work, accompanied by an essay from Hilton Als. Lankton, who died in 1996 aged 38, was an artist who navigated the febrile art world of 1980s New York, where your art and your life were to be lived authentically, and few were as authentic in the expression of beauty, pain, humor, and personal history than Lankton herself. She was certainly a star, photographed by Peter Hujar, and filmed by Vivienne Dick, the Irish feminist documentary maker.
Lankton s work focused on the creation of life-size papier-mâché dolls; of herself, friends, and characters imaginary and real, including model Teri Toye, Coco Chanel, and Andy Warhol. (She burned him, saying he ‘was the dullest person I ever met in my life’.) The dolls, impeccably costumed and coiffured, posed, gendered and then re-gendered, isolated or in tableaux, with Lankton, who was trans, unravelling the complexities of body, gender, and sexual identity. It was Alphabet City seen through the lens of Weimar Germany. “They’re all freaks,” Greer’s quoted as saying in the book. “Outsiders, untouchables. They’re biographies, the kind of people you’d like to know about. Really interesting and fucked up. It’s what you want to read, the kind of people you stop and notice.”
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Could It Be Love is a treasure of a book, created with love and care, and as a tender remembrance for Lankton which doesn’t shy away from honesty by its trio of editors. And its publication will make you wonder why she hasn’t received the rightful celebration of her work until now. Greer Lankton was absolutely singular, an original, yet so much of what she was creating, thinking and feeling stretches its way back from the ’80s right into today; her work exquisite and exquisitely haunting. (It can be seen in a permanent installation at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.) Nan Goldin agreed to speak about her friend and former roommate, and what follows is a conversation about the Lankton she loves and remembers.
Vogue: Nan, I’d like to ask you about your earliest memories of Greer…
Nan Goldin: I went to Chicago to meet Greer in 1977 with somebody who knew her from the Art Institute of Chicago, but she was in a mental hospital at the time, so I didn’t meet her then. [Performer] Suzanne Fletcher and I [later] met her at Pratt. We were all chatting, and she was in the corner making dolls. Then I called Greer to ask her to move in. We didn’t really know each other. She had a different demeanor at the beginning—she was shy. In the pictures of her from that time, she looks a little bit like a nice minister’s daughter. She definitely sharpened and developed her scathing, brilliant, but sweet sense of humor. Reading people was the coin of the realm, especially if you made it funny. She could hold her part in that.
I saw her change in the years she was living with me, especially in the pictures I took of her. At the beginning, she seemed more vulnerable. Her surgery was recent, and I don’t think she was as grounded yet in her female self. She came and lived in a room in my loft. There was very little privacy—there were walls, but not really soundproofing, not really doors—and she worked constantly. She couldn’t work without a friend in the room—not that they helped her make the work at all. Just somehow maybe she didn’t feel comfortable working by herself. Maybe she needed an external eye on her to feel secure. I kind of understand it.
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Did you ever sit with her while she was working?
A little bit. She had this friend David [Newcomb] that was with her almost all the time, who was pretty much silent around me. I’ve met him since and he talks a lot, so I don’t know—maybe he was talking a lot then and I never heard him. But she had him as her support, and other people came. She was in love with a boy named Robert Vitale, and that didn’t work out, and she was heartbroken, and it was in the period she was living with me. That’s when I took most of my pictures of her as well, which was really a pleasure—especially the picture of her and Robert, where she’s so amorphic; she’s almost floating away and in pain, but in utter beauty. She dressed up all the time. She became part of the downtown crowd pretty quickly. It wasn t just David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, but also Rene Ricard and Cookie Mueller and Costa and Tabboo!—all these characters and figures and geniuses, the creative energy at that time. The galleries that existed like the Fun Gallery and Civilian Warfare and PPOW were fabulous and showed artists because they loved them. But the market was still centered on the commercial uptown galleries.
In your 1996 obituary of Greer, you wrote that she had a show at the Civilian Warfare gallery in Manhattan. How did that change things for her?
There were write-ups of her. The picture that’s on the back of the book—her with all her family of dolls at the opening: That’s the install she did. These shows were of tantamount importance to her—she finally felt seen in public—because this was the eye of the world that she didn’t have. I don’t know—it wasn’t like there were sales or big shows in museums. She worked with that gallery, and she was in the PS1 show New York/New Wave, and the famous Times Square show that was in the old whorehouse—they were held on the fly, almost in squats, that kind of feeling. But this was a time when, like I said, there wasn’t really gallery representation.
So the institutional art world, the establishment art world wasn’t really paying attention?
Well, there was no money to be made. The market hadn’t really caught up to us. The artist Tom Otterness was the first person I knew who had a gallery, and then of course Keith [Haring] and Jean-Michel [Basquiat]. At the time, I remember being critical of artists that went to galleries—like they sold out. There wasn’t that feeling that your work was about getting into galleries; your work wasn’t about the market. But it meant a lot to Greer to show, and her show was written up in one of the magazines that wrote about the art world, like Details, or the Village Voice. Those magazines were important to us at the time. [After we spoke, Goldin sent me press clippings from Lankton s archive—the East Village Eye, New York Native, and i-D, where Lankton tells interviewer Dylan Jones, ‘In this country anything sexual is bad taste—right?’]
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And you put Greer’s work in an exhibition you were curating…
In 1989, I included Greer in a show I curated about AIDS. It was a response from people living with HIV and those affected by it, including work by living and dead artists, some of who were living with HIV/AIDS. Greer was very affected by our community being wiped out—it’s one of the main reasons she left New York. She had a diary where she kept the names of her friends and wrote “dead” by them, and said when she got to 45, she couldn’t do it any more. The pieces she put in that show at Artist Space were skins; full body skins of dolls she hung on the wall.
[Goldin gives me Greer’s quote from the Artists Space catalog for Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing:]
Having watched so many friends die from AIDS has been like surgery without anesthesia. I have found it very difficult to relate my emotional responses to my art work. It seems like nothing I could make would adequately describe the grief I feel. The skins I have made are just mementos, like the skin we wear when we are alive becomes just a memento after we die.
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Do you have any of Greer’s work, Nan?
I was obsessed with Catholic art for many, many years. I had a collection of bleeding hearts, so Greer made an anorexic Jesus for me. I have another doll that’s a contortionist, but this is the one she made [Goldin lifts the Jesus figure to the screen] especially for me.
Do you remember when she made it?
Well, we were living together, so basically 1981 to ’82—sometime in that period. A lot of people went through there in those years—like, 25 people came and went. She stayed for a year.
You were sharing an apartment, but did you also socialize together?
She wasn’t really a club kid, to the best of my memory. The rest of us went to the Mudd Club, which opened the same week I moved to New York in ’78, all the time. But I don’t recall her going to clubs much. In the ’80s, we each did a lot of drugs, but not together. Greer always laughed when I used to say, “You are the only person I knew who could get addicted to MDMA.” I guess times changed.
You mentioned earlier how magazines were important—that’s how I discovered Greer back in the ’80s in the UK. If I remember correctly, it was an image of her with [trans model and Steven Meisel muse] Teri Toye, perhaps in The Face, or i-D, and Greer’s doll of Teri.
When Greer first came into the downtown scene, she was the only openly trans artist. Sometimes I think she felt like a freak—people were fascinated, but she also felt like that fascination had a twinge of vicariousness. When she met Teri, she idolized Teri, and then they started hanging out together around ’87. Teri and Patrick were living in my house for a while after their wedding, and so Greer and Patrick and Paul [Monroe], Greer’s ex-husband, were hanging out together in my house. Paul had a huge influence on Greer then. Her work was constantly in Paul s store Einsteins. Most people remember her dolls from those windows.
Maybe there was, to some degree, a fetishizing of her being trans as well?
Yes. And she was very, very anorexic the whole time. I think she got down to 80 pounds at one point. Yeah—we saved each other’s lives at different times. That’s what we did in those days: People saved each other’s lives. One night she came to the bar I was working at in Times Square. It was a rough bar, and she felt horrible there, devastated, and went home and tried to commit suicide. I got home early somehow and took her to the hospital. So we had that kind of intensity. There was no privacy, really. She moved out because she couldn’t stand listening to my boyfriend and I have sex and then fight.
She left New York at some point, and I’d be interested to hear your recollections of what life was like for Greer after that.
She was in Chicago—she’d gone back after her divorce—and I guess she thought her stardom would travel with her. Nobody knew of her in Chicago, which was really hard for her. She lived with her parents, and then she ended up moving to a small apartment and working constantly. Then she went to Pittsburgh to install her show at the Mattress Factory, which is now on permanent display. It took a week or two—she just replicated her apartment from Chicago. This was the last time I heard from her. She called me asking for money—she was having trouble finding the drugs she needed to sustain herself. She told me she tried to convince the people who had invited her that it was their responsibility to find drugs for her. Like it was another thing, like being picked up from the airport. (It inspired me a decade later.) She seemed to know the installation was her last. She died soon after, in her apartment, alone with her dolls. The drugs killed her.
Would you mind telling me a bit about the dolls in terms of her creative expression and self-expression?
The making of the dolls…so there’d be newspapers spread out, and it would start with a wire armature, and then she would use wet newspapers and wrap them, and then eventually papier-mâché them, and then she’d find glass eyes and paint them and dress them. She was working for Jim Henson for a little while, and she was thrilled by that. Anyway, then the dolls were like her and her family, her friends. And she constantly dressed them up, changed clothes, changed wigs, completely changed identity, made new vignettes, had parties with them, and took them on the street—she lived their lives with them.
There was absolutely no filter between Greer and her work. There was no intellectual premise or construct. It was absolutely from her body—and that’s the work I love most. I know she was influenced by Hans Bellmer, Pierre Molinier, and James Ensor, and I guess to some extent Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele. I think her work is some of the most honest work ever in the art world. It’s totally without artifice, in spite of the fact that it looks like it is. I don’t see the work as grotesque at all. She was obsessed with movie stars and models, like everyone was at the time—like the queens I knew in the ’70s who knew every line from every movie.
How do you see Greer’s work now?
I never stopped looking at the work, because I live with it—I live with her drawings on my walls. And I want to do a book of her drawings now that this book is published. But there’s no difference between how I looked at her work then and now. My role in the book… Francis was my archivist for many years, and Jordan’s his boyfriend and a publisher, and they came to me with this book. I don’t know if they wanted me to get involved, but I involved myself. They had started with images of the dolls at parties, and they lightly hit on the pain in the middle, and then went back to the party. I changed the whole narrative arc—I’m always good at bringing in the darkness and pain. As it goes along, it increasingly becomes more painful. And it ends with her starved and depressed. I thought it was really important to trace that.
To not glamorize the past.
Well, to not make it all a party. That was my real involvement in the book. They were more positive—I guess they have a more fun outlook on the world than I did. And we worked together on every single thing, every detail, after that. I think it’s a beautiful little book. It’s not like one of my books—it’s collaborative—but I think it’s a perfect book, and I’m so happy it’s out there, because she hasn’t been represented to the public enough; the only thing that’s out there is Sketchbook, September 1977, published by Primary Information.
I think it’s fabulous that generation after generation—and particularly this generation—has discovered her and worships her as she should be, but it was just such a different period to be trans. There’s too much fetishism of the ’80s, but I don’t know that they would’ve really liked us the way we were then. I want to say, after all of this, that it was also a time of glamour and pleasure and color. And Greer was an embodiment of all of that. It wasn’t just pain.
