{"id":3771,"date":"2019-05-08T00:00:01","date_gmt":"2019-05-08T04:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/?p=3771"},"modified":"2019-05-08T12:02:18","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T16:02:18","slug":"smith_lankton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/2019\/05\/08\/smith_lankton\/","title":{"rendered":"Girl in Pieces: The Quasi-Subjectivity of Greer Lankton\u2019s Dolls"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Greer Lankton with doll, photocopy, date unknown. Greer Lankton Archives, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In New York\u2019s East Village in the 1980s, visitors flocked to Einstein\u2019s on East 7th\u00a0<\/sup>Street to catch a glimpse into the world of Greer Lankton. What distinguished this clothing boutique from countless others were the androgynous, emaciated figures that filled its glass storefront with a kaleidoscope of strange glamour. Made from cloth, wire, and plaster, with glass eyes and real hair, Lankton\u2019s dolls and mannequins had a compelling cult status, situated between art and commerce, high and low culture, beauty and abjection, life and artifice. After her life and career were cut short in 1996 by a fatal overdose, Lankton became marginal to art historical accounts of the 1980s. But as objects that claim some of the qualities of living subjects, Lankton\u2019s dolls embody the fraught relationship between subjectivity and representation that was a major concern of feminist artistic discourse of her period (Fig.1).<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 1. Nan Goldin, Greer Lankton in her Studio on East 4th Street, NYC, 1983, gelatin silver print. Greer Lankton Archives, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA<\/span>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Lankton\u2019s dolls can be read as quasi-subjects, on the threshold between person and thing. In their anthropomorphism, they suggest the potential for subjectivity, but more significantly they act as surrogate subjects in the artist\u2019s own production of the self. Unapologetically autobiographical in nature, Lankton\u2019s workis deeply entangled with the politics of transgender representation. Judith Butler has articulated how gender \u201cfigures as a precognition for the production and maintenance of legible humanity\u201d[1]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0within the social sphere. As a transgender woman, Lankton lived with the threat of becoming a \u201cthing\u201d under the normative gaze. Through the quasi-subjectivity of her dolls, the artist destabilizes the very categories of \u201cperson\u201d and \u201cthing.\u201d Viewing photographs of dolls posed by the artist, acting as subjects, and of the artist posing alongside them, produces a confusion of subject-object relations similar to what Bill Brown\u2019s study of the \u201cthingness\u201d of objects calls \u201coccasions of contingency\u201d that disrupt clear boundaries of self against Other. \u201cThe story of objects asserting themselves as things,\u201d he writes, \u201cis the story of a changed relation to the human subject,\u201d [2]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0a changed relation that Lankton courts to reframe normative perceptions of bodily difference and gender variability (Fig. 2).<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 2. Greer Lankton posing with dolls, 1981. Date unknown, photographer unknown. Greer Lankton Archives, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 2b. Greer Lankton posing with doll, date unknown. Greer Lankton Archives, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The projective capacities of the doll and its cousin, the mannequin, have been seized upon by many artists across the twentieth century. They embody the mechanized subjectivity of mass culture, the repressed and at times violent impulses of sexual desire, and, later, feminist critique of social conditioning. In the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, dolls and mannequins embodied \u201cboth the femme-enfant<\/em>, an uncanny childlike doll who evoked repressed fears and desires, and the femme fatale, <\/em>who evoked lustful and often sado-masochistic fantasies,\u201d according to Alyce Mahon.[3]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0However, the modernist doll was not exclusively a vehicle for masculine projections of desire, fear, and violence onto the female body. Modernists Sophie Taeuber, Emmy Hennings, and Hannah Hoch all worked with dolls. Hal Foster notes that \u201cfor these women, such figures were vehicles of role-playing, of staging and testing models of femininity.\u201d[4]<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Of particular resonance to Lankton\u2019s work is the fin-de-siecle\u00a0<\/em>dollmaker Lotte Pritzel, who, like Lankton, created her androgynous figures for commercial storefronts and as art objects. Pritzel inspired Rainer Maria Rilke\u2019s now classic essay on the doll, which explored the \u201cdoll-soul,\u201d an excess element beyond projected fantasies, that sits on the threshold of human comprehension. He writes, \u201cwe realized we could not make [the doll] into a thing or a person, and in such moments it became a stranger to us.\u201d [5]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0This life of the doll, neither object nor subject, is key to understanding Lankton\u2019s artistic project.<\/span><\/p>\n

The doll\u2019s potential to destabilize boundaries of subjectivity found its apex in the work of German artist\u00a0Hans Bellmer<\/a>, whom Lankton identified as her greatest influence.[6]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0His painstakingly crafted Poup\u00e9e<\/em>, composed of abject torsos and limbs connected by ball-joints, could be assembled in various configurations. While Bellmer\u2019s work has been criticized for its disturbing fixation on the sexualized adolescent female form, the significance of his work here is in his conception of the body as mutable, inviting endless reconfiguration through its \u201cannagramatical potential.\u201d[7]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Roxana Marcoci argues that his transformations of the doll \u201cdispensed with the idea of the unitary self,\u201d[8]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0offering alternatives to normative conceptions of the sovereign body.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lankton\u2019s dolls show startling parallels to Bellmer\u2019s. Both continuously reworked, repainted, and reassembled their dolls, laboring over them for years. They also shared an obsessive desire to document the transformation and animation of their figures through drawing and photography. Like Bellmer, it is through Lankton\u2019s posed photographs of the dolls, the ways in which she crafted their relationship to the gaze of the camera, that we learn the most about their potential inner life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sissy, one of Lankton\u2019s favorite dolls and her most autobiographical figure,[9]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0was continually reworked for the entirety of Lankton\u2019s career, as seen in photographs spanning nearly a decade. In\u00a0one image<\/a>, we see Sissy seated outside Einstein\u2019s, seemingly taking a smoke break. In\u00a0another<\/a>, she is shown outside a subway station, wig removed, her pants around her ankles, her penis exposed.\u00a0Another<\/a> shows her lounging in a bedroom surrounded by smaller, less animate dolls. Sissy\u2019s style of dress varies in each, as does the painted surface of her body. Previously unpublished photographs from Lankton\u2019s archive show Sissy stripped down to her wire armature, caught in the process of disassembly, revealing the degree to which these revisions penetrated to the doll\u2019s very core. (Fig. 3)<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 3. Greer Lankton, Sissy mid- \u201coperation,\u201d 1985. Greer Lankton archives, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Lankton spoke of Sissy\u2019s reconstructions as her \u201coperations,\u201d ritualized and documented by the camera.[10]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Bellmer used the same term to describe his doll\u2019s transformations.[11]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0In Bellmer\u2019s case this carries an almost sinister connotation, but if Sissy is indeed a self-portrait, Lankton\u2019s use of the term takes on different meanings. Lankton had a history of traumatic medical care in childhood, including electroshock therapy to \u201ccure\u201d her transgender \u201ccondition.\u201d[12]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Her sexual reassignment surgery at the age of nineteen led to months of traumatic physical recovery, which she documented in harrowing\u00a0drawings<\/a>. Here the term \u201coperation\u201d reveals a deep empathy with the position of her dolls, and a desire to reframe her medical trauma as a creative act of transformation.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, traumatic de-articulation is merely one aspect of Lankton\u2019s project, just as gender dysphoria or transition narratives are merely one aspect of trans life. Her work also exudes a sense of familial intimacy, celebratory glamour, and unflagging humor. In many of the photographs she made of her dolls, she trains her camera on them as intimates, focusing on their faces, their postures, and their interactions with one another. Unlike Bellmer\u2019s photographs of his Poup\u00e9e<\/em>, which appear violently coerced into position, Lankton\u2019s dolls seem almost in control of their imaging, knowing and willful collaborators. (Fig. 4)<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 4. Dolls and drawings by Greer Lankton, possibly from first solo show at Civilian Warfare, New York, 1983. Greer Lankton Archive, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his writings on feminist strategies that subvert the masculine gaze, Craig Owens identifies a \u201crhetoric of the pose\u201d whereby artists adopt posing as gray zone between being passively rendered an object and actively becoming a subject. Owens argues that in such works \u201cthe subject posesas an object<\/em>in order to be a subject<\/em>.\u201d[13]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0To see Lankton\u2019s sculptures as posing<\/em>rather than posed <\/em>is to read them as rendering themselves objects. Agency is thus granted to the dolls through their very status as objects, in a formulation related to Lankton\u2019s complex relationship to her own image in the world as a transfeminine body. Barbara Johnson acknowledges that a founding insight of feminist criticism is \u201cthat the idealized, beloved woman is often described as an object, a thing, rather than a subject,\u201d but argues \u201cperhaps the problem with being used arises from an inequality of power rather than from something inherently unhealthy about willingly playing the role of the thing.\u201d Instead, she asks: \u201cwhat if the capacity to become a subject were something that could best be learned from an object?\u201d[14]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0To extend this to Lankton\u2019s practice, how does this emergence of subjectivity for these surrogate bodies through their very objecthood, their materiality, relate to an experience of trans embodiment?<\/span><\/p>\n

An answer might be found in Peter Hujar\u2019s portrait of Lankton posed alongside her dolls Sissy and Princess Pamela, shot for her exhibition at Civilian Warfare in the East Village. Reclining nude together, the three present a radical image of the possible configurations of femininity, or even personhood. Lankton entangles the status of her dolls as quasi-subjects with her own precarious status as a \u201clegitimate\u201d body in the eyes of others. She poses herself as if a doll, drawing on their liminal status between subject and object to claim the space of material and gendered indeterminacy as her own. (Fig. 5)<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 5. Poster for Greer Lankton\u2019s second exhibition at Civilian Warfare, New York, 1984, featuring Lankton with Sissy and Princess Pamela. Photograph by Peter Hujar. Greer Lankton Archive, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Understanding Lankton\u2019s life entwined with her dolls\u2019 provides us with new codes of intimacy, and new modes of perceiving otherness. To see objects as living subjects, to acknowledge the dissonance in this recognition and nonetheless invest empathy and care towards these objects may help us to live empathetically with difference among subjects. Jane Bennett\u2019s understanding of the life of objects insists on \u201cthe alterity of things as an essentially ethical fact,\u201d whereby \u201caccepting the otherness of things is the condition for accepting otherness as such.\u201d[15]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Lankton\u2019s dolls invite similar readings, producing considerations of self and other as always in a state of relation and becoming.<\/span><\/p>\n

Evan Fiveash Smith\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

Download Article<\/a><\/p>\n

____________________<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[1]<\/span><\/a>Judith Butler, Undoing Gender <\/em>(London: Routledge, 2004), 11.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/span><\/a>Bill Brown, \u201cThing Theory,\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/em>, Vol. 28, No. 1, Things. (Autumn, 2001), 1-22: 4.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/span><\/a>Alyce Mahon, \u201cThe Assembly Line Goddess: Modern Art and the Mannequin,\u201d from Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish <\/em>(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 191.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/span><\/a>Hal Foster, \u201cPhilosophical Toys and Psychoanalytic Travesties: Anthropomorphic Avatars in Dada and at the Bauhaus,\u201d in Art and Subjecthood,<\/em>25.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/span><\/a>Ibid., 57.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/span><\/a>Greer Lankton, artist statement for It\u2019s All About ME, Not You<\/em>at the Mattress Factory, 1995.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/span><\/a>Marquand Smith, The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish.<\/em>(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 292.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/span><\/a>Roxana Marcoci, \u201cThe Pygmalion Complex: Animate and Inanimate Figures,\u201d in The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture<\/em>, 1938 to Today, 186.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/span><\/a>Lia Gangitano, as told to Johanna Fateman, \u201c500 Words: Greer Lankton,\u201dArtforum<\/em>, October 2014.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/span><\/a>Paul Monroe, \u201cUnalterable Strangeness,\u201d Flash Art.<\/em><\/p>\n

[11]<\/span><\/a>Wieland Schmied, The Engineer of Eros, in Hans Bellmer<\/em>, 22.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/span><\/a>Monroe, \u201cUnalterable Strangeness.\u201d<\/p>\n

[13]<\/span><\/a>Craig Owens, \u201cPosing,\u201d in Difference: On Representation and Sexuality<\/em>(New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 17.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/span><\/a>Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things <\/em>(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 95.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/span><\/a>Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things<\/em>(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 12.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In New York\u2019s East Village in the 1980s, visitors flocked to Einstein\u2019s on East 7th\u00a0Street to catch a glimpse into the world of Greer Lankton. What distinguished this clothing boutique from countless others were the androgynous, emaciated figures that filled its glass storefront with a kaleidoscope of strange glamour. Made from cloth, wire, and plaster, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12162,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12162"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3771"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3961,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771\/revisions\/3961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}