Create the World You Don’t Have Access To

I’m an artist originally from the UK, but I’ve been based in Los Angeles for the last 10 or so years, and I am a fan of Greer Lankton. Greer’s work circulated somehow in my consciousness before I even knew who she really was. I think that, like lots of other trans, queer people, you’re always searching, on the lookout, picking up these little crumbs of information or these little slight glances of recognition. I feel like I probably was first seeing Greer’s work on a bad Xerox for a punk show or something, or other queer, trans people having a poster on their wall. Greer also crossed over between the “art world,” in air quotes—the more formal version of what we know as the art world, the MoMAs of it all—and then was also downtown, doing shop windows, that kind of thing. The afterlife of the work, I think, circulates in a similar way, whether it’s bootlegged or reproduced or understood in a more informal way, maybe also because dolls are not always considered art objects. It wasn’t an art lesson at school that brought me to Greer’s work. It was a countercultural, very trans impulse.

Greer Lankton is primarily known for making these larger-than-life dolls. They mirror her in some way. The versions of the dolls that we see most often are the ones that resemble Greer in some way. I think it suits an art-historical narrative, it suits a kind of mythological narrative, that the dolls were facsimiles of herself. But I also think they were her friends, they were her milieu, they were toys to play with. I would assume there was a huge amount of pleasure in making a lot of these dolls. Sometimes, as artists, we’re goading ourselves: Can I do this? Can I make this one? Can I make it in this way? The dolls shift and change in scale. I love that they’re often a little too big. Even as much as they’re sometimes bony and uncomfortable, a lot of them are like six or seven feet. Dolls are not my thing, so it’s also funny to think about all of those connotations, like mannequins, they’re made to wear clothes and hats and whatever, and I think she was often dressing them up in fashions. Sometimes making art is making the world that you don’t have access to for some other reason. It’s a little less lonely when there are things that you’ve made that you can hang out with and live with.

Someone was asking me recently why I became an artist. Which is such a wild question, in a way. And the thing I really hit on was that, as a child, I would sit and watch the adults around me and be like, “Absolutely not. I am not doing that. Whatever is going on here, I want no part of it.” At some point as a child, it was instilled in me that artists don’t live in the real world, that they somehow have these lives that don’t have to adhere to the same rules as everyone else, and I was like, okay, I’m an artist then. There’s something in there about not understanding the world, but also not being able to tolerate the world in the way that it is, in its current form or in the forms that are being handed to us. Greer seems like she couldn’t handle the world that was being given to her, and the historical narrative is to pathologize that. In that vein of thinking, it feels like the dolls become this strange facsimile of a world that is intolerable. The dolls either have to live in the world, or they live in the world, but they’ve learned to tolerate it in some way, or that their being, their material weight, their existence in the world, relieves Greer, in some way, of her having to be in the world.