Greer Lankton. Journal #2 Sketchbook (September 1977). 1977. Pen, marker, and pastel on paper in spiral-bound sketchbook, 8 1/2 × 6 1/2 × 3/4" (21.6 × 16.5 × 1.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Joyce Randall Senechal

On the occasion of the exhibition Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, we spoke with artist P. Staff about a personal lodestar, Greer Lankton. Lankton’s journals and watercolors in the exhibition offer “a horizon of freedom,” in the words of curator Lanka Tattersall, around ideas of abstraction and the body.

Greer Lankton, 1984

Greer Lankton, 1984

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.

I can’t tell you the amount of people I know that feel that their own experience of inhabiting a body is deeply abstract.

Greer Lankton. Journal #2 Sketchbook (September 1977). 1977. Pen, marker, and pastel on paper in spiral-bound sketchbook

Greer Lankton. Journal #2 Sketchbook (September 1977). 1977. Pen, marker, and pastel on paper in spiral-bound sketchbook

Greer’s work makes me think that abstraction really begins in the body. We think of abstraction as being divined somehow, from the universe, from some higher power, or from some kind of otherworldly formal experimentation. And really, I think that, without sounding really corny about it, abstraction begins inside. I can’t tell you the amount of people I know that feel that their own experience of inhabiting a body is deeply abstract.

With Greer, I feel like there’s this kind of push toward abstraction and then figuration inserting itself back in again, and this tussle between trying to understand what abstracting the body might allow us, what freedoms might be given through abstraction, and then the re-inscription of a violence of figuration.

The sketchbooks were Greer’s diaries, in a way. They were her form of self-regulation. At times, you just see lists of what she’s eaten that day, how many minutes she’s walked that day, conversations she’s had. They do increasingly become sketchbooks, more formal, how we think of an artist’s sketchbook. I actually think they’re beautiful in the way that they contradict the Greer Lankton narrative. They also feel, at times, that they’re made to be read. Maybe all of us who keep diaries keep them to be read in some way, but for Greer it feels like there is this constant asking: Who am I? Who is Greer? Who is the Greer Lankton that I’m making? And who do I become once I’ve made Greer Lankton?

Through these sketchbooks—whether they begin with the diaries of being institutionalized or trapped in dialogue with the medical-industrial complex and her family and her friends—she’s also circling really quite a formal understanding of bodies. It’s like you see her figuring joints out, you see her working out how far an arm can bend, and you can see how that becomes doll-making. It’s a little painful at times to watch someone figuring out skeletons and tendons. It feels like she wanted quite literally to get down to the bones of things.

She’s also abstracting a lot in the notebooks. She’s abstracting herself. It feels like she’s almost writing her name so many times that it becomes meaningless. She’s making and undoing the idea of Greer in the sketchbooks. I actually love, in her diaries, the sketchbooks, that you see such a complex but honest reality of a trans person. More often than not, we are given this narrative that a child, young person, feels themselves to be in the “wrong body,” which I’m saying in air quotes, and therefore needs to become right and normal and functioning. The communist in me wants to say also the kind of capitalist subject, essentially the subject who can work, who can get up in the morning and function in the way that capitalism requires them to. And what often gets maligned in that, is the kind of ambiguity and ambivalence and dissociation that I think probably all of us feel in relation to gender. I love Greer’s sketchbooks for their sense that there is no cis person. That doesn’t exist. All of us are constantly pushed out from the center and find our ways of just holding on, to hold on to dignity in some way. To understand Greer’s relationship to institutions of wellness, institutions of gender, medication, and all of those things is to be able, I think, to generously expand the narratives that we have around, What is a woman? What is the correct way to be a woman?

We don’t allow for much contradiction in the lives of marginalized people. We don’t allow for much dissent in the lives of marginalized people. If I have to fight for my rights to be a woman, to be a dignified person, to be a “free,” in air quotes, person, it then makes it very difficult to express a dissatisfaction with that, and we see this a lot around gender, around the idea of gender affirmation, around the pressure to be a success in the eyes of a cis world.

I think that Greer had to fight so hard to be Greer. And in some ways, she succeeded. She succeeded in being an icon, a kind of a mythologized figure, someone in the same breath as a Candy Darling or Holly [Woodlawn] or any of these infamous girls that we think of as part of Downtown New York and trans life. But I would hope that there is also a softer moment we can have, with her life and her work and her biography, a softer moment in the sense that maybe we can look at Greer in a light where she doesn’t have to fight so hard to be Greer, and maybe that allows us to look at the work a little differently, to understand her biography a little differently, and to see it with a little more complexity and nuance and compassion.

–As told to Arlette Hernandez, and edited for clarity and length

Greer Lankton. Journal #11 Red Datebook. 1986–87. Pen and pencil on paper in hardcover sketchbook

Greer Lankton. Journal #11 Red Datebook. 1986–87. Pen and pencil on paper in hardcover sketchbook

Vital Signs: Artists and the Body is on view at MoMA through February 22, 2025.