I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling to life and reason

- Franz Kafka

1. Work

Greer Lankton was an artist and muse, a pioneer dollmaker who “bridged folk and fine art.”

She graduated the Pratt institute with honors and a 3.4 GPA and found a place in the East Village art scene, as a muse to David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, and Nan Goldin.

Though popular within the scene, her work was unique among her peers. She was a dollmaker not by conformity but by obsessional dedication to taste.

This sort of independent personality was evident early on, in high school:

“This sound really bad,” explained [Greer]. “but I’m in gymnastics for one reason, myself. I don’t really care about the team.”

(Cunningham 1974)

Her adult life was defined by an indomitable work ethic (directed at her dolls) and her never-lacking personal beauty.

Morton (2007):

Greer had a thin face with full hazel eyes, and a pretty, doll-like quality. Ambitious, with a drive to “get over,”

Gonzalez (2019):

Even when held up at the hospital for weeks she would make work.

Greer dates Paul Monroe beginning in 1982 and marries him five years later surrounded by stars of the East Village art scene; Nan Goldin is wedding photographer.

She is prolific: in February of 1983 she writes that she has “finished 4 dolls in 5 weeks.”

Neither work nor marriage deter her lifelong eating disorder; from 1981 onward she documents her dwindling weight on the pages of her calendar:

Note that “fortitude in illness” is a female virtue (Bell 1987, 146)

The place she occupies in history is unique: she is the only transsexual woman of the era to have achieved such status even briefly. Others have bemoaned her lack of recognition but it is precisely the lack of peers or successors that attests to what she did.

Greer had few protective devices or defenses from the world. I once said to her that her work was like surgery without anesthesia, and she agreed.

(Goldin 1996)

2. Apotheosis of the Doll

The doll is readily offered as an idol by anorexics:

They are thin and fragile to the touch but yet some people can achieve the look and body of an actual doll. Thin and petite and ever so beautiful.

(CuriousDollita 2016)

This is team perfection.

Welcome to the Broken Porcelain Doll Competition.

…

The goal for you is to lose 10 pounds in 21 days.

(DeadlyBones 2013)

The doll is rigid and fragile, unyielding in the face of feelings. It is a perfection of the body that exists independent of the turmoils of the soul.

Hood (2025, 42):

i love even more the wish that a man would manage me improve me

it must be such a dream to be a doll

Greer possessed the pathognomonic anorexic ability to maintain glamour even in sickness (Morton 2007); her friends frequently mention her lotus beauty, as if it were a personality trait. She had the rare combination of artifice and glamour the anorexic embodies so well; effort that would otherwise undermine the naturality of beauty works because it never lets up.

Greer’s dolls were overwhelmingly women: Diana Vreeland, Coco Chanel, Jackie O. She made dolls of dolls: Edie Sedgwick, a fragile and preened Warhol superstar; Candy Darling, a fellow made woman.

All of them were simultaneously gorgeous and grotesque … To her, self-destruction was the height of glamour.

The term has recently grown in popularity as a term for transsexuals:

“I think the term ‘dolls’, what its use in transfeminine culture is getting at, is kind of owning the ‘synthetic’ nature of trans women’s hyper-femininity.” She continues: “[where] trans women are supposed to aim for a non-spectacular femininity, often the doll kind of rejoices in the spectacularity of her femininity, and its synthetic nature that, ultimately, she’s usually created herself through surgery [and or] cosmetics.” To be a doll, regardless of financial bracket, is to be in a kind of rapturous and devout practice of a deep aestheticism: an ostentatious assertion of the value and opulence she is told by a transmisogynistic world is not her birthright; a flourishing. The doll’s world – her house – is one of soft-focus filters, of mirrors, powders and acute, porcelain perfections, furnished by her will-to-power, and importantly, one of socio-cultural innovation. It is one that embraces and toys with artifice as a means to truth; glamour as a door into the temple.

(Guobadia 2022)

Dolls notably are playthings, with no will or bodily self-possession, subject to vicissitudes of the world but also released from choice (a comfort to the anxious personality).

Greer herself gives an almost transcendent quality to feminine beauty, in light of her hermaphroditism:

THE MAKE UP AND HAIR, GLAMOROUS PERFECTION, ONE THING THAT NEVER LET “IT” DOWN.

3. Decline

Greer’s last years in Chicago were bleak. She was not renowned as in New York (Goldin 1996), notably she was never a muse in Chicago.

The move came in desperation, after a divorce when her husband turned abusive and AIDS decimated her social circle:

I left New York after losing 30 friends to aids and a divorce that almost destroyed my art career and my life. I feel that art is one of the only ways for me to communicate the despair and loss I feel and also the joy one can find in life.

…

I know that art is my calling in life. The purpose that keeps me going.

Als (2014):

no artist is down on her luck when she has her art. It’s what Greer fed on, even when she ate no other food at all

She reorients herself to local fabric stores and receives calls from New York but never gets her footing. She is financially dependent on her parents and on food stamps.

Having covered Harper’s Bazaar in New York, in 1991, she buys clothes from Sear’s.

In 1992 (age 34) she runs away from SSCA (a drug rehab) and has to be brought back by police. Her parents act as her caretakers; she reverts to listing her mother as her emergency contact.

Greer never recovers from her anorexia; in her years in Chicago she makes efforts to gain weight but her alcoholism, health problems, and work remain her focus.

In August 1995 she overdoses; in the hospital she is on life support for weeks. She works tenaciously amid health problems from 1995 to 1996, completing dolls nocturnally. In 1995, a doll of Edie Sedgwick would sell for $600.

King (2003):

She told me that most visitors who came to the apartment for the first time – acquaintances or people she had met hanging around – thought that she was crazy when they saw all of her figures.

Derangement attests to dedication, in material and space, to work.

Her work came out of her need to create art to survive

(Goldin 1996)

She created a copious amount of work in her short lifetime … She worked compulsively

(Durbin and Monroe 2015)

In turmoil and decline, her singular focus remains. Before and after heroin addiction, after divorce, her work continued - she made dolls.

End

I imagine the weeks that led up to the Mattress Factory opening must have been some of her happiest; working on her largest installation to date, money in her pocket and surrounded by an admiring staff. She was sick from continued drug use, and down to 90 pounds, but the curators told me how impressed they were by her dry wit, creative process and work ethic.

(Morton 2007)

“She was alarmingly emaciated, and her hands were shaking,” recalls Mr. Kertess, who chose her as one of the 89 artists in his show.

(Goldin 1996)

Greer died November 18, 1996, in Chicago, from a cocaine overdose presumably exacerbated by her low weight and purging.

Despite the lamentations of fans and true well-wishes from friends and family, one must imagine her exhausted at the end of her life. The prognosis for chronic anorexia is grim and she was clinging to a life on the downturn, denied domestic union by her violent ex-husband and unrecognized in the second city.

References