As Artist Greer Lankton Is Celebrated in a New Book, Nan Goldin Remembers Her Friend

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 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.

Her 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.”