History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalances and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterize the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in search for survival and progress. - Amilcar Cabral [1]
Distinguishing between the art and the artist is by now a cliched expression. But there is something about Greer Lankton, now relatively obscure but one time darling of the New York art world, and the uncanny dolls that she made and remade over the course of her life, that make people seemingly unable to resist the analogy. Julia Morton, for example, writes, “Around 5’7" tall, Greer had a thin face with full hazel eyes, and a pretty, doll-like quality.” In this passing but significant remark, Lankton is placed among her dolls, each standing as figures for a form of eternal femininity. By contrast, for Laura Allsop, Lankton and her dolls are united by an outsider status, or exclusion from normative desirability; “Far removed from the brash beauty standards of the day, they [the dolls] were fringe-dwellers like Lankton herself”. Both comments are strange; to invoke Greer Lankton and the idea of doll-like beauty in the same sentence is woefully ironic given that her dolls were so disinterested in being beautiful. They are expressionistic, in a constant state of revision, ostentatiously imperfect, perhaps even ugly. On the other hand, Lankton was not an outsider to normative beauty - another fact that commentators frequently emphasise, in that distinctively transmisogynist combination of shock that trans women are sexually desired alongside fetishisation of our desirability.
Even when critics seem aware of the dismissals encoded in these characterisations of Lankton’s work, they seem unable to help themselves. Andrew Durbin writes,
I’ll resist the obvious by stating that I don’t think Lankton’s work reflects a turbulent or tortured sense of her own body, despite her dolls’ sometimes turbulent and tortured nature. Rather, their re-visional quality suggests a distinctly queer and trans experience of the world, one that is attentive to physical mutability and the rotation and flexibility of “roles.”
I can’t be too harsh on Durbin here - he is, after all, only repeating the conventional wisdom of queer theory about trans people for at least the past thirty years, deriving from the same cultural forces that drove the so-called ‘tipping point’. But like many critics, he remains unable to see trans cultural work as anything but an extension, and thereby confirmation, of a form of self-creation as gendered persons that is supposedly distinct to trans, or perhaps ‘queer’, experience. If trans cultural work is continuous with a process of gendered self-creation, can it ever be something other than an expression of pure individuality, isolated from wider conditions or relationships that made it possible, and (unlike Art as such) without wider social relevance? (There are certainly plenty of cis audiences who would prefer to absorb trans people’s labour without struggling through their own place in the structures of power, exploitation, and violence that organise it - this, before we even begin discussing transmisogyny within queer cultures.) Similarly, Durbin acknowledges that “Lankton likewise performs the double work of representing bodies (hers and others) while asserting their alienation.” Ironically, even as he recognises the figuring of alienation in Lankton’s work, he cannot help but read this as self-representation. Lankton once again becomes her dolls.
But in many ways, this approach is continuous with a certain understanding of women’s subjectivity more broadly, specifically, our relationship to visuality. John Berger writes,
men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male; the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object. And most particularly an object of vision: a sight.[2]
Popular understandings of trans women literalise this metaphor; the trans woman is literally a man looking from inside at the womanly object of his own gaze without, an object produced by the gaze as a process of identity making. Emma Heaney, in her study of transfemininity in modernist literature, calls this ‘the transfeminine allegory’, and sees it as a means by which trans women are made essential to and yet invisible within contemporary understandings of womanhood.[3] Such processes of identity making appear in the context both of what Yoruba scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí calls “the West’s privileging of the visual” in contrast with other “cultures that may privilege other senses”[4]. For Oyěwùmí, this is not merely about a diversity of senses, but rather articulates the epistemology or sensuality that has accompanied Western aggression, slavery, conquest, exploitation, and extraction. The relationship between the visual and the object of vision is key to this; it has formed and was formed by the mode of production driving Western empire, centred around a relationship between labour, land, property, and the commodity. It is not by accident that Marx’s critique of political economy begins with the commodity, value made object through violence.
Lankton began making her dolls in childhood, around age ten, so circa. 1968. She had her first exhibition in 1981. Between the mass revolts of 1968, in the midst of Black insurrections across urban centres, threatening to transform America’s imperialist wars into a civil war, and Reagan’s inauguration as imperial Commander in Chief in 1981, the global counterrevolution now better known as ‘neoliberalism’ had begun. By the time she died in November 1996, the counterrevolution had won. The Soviet Union had been overthrown; the Black Panther Party had been scattered and its members killed, exiled, or incarcerated; the u.s. prison population had overtaken that of many small countries; Lankton’s friends and collaborators, Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz, had both died of AIDS. Her work appeared in in the midst of an emerging mass media rapidly congealing into imperial monopolies, promoting a world of consumer goods to furnish a model nuclear family life. This model was available as an aspiration to some, and denied to others, through (among other things) housing policy, redevelopment programmes, AIDS fear-mongering, welfare cuts, and as ever, endless war at home and abroad. The commodity launders the profits of imperialism and buys out dissent at home. Possession of commodities comes to stand in for other kinds of power and property, over people, land, spirits. What makes this possible - this new visual culture, neoliberalism’s spectacle of endlessly available consumer goods in glossy magazines and crisp TV adverts - is a violence that invisibilises both itself and its objects; the many millions disappeared by prisons, borders, and CIA backed coups and civil wars.
Even before the counterrevolution, many had discovered the value of the transfeminine allegory for concealing, glamourising, or distancing yourself from the violence of capital. Leah has written of how these dynamics played out a generation prior to Lankton, at Andy Warhol’s attemptedly ironic ‘factory’. The art world’s demand for new commodities meant that the feminine mystique had to be done away with for a more ‘available’ glamour;
“The ‘realism’ of the prostitute,” as critic John Berger phrased it, came to replace the broken ideal of the female nude in urban life. Sex workers were “the quintessential woman of early avant-garde twentieth-century painting.” Walter [Benjamin] refers to this supposed realism, the immediacy of a body undefined by its history, as “the disintegration of aura.” Goodbye feminine mystique! In his modern city bodies have no proper names.
[...]
In the era of noise, trans and sex-working women became the postmodern muse. Rather than summoning classical knowledge to the mind of the male artist, we wisked it away. Lou [Reed] used us to pretend he was wild, not traditional; Andy [Warhol] imagined us commodifying sex the way he commodified art. When these men surveyed what deconstruction they had wrought, they did become horrified, and all their attempts to rediscover meaning outside context led them back to lazy conservatism.
This is what Jackie Wang calls ‘rapeability’, the way social constructions of beauty and desire preserve some from sexual violence by deploying it against others.[5] By the time of Lankton’s appearance on the New York art scene, these conventions were well-established - which is not to say that she would herself have been prepared for the kinds of fascination, neglect, and abuse her ‘conventional’ good looks would inspire.
Yet, like many trans artists, and in contrast to Warhol and Reed’s representations, one of the fundamental impressions one is left with from Lankton’s work is a resistance to identification from the outside, to what we now call ‘hypervisibility’, with the dolls standing as an attempt to distance herself from a form of beauty she did not ask to represent. One might suggest Lankton stages a body in place of the desire for her own; the doll is an object so she need not be.
This would, however, be only a substitution, a metonymy, a displacement. If the dolls are a strategy of self-preservation, it is a strategy that depends upon and legitimates the abjection of others. It is the self-preservation of property, whiteness, eugenics. At the same time, ironically, such a strategy would bind her forever to her own body - and, all commentary suggests, its beauty - a spectacle displaced but not escaped.
What would it mean to ‘escape’ the gaze of a culture whose vision is both deadly and, in its distribution of resources, the only means of survival? What are the criteria on which we might answer this question?
Why is it inevitable that the dolls either displace or represent a body, that they be received as either abjections or celebrations of spectacular violence? What other possible mediations and relations vanish, away from the straight and narrow road traveled by the art object from creator to audience?
In 1936, a time not unlike Lankton’s, or our own, Walter Benjamin wrote;
Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. [6]
[1] ‘National Liberation and Culture’, in Return to the Source (Monthly Review Press: New York, 1973) p. 42.
[2] Ways of Seeing (BBC: London, and Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 47.
[3] The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Transfeminine Allegory (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, IL, 2017). See especially chapter one, 'The Development of the Allegory of Trans Femininity: Sexology, Gay Rights, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Modernism', p. 23-65.
[4] The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse (University of Minnesota: Minneapolis, 1997), p. 2-3.
[5] Carceral Capitalism (Semiotexte: South Pasadena, CA and The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London, UK, 2018), p. 288-291.
[6] 'The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Harry Zohn, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (Schocken Books: New York, 2007), p. 242.