As Others Have Before

Words by Dani Lamorte published by Howlround.

A choreography of refusal: arms folded across chest, hands tucked below arms, and head turning, scanning for targets; or arms unfolded in a movement away from the chest, hand flattened against the future, and head still. One option annihilates in a hold. The other preserves in a push.

B Kleymeyer wants to push the pile over, the pile being the archive. In her latest work, As Others Have Before, the playwright-turned-reluctant performer holds tight to the archive while rejecting its authority. The archive is an institution kept in crisis. As Others Have Before traces the life of sculptor Greer Lankton (1958-1996) in much the same way Lankton tried to account for her own life—with obsessive diaries and ledgers. Throughout the ninety-minute performance, which debuted at Pittsburgh’s inter- art space in March, Kleymeyer narrates Lankton’s Chicago childhood, her artistic development, her recordkeeping, and her gender transition.

An aside on what might be mistaken for the main point: Is it, or will it ever be, possible to bring up Lankton’s transition without collapsing the rest of her life under it? On one hand, the collapse seems almost sensible. The very possibility of—let alone the actual enactment of—gender transition brings into question the stability and meaning of the body, which is to say the very reality of existence. On the other hand, the collapse can feel intentional, like an insurance fire. What do we mean to destroy by collapsing Lankton’s life down to one thing? What do we stand to gain from this destruction?

The organization of a life, particularly the organization of a life into an archival collection, is an open question in Kleymeyer’s work. There are at least two answers to this question. First, there is the familial answer: As a young person, religious storytelling fascinated Kleymeyer. In rabbinical commentary, personal narratives interact with Talmudic lore, fusing the unstable and contemporary with the archaic and authoritative. A rabbi looks at religious precedent, develops thought experiments in the form of fables or legends, and draws parallels between simplified, hypothetical cases and the mess that is real life. As contemporary rabbis draw on the contributions of canonical religious commentators, their own opinions are the canon. Thinking, in this tradition, is thinking with others—past and present. Crucially, it is never assumed that a question, once answered, cannot be raised again. As technologies and practices emerge in broader culture, halacha (Jewish religious law) is impelled to keep up, to manifest its relevance and wisdom in an era of artificial intelligence (AI) psychoses and lab-grown meats. This tradition of storytelling-as-thought fascinated Kleymeyer enough that she seriously considered becoming a rabbi herself.

The audience, normally the recipient of something like a coherent collection in the form of a performance, is asked to make sense of Lankton’s life, and Kleymeyer’s as well.

Raise the question again. Why is Kleymeyer interested in the organization of a life? In 2016, she worked with the Baltimore theatre space Single Carrot Theatre, where she assisted in the creation of Promenade Baltimore—a bus tour of the city that incorporated audio from interviews with residents. Kleymeyer collected interviews for the piece and edited the audio together, tracking how people understand the major themes or moments in their lives. In the years following, she created work like i’m not done with this body (and i never will be) (2023), in which trans women from the Pittsburgh area shared their stories of transition onstage. After i’m not done, Kleymeyer noticed attendees staying behind to share stories and map out resources. Though Kleymeyer found this work gratifying, the economic reality of paying her interviewees and performers made her curious about working with stories found in archives. Incidentally, Pittsburgh is home to the archival collections of two well-known trans women of the art world: Greer Lankton and Candy Darling.

The administration of the Lankton and Darling materials couldn’t be more different. Greer Lankton’s archival materials are managed by the Mattress Factory museum on Pittsburgh’s North Side. Kleymeyer says she was permitted broad access to the materials, even those which were fragile or in need of conservation. The Mattress Factory has digitized a range of Lankton’s papers and photographs, allowing the public to easily see and engage with the documents. The museum’s website openly offers that the collection can be viewed by the visiting public. A few streets away, the Andy Warhol Museum takes a more draconian approach to archives. Candy Darling’s materials, which are subsumed under the Warhol collections, are only available for serious scholarly research at the graduate level and above, or—as we can assume from Cynthia Carr’s book on Darling—researchers with the right connections. The museum has a menacing list of rules for those who visit the archives, including one stipulating that researchers must submit their descriptive notes (notes on contents of documents, individuals in photographs, etc.) to archives staff before departure. If a researcher transcribes any audiovisual material, the transcripts must be given to the museum who, at any future point, may deny the researcher the right to publish the transcripts—in whole or in part. The Andy Warhol Museum takes a paranoid stance, as though the visitor is something against which the archive must be defended, while the Mattress Factory invites the visitor in somewhat casually.

These two approaches don’t tell us anything about Lankton or Darling. Instead, they tell us about the institutions who lay claim to their stories. The Warhol Museum seeks to anxiously preserve a story (the legend of Warhol’s greatness), while the Mattress Factory opens the archive outward, even past the point of safety. Echoing this, the archive overflows itself in Kleymeyer’s As Others Have Before. As Kleymeyer navigates the gallery space, at the center of which is a mobile ballet barre, she retells chapters of Lankton’s life and weaves in resonant moments from her own. Around the audience, on improvised wallpaper and living room furniture, are Lankton family photographs, artwork, and homely brick-a-brack. While talking, Kleymeyer distributes—individually, in clusters, and in folders—photocopies of archival materials from the Lankton collection. Sometimes, Kleymeyer asks audience members to read the documents aloud, putting Lankton’s personal feelings in new mouths. Audience members look at the materials, pass them along. The documents amass at the end of a row of seats, with one person holding a whole, mixed legacy. Dates and places coalesce into something more like a weight, maybe an obligation. The audience, normally the recipient of something like a coherent collection in the form of a performance, is asked to make sense of Lankton’s life, and Kleymeyer’s as well.

In the parlance of archival professionals, Kleymeyer’s approach might be called “postcustodial.” A traditional archive collects materials and physically hoards them within its walls, but the postcustodial archivist asks how archival skills might be “lent out” without materials being brought in. For instance, an archivist might visit the home of an ethnobotanist, digitize her photographs for her, and conduct an oral history. The digital files and transcripts would be left with the ethnobotanist, who could share or distribute them as she likes. Her story remains in the context, the social ecology, of its making. She might strike a deal with the institutional archive to pass along part of these materials at her death, but not necessarily. This approach removes one of the archivist’s primary roles: custodian of materials. What remains is the archivist’s other primary role—archivist as organizer.

In an archive, a life is organized into themes, decades, and projects. A series of documents might be held together by a degree program or a big achievement. Others, less thematically coherent, might be grouped together by year. Correspondence is often organized by correspondent—letters from G. Lankton and letters from B. Kleymeyer kept apart from one another. Archives are convenient fictions, but nothing on this organic earth has the stability and self-enclosure an archive might imply. Greer Lankton’s materials at Mattress Factory are organized in the traditional fashion: series labeled 2D Artwork, Correspondence, Ephemera and Administrative Papers, Journals, Photographs, Photo Albums, Periodicals, or Slides and Negatives. In some ways, the collection gives me what I asked for: It organizes Lankton’s materials so as not to collapse her life into a single point. It does so by making Greer Lankton into anybody, into nobody, into someone whose material traces can be organized by medium.

The archive puts the archivist’s mind at ease. The archive takes possession, turns a thing into a resource: something from which we can extract.

We learn the body in systems, but systems are heuristics of convenience. The pain of a broken bone crosses lines of mineral, muscle, blood, and synapse. When a body is reformed—by medicine, childbirth, grief, or nights of chemical bliss—do those reformations not reform the entire body? Do they not exceed the targeted system, not introduce corpuscles of mockery into our attempts at distinction?

Kleymeyer says she’s curious how else we might organize a life. Greer’s diaries and photographs show a lifetime of hairstyles, for instance. Kleymeyer says she could organize her own life based on the beds she has owned. In As Others Have Before, Kleymeyer takes a more poetic approach to the question of organization. By continually moving between her own story and Lankton’s, Kleymeyer brings Lankton’s story—a story of studio art, of love, of family friction and support, of moving and trying and failing, and, yes, of transition—back into the present. At the same time, photocopies of Lankton’s documents circulate through the room. A final organization doesn’t take shape, but the process which instigates organization does. Here, a life, an archive, is organized by the moments when it ceases to be one’s own life and becomes ambiguous with the lives of others. Perhaps the work resonates well here in Pittsburgh because it is, as Kleymeyer puts it, a place where people are “collecting things to save places.” As gentrification and greedy property development reshape this city, as they are doing in most cities, Kleymeyer says residents are interested in holding onto touchstones, maybe talismans, of what has been lost in the flux of change. Through these objects, residents narrate stories about what came before, as well as what they think might come next

When Kleymeyer’s lover—her stack of archival boxes—slips away and hits the floor, spills open, it is—perhaps—a way of rejecting the crisis of forgetting which is the premise of the archive.

“What comes next?” is a provocative question because it refuses to unthinkingly promulgate what already is. After sorting through documents, handing them out to attendees, and talking through two life stories, Kleymeyer dons a white wedding dress and slowly dances with a stack of archival boxes, which she holds in her arms. The dress indexes Kleymeyer’s own emerging desire for familial connection and stability, but it also ties her—through longing and curiosity—to Lankton’s wedding. She is, maybe as all brides are, a composite image. Kleymeyer’s movements in dance are sweet and delicate. Then, she slips on the train of fabric and the stack falls forward, hitting the floor and spilling contents outward. For a moment, she seems to sort through the fallen boxes before finding a diary from which she reads aloud. The pace of the text, which had previously been metered and even welcoming, becomes distressed. The entries, more like strings of words than coherent narratives, pull frantically at Lankton’s own stories of health anxiety, family conflict, the death of friends from AIDS, and the disappointments of living.

There is a fire in the mind of the archivist or, better yet, a flood. And there is a desperate need to rise above a crisis—a disaster, a war, or the benign neglect of time. Everything in an archive is there because, otherwise, it is considered at risk. The archive puts the archivist’s mind at ease. The archive takes possession, turns a thing into a resource: something from which we can extract. It both produces the resource and warns us of its non-renewable nature. “If you don’t save these things,” the archive seems to say, “then the questions can never be answered.”

When Kleymeyer’s lover—her stack of archival boxes—slips away and hits the floor, spills open, it is—perhaps—a way of rejecting the crisis of forgetting which is the premise of the archive. Instead, she calls our attention to the live, messy present, to the task—never complete, always full of others’ commentary—of sorting out what a life is made of, how it comes together. This is, certainly, talmudic in its way: All answers must be re-evaluated again and again, because the world is not a static creation. In another way, this is a trans approach, which is to say: an approach which does not take the terms of embodiment or categorical boundaries as givens. This is a life which can be organized many ways, and whose organization can be debated—not in the bad faith arguments of TV pundits, but in the careful interrogations of someone who seeks answers alongside you, as a companion in living. Both talmudic and trans approaches caution against the illusion of unlimited freedom. The document never becomes a feeling. Religious thought always requires religion. The body, at least in life, gives us limits. We work from a prompt.

As Others Have Before asks attendees to work through Greer’s life alongside Kleymeyer and Kleymeyer’s alongside Greer; it involves them in her forming of herself. In this way, becoming a certain kind of person stops being an individual act. It necessitates others, and even those who reject what’s being made, in their very rejection, acknowledge its birth.

This project was made possible with support from the Frank-Ratchye Further Fund Grant #2024-050.