If you’d lived, would you have still loved me?
McKenzie Wark on mothers, modernism, and trans identity
This week at Public Seminar, we’re reading McKenzie Wark’s new memoir, Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso Books, 2023). In a passage shared at Public Seminar, Wark recounts her early encounters with trans identity, aesthetics, and the ghost of her mother, who died when the author was a small child. “You weren’t there,” Wark recalls, “but certain objects, media artifacts, were left behind as clues, as evidence, of how you lived your life, and how I might live mine.”
Mothers
McKenzie Wark
It’s telling that I learned about Andy Warhol from “the box,” as we called television. Of all the glimpses of the other side of the modern, its color and glamour and ornament and play, its appearances and passing situations, Warhol was the one that pointed to the kind of otherness within and against the modern to which I might one day belong: to transsexuality.
More than Warhol, it was the Factory that intrigued me. And in particular, Candy Darling. Of Warhol’s three trans goddesses, she was the prettiest one. I don’t know when her image beamed into my world, but I loved her from the start. A book of Richard Avedon pictures I stole as a teen has a group portrait of Warhol Factory regulars, including Candy. Her naked body, tits and dick, transfixed me.
Transsexuality is technically modern, but I’m starting to feel like it’s something ancient as well. Maybe there’s no essence to the sexed body. Flesh is always-other. It can be diverted, elaborated, ornamented, in different directions, although not without a certain effort. We cut and fold flesh. Like text, like collage.
You taught me something about all this, about form, through your own art. I don’t imagine you had much time for art, pressed into the mold of a postwar homemaker. I don’t imagine you had much time of your own at all. You liked to arrange flowers. Ikebana, the Japanese art of flowers, was popular in the sixties. You had a book about it. I remember the scent of cut stems. Your secateurs, which I was not allowed to touch. The various vases.