Mark Morrisroe 1959-1989

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Born in Boston in 1959, Mark Morrisroe led a brutally short life. After fleeing his drug-addicted mother at the age of 13, Morrisroe found a new home on Boston's streets, earning extra cash by taking up the world's oldest profession and following his dreams in the only way he knew how: tenaciously.

His dedication to photography earned him a spot at School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston alongside the likes of Nan Goldin, David Armstrong and Philip Lorca diCorcia. Founder of the punk 'zine, Dirt under the name Mark Dirt and known to embody a down on her luck drag-queen named Sweet Raspberry, Morrisroe's credited as Boston's first Punk.

Despite - or, perhaps, in conjunction with - his wells of talent, Morrisroe battled years of drug addiction and paralytic self-abuse. Like so many of his peers, Morrisroe's fast living got the best of him: he contracted HIV and died in 1989 at the tender age of 30. Though many may not have realized it, the world lost a legend and with that legend, the record of a life lived.

To celebrate Morrisroe's oft-ignored work, Andrew Belonsky caught up with another of Morrisroe's school chums and former boyfriend, Jack Pierson. Meeting at Pierson's Chelsea a fews days after Pierson returned from art basel Miami beasch, where he had been promoting his more recent collection, Desire/Despair, they chatted about the boys' first date, Morrisroe's unique culinary skills and what it really takes to make a legend.

Andrew Belonsky: I want to start with your first meeting with Mark Morrisroe. Do you remember exactly where it was?

Jack Pierson: It was this little café called C’est Si Bon on Arlington Street in Boston: a café under a very fancy restaurant also called C’est Si Bon - the café was all run by art students. It was a place where you could hang out and somebody would feed you and the check would disappear. [Mark] was the dishwasher. I guess the second time I went there, my friend who worked there said, “Mark Dirt” – as he was known at the time – “really likes you and wants to meet you.” I was, whatever, eighteen.

AB: Were you attracted to him immediately?

JP: Um, I guess. I think in that way – yeah, I was attracted [to him].

AB: Can you trace the evolution of the friendship?

JP: We met and he asked me out on a date. He was very polite and very – at that time, he wasn’t considering himself Mark Dirt. He was probably 24, but he had been on the Boston punk scene since he was 16. He sort of invented the Boston punk scene with this magazine called Dirt. By this time, he had moved into – his thing when he was meeting me was that he was now not punk. He was going to be successful and he was going to wear a tie. He had this book about dressing for success. He was very sincere about it. He went back to being Mark Morrisroe. He wore Brooks-Brothers clothing from the thrift store and was trying to be “successful”.

AB: That’s something that is written about a lot: he wanted to be a critical success. It seems to me that he didn’t get the attention he deserved when he was alive and even now – I was actually talking to Nick Weist from powerHouse about [Mark] and how it’s a shame that he’s glossed over…

JP: Well, he’s not here to…

AB: Do you think that’s what it is?

JP: Yeah. There’s a finite amount of work that he made and it was radical back when he made it. It was great that Pat Hearn showed it, because it was so of that moment in the eighties. The work he made in the eighties applies to the nineties…

AB: Do you consider his work bleak? It’s described as bleak, but I don’t read it as such.

JP: I don’t, but I mean I do. You know, in some ways. Like the ones that are supposed to be bleak, look bleak.

AB: I guess there’s that veil of bleakness, but it seems to me that there’s also this confused innocence of youth. It’s more confusion to me, because when I think bleak, I think “dreary” and I don’t find his work to be dreary. I find it quite energetic, actually – a beacon for success.

JP: Yeah, yeah, but I’m thinking [about] the dismal Boston skyline and there’s one of the branch on Coney Island that’s just a dead branch…

AB: Do you find that sort of work tiresome?

JP: [laughs] No! I love that kind the most, because – I don’t know – I find bleakness energizing. I find it humorous and energizing. I like an over the top kind of Chekhov…super-bleak.

AB: There’s this quote that I’m sure you’ve heard: It kills me to look at my old photographs of myself and my friends. We were such beautiful, sexy kids but we always felt bad because we thought we were ugly at the time. It was because we were such outcasts in high school and so unpopular. We believed what other people said. If any one of us could have seen how attractive we really were we might have made something better of our lives. I'm the only guy that I know who wanted to runaway to be a prostitute. Do you have a reaction?

JP: Well, he died when he was 27 – imagine what it would sound like now.

AB: It would sound ridiculous. It does sound ridiculous, in a way. To consider everybody who’s gone on -

JP: Right, but you don’t relate to that quote?

AB: Well, certainly I do. Do you still feel like an outcast now?

JP: Totally - to this very day.

AB: Daily or just occasionally?

JP: Basically daily.

AB: How do you feel looking at old pictures? Are you nostalgic at all?

JP: I mean: these are so…I lived with these for so long in a pile, that it’s hard…

AB: Does it not seem like you?

JP: No. When this picture was taken I almost burst into tears, like, “You can’t show that, please.” I thought he was just torturing me. Now I’m like, “Oh, wow, I was skinny. You can see my clavicle.” But at the time it hurt me to look. So I know this quote. I know what this quote means...

AB: How old were you in this?

JP: Eighteen, Nineteen…

AB: Do you consider your work political?

JP: Yeah. I depend on it being political, but I don’t know that I could defend it as such.

AB: So you depend on the viewer translating it as political?

JP: Maybe. I guess. I’m pretty sure it is, but it’s just something I wouldn’t want to claim for it. Just like I wouldn’t want to claim that it’s spiritual, but I depend on it being [spiritual]… Mark was always obsessed with being famous and success in a way that I didn’t care about as much, honestly. Maybe I didn’t see myself as being able to, but also I really didn’t – like, whatever my constitution is, I would have never been so openly desirous. But he did…I just wanted to do what I do. But the other thing he taught me – the weird thing: as much as he craved this fame and intentional sort of art making, he always taught me how to be interested in things that weren’t necessarily known…commodities. He would make things at the time that would be like – made just so that they would be weird. Like, “What if you found this” – you know what I mean? In that way that now I go to the desert in California and go to an abandoned shack and find things that some speed freak made and think, “Ew, what is this? Why did they do this? Why is it written like this? They must have been crazy.” Stuff like that interests me. There’s a part of me that likes stuff that you couldn’t know about.

AB: New discoveries?

JP: Yeah, which is basic, but one of the things Mark would do that I would think is so weird is follow things through that other people just would glance over. Like in the back of magazines, there used to be classified things. [For example] someone would pay five dollars for pictures of girls smoking cigars. So, [Mark would] go out and do it. Now the internet makes all that stuff seem like, “Oh, yeah, of course…” But in 1977 it just seemed weird, “What’s guy in Texas would want pictures of girls smoking?” It just seemed so bizarre, but [Mark] would connect to it…

AB: So it’s more the idiosyncrasies of people?

JP: Yeah, that’s what I like – I mean, I think it’s cute…It amazes me that my idiosyncrasies seem to have currency these days.

AB: Do you feel like a legend?

JP: No.

AB: I feel like you’ve been described as a legend.

JP: Yeah, but on what grounds? Because I was boyfriends with him and he died and he’s a legend?

AB: No, because of your work in and of itself.

JP: It arrived sort of with this legendary thing that I don’t quite get. I think it annoys people.

AB: What do you mean?

JP: I think there are people that get annoyed that there’s a legend [but] there’s no legend. I went to school, I came to New York, I did everything everybody else did. I didn’t hang around with anybody – [Mark’s] the only one I…a legend seems to imply that I was in Morocco with Paul Bowles.

AB: I think it implies more that you’ve left a noticeable mark.

JP: I did, but where was the legend there? I make stuff that looks like some kook made it. There’s no real kook there, I don’t think - except me. I’m not that much of a kook. I could be kookier. I think that’s part of what I do well - make it look like some kook made it. It looks like it has the texture of a lived life. And I guess I do do that, but there [are] no stories like “Oh, he was so fucked up and he peed…” there’s no stories like that: legend stories. There’s just work that looks like there should be.

AB: Stories are essential to legend?

JP: A little bit, no?

AB: Yes...

JP: I tend to eschew those kinds of stories. I know how people thrive on those sorts of stories. People would rather their artists have a story than not. [I’m] too self-conscious. Mark would say, “I want to be rich”. I would [think], “Why do you have to be so vulgar?” I don’t like – when I first started with galleries and they [said], “[X] makes this every morning and he writes a list of the things he ate.” You’re like, “Oh, really?” I never want them to be able to say, “[Pierson] only does this when he’s facing the east.” I think that stuff is silly.

AB: Back to Mark for a second. Do you remember the last time you saw him?

JP: Yes. It’s [a] typically him sort of deal: he lived in this apartment in Jersey City, which at the time was ridiculous. It was 1989. He always lived outside of wherever he needed to be. In Boston he lived in Summerville, which is a long train ride into the center of the city. He would gimp over to a subway, looking like he did, but that was where he was from – I guess that’s part of it. The guy was trying to evict him for years. The whole house had been destroyed. There were no walls. There were no walls on the outside – it was just the framing of the house with stairs. Mark’s apartment was the only thing still standing. It just sat in this structure so it was just one little module. [He was] in there dying of AIDS with the one girl that he still convinced that he was a legend. She was a junkie. They were both junkies together. She stood by him. And then finally he died and they probably remodeled the rest of the building.

We had been up there and he was delirious at the end. The only reason we were still in touch at the end was that he was so delirious that he didn’t have the fight left in him because – well, he did… It was just the right thing to do, to be there. It was hard to take. He was a mental case. Certifiable.

AB: Do you remember the first date you guys went on?

JP: Yeah. He invited me to his apartment and was going to cook me dinner. His apartment was in a basement… The whole thing with me – part of what he loved about me – I don’t mean to imply that I’m from a wealthy WASPy community, but I’m from this small town… Not country folk WASP, but go to church on Sunday…nice kids. He liked that. He fetishized that thing. He was [this] inner city, tough little scrappy thing. Me with a somewhat clean attitude: that’s what he wanted. And I guess I was looking for punk rock myself. [His] basement apartment was filthy. You couldn’t even walk; there wasn’t a path on the floor. It was just crap: barbells, porno and pennies. You couldn’t art direct a worse, slobbier thing. But in that way like – did you ever see that movie Hairspray, when she’s making out with the guy and she kicks the rat off her foot and is like “so romantic”. That’s what it was like: “Oh my god, I can’t believe it.” He had a hot plate and that’s what he [used] to make this dinner and make instant coffee. I never had instant coffee in my life. He made this whole dinner and showed me his work and told me he was going to be famous and if I was lucky he’d photograph me.

AB: It was attractive to you?

JP: Not necessarily. I was a little appalled, sort of. I remember that night we had this conversation: “How can you have pornography? This kids are on dope and are forced to do it by the mafia!” And he was just like… “Oh my god. Where did you come from?”

Images:
"Self-Portrait with Broken Arm", 1985
"Untitled (Self-Portrait)", 1983
"Untitled", Year Unknown
"Facination (Jack Pierson)", 1983
"Embrace", 1983

Tagged: Art, Jack Pierson, Mark Morrisroe, Photography, The Youth Issue

BLOW BOTH OF US AT PARTICIPANT INC, NEW YORK

Under the direction of Lia Gangitano, whose passionate brilliance has brought much deserved attention to the alternative space, Participant, Inc. has become one of the most happening places in the New York art world. Gangitano facilitates the exhibitions, manages a publishing program and perhaps more importantly, continues to commit to collaborations with artists on public experimentation and "project-based" events.

The current show, "Blow Both of Us," is curated by Shannon Ebner and Adam Putnam (an artist who shows his own work at Taxter & Spengeman). Taking its title from a scrawled caption on a 1980s Polaroid self-portrait of Mark Morrisroe and Gail Thacker, the show brings us to familiar territory of these "Boston School" artists --the moniker was coined by Gangitano herself--as well as Allen Frame and Jimmy DeSana. The exhibit shrewdly, if not exactly seamlessly, opens up the conversation to artists who came later, such as Eve Fowler, Luther Price, Emily Roysdon and Dean Sameshima. These artists have expounded on the traditions of queer diaristic photography in compelling ways, and as AIDS has gradually become an unavoidable key on the cosmic typewriter, a visit to the show is like witnessing a twenty-year crescendo of playful and sexual survival.

Despite the presence of a pair of early Mapplethorpe Polaroids, it is Morrisroe who is the towering figure of the exhibition. The artist has left a legacy of self-portraiture that pulls triggers in our collective unconscious at no matter which point in our journey. The transgressive, though no-longer-shocking, images have gathered poignancy with age. Morrisroe's life as a chameleon is concisely depicted in the show: he can appear as a strung-out nomad in one image and evoke the effortless beauty of Audrey Hepburn in the next. His stint as a hustler dovetails nicely with the enchanting legend that he might possibly have been an illegitimate son of The Boston Strangler, based on the fact that he spent part of his childhood in a house his family rented from the killer.

The opening night crowd at Participant, Inc. included curators Matthew Higgs and Klaus Biesenbach as well as chanteuse Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons,) and wizened writer Gary Indiana. Ramsey McPhillips, an associate of the artists of the Boston School and Morrisroe's last boyfriend, considers his time with Thacker and Morrisroe a "plateau of weird genius." Standing in front of Gail Thacker's less frequently exhibited Polaroids, he tells me that Thacker wore a nurse's outfit throughout college. Drugs were not a major part of the scene. Instead, McPhillips says, "They preferred color and John Waters. And insulting people for humor."

Kindred spirit Jimmy DeSana took his own sense of humor quite seriously. His photographic experiments continue the tradition of Pierre Molinier, and are shown here next to the works by Morrisroe. The iconic pose as "Coffee Table" (1978-79) has earned a place in the queer self-portrait canon. It's worth noting, too, that DeSana was shoving ladies' shoes into his pantyhose and mashing his genitals for public display long before webcams made exhibitionism safe, anonymous, and commonplace.

Allen Frame was in the gallery tonight, and is justifiable proud of his misty images of friends and lovers immortalized in selenium-toned silver prints. Emily Roysdon has created a touching homage to one of her heroes, David Wojnarowicz, "Untitled (David Wojnarowicz series)", 2001. For the series Roysdon wore a Xeroxed mask of Wojnarowicz's face over her own, just as Wojnarowicz did with the visage of poet Arthur Rimbaud. Los Angeles-based modern master Dean Sameshima has contributed a memorable small series of color photographs of empty beds entitled "In Between Days (Without You)", 2004. The individual histories of the wet spots on pillows (sweat? saliva? other?) are mysterious and lovely.

For curators Ebner and Putnam, photography such as the work in the show is about friendship, and more specifically trust. "Blow Both of Us" makes a strong case for photography's essential impulsiveness and secrecy, as well as its ultimate accessibility. For the permanence of other people's ephemeral snapshots. After all, they're not coming back, these moments.

Doug McClemont

Doug McClemont is the former Editor-in-Chief of the gay porn mag, HONCHO. He is currently writing about his adventures as a Mortician.

Blow Both of US
Until 11 February
Participant Inc
95 Rivington Street
New York
T: +1 212 254 4334
www.participantinc.org

Allen Frame

Jimmy DeSana

1908s Polaroid self-portrait of Mark Morrisroe and Gail Thacker

Mark Morrisroe

Monday, April 30, 2007

Mark Morrisroe

Mark Morrisroe born 1959 (d. 1989)

Mark Morrisroe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1959 and was a photographer.

His mother was a drug-addicted prostitute. He left home at the age of 13 and began hustling. One of his disgruntled contacts shot him and he carried a bullet in his chest for the rest of his life.

He won a place at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but he was disruptive as his lifestyle involved drugs, cross-dressing, and exhibitionism.

Many of his photographs were self-portraits and formed a visual diary of his life. He photographed himself, friends and lovers in dark, grainy, distressed colour, integrating Super 8 stills and black and white Polaroids. His work is 'decadent' and his subject matter inseparable from his life. His work is technically experimental and takes on a sketchbook quality which includes titles and comments scrawled on the edges of his images.

Morrisroe used a 195 Polaroid Land camera and a nearly unlimited supply of film donated by the director of marketing and communications at the Polaroid Corporation.

He assumed various identities including Mark Dirt, fanzine editor, and Sweet Raspberry, a maudlin drag queen down on her luck.

In 1997 an exhibition of Morrisoe's work My Life. Mark Morrisroe: Polaroids 1977-1989 was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. The exhibition included 188 portraits. Captured over a twelve-year period, Morrisroe's naked body in these photographs deteriorates from youthful beauty to near-skeletal wasting as a result of his illness with HIV. The self-conscious innocence of Morrisroe's early work is unforgettable.

Towards the end of his life he spent so much time in hospital he set up a dark room in the ward shower.

When he died 2000 Polaroids were found along with Super-8 films.

Mark Morrisroe

Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989)