Mark Morrisroe

Mark Morrisroe

Eva Respini

Following are some facts about Mark Morrisroe. He was born in 1959 in Malden, Massachusetts, son of Patricia, father unknown. He created the punk zine Dirt with his school friend Lynelle White. In 1976 he was shot. He walked with a noticeable limp. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In 1978 Morrisroe became romantically involved with Jack Pierson (Jonathan at the time) and was part of a cohort of artists, filmmakers, and performers that included Pat Hearn and Stephen Tashjian (aka Taboo!). In 1984 he moved to New York City (or more accurately, Jersey City). He tested positive for HIV in 1986. He spent his last summer with his partner, Ramsey McPhillips, on an Oregon farm, and died, much too early, at age thirty in 1989.

Following are some stories about the life and times of Morrisroe. He was the illegitimate son of the infamous Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo. His mother was a drug-addicted prostitute. He ran away from home at thirteen and was taken in by hustlers. While turning a trick in drag, he was shot by a john who realized Morrisroe wasn’t a woman. He was shot by a trick who was tracing drawings on his back with a gun. He was the subject of a snuff film and left for dead. And more. In his book Am I Dead Yet?, McPhillips wrote, "Mark Morrisroe was a liar. His friends also lied. Interviews, hospital records, police records, school files and periodical research are merely an addendum to oral histories that are partially fabricated, partially the truth ... believe what you want, one truth does exist—Mark Morrisroe was a real person and if this happened at all it could only have happened to him.”

Perhaps what we know most definitively about Morrisroe is that he understood identity is slippery and photography is complicit in its construction. Morrisroe enacted fictional selves, past and present, in both his work and life. He performed for the stage, for the camera, and socially, including as one half of the drag duo Clam Twins with Tashjian, as his punk persona Mark Dirt, and as the Tina Turner impersonator who graced the 1981 invite for his first exhibition at the 11th Hour gallery. Although he experimented with a variety of genres and techniques, self-portraiture was the bedrock of Morrisroe's art making. Self-portrait is really a misnomer, because his work is a study in dispelling the notion of photographic truth. He was extremely prolific, especially with the Polaroid camera, producing more than two thousand Polaroid portraits during a ten-year period.

In these pictures, we see a range of portrayals of Morrisroe that are at turns intimate, flamboyant, erotic, exhibitionist, narcissistic, and voyeuristic. The performance of the self is at the heart of all his pictures, even the Polaroids that seem to offer a glimpse of the "real” Morrisroe. Is the pensive nude Mark in bed more honest than bewigged Markin drag? Is a self-capture of the artist masturbating more intimate than an X-ray of his illness-plagued body? The lens was ever-present, always ready to capture whatever self Morrisroe performed. This doesn’t diminish the works; after all, the best method actors call on real events and emotions to create resonant performances. Morrisroe’s exploration of the spectrum of the self is further enhanced by the experimental photographic techniques he preferred.

His distinctive sandwiching of color and black-and-white negatives, which he also manipulated by hand, produced shadowy, scratched, and dreamy pictures, offering the opportunity to create radically different results from the same negative material. For Morrisroe, the photographic negative was also a site for performativity.

For those of us who know Morrisroe only through his self-portrayals, there is no "real” Mark. There are only impressions of him, hundreds of likenesses of an artist performing for the lens, and for life. Although Morrisroe’s work is a far cry from today’s puckered and hashtagged selfies, he was way ahead of the curve in appreciating and exploiting photography’s power in facilitating the performance of the self.

"Sometimes I think I’d rather be a movie star than an artist.”

— Mark Morrisroe

Eva Respini is curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is currently at work on a major midcareer survey of Walid Raad for fall 2015.