Mark Morrisroe Photography and A Heavy Load To Bear
Mark Morrisroe "Self Portrait (to Brent)" (1982)
I first spotted this Polaroid photo by Mark Morrisroe in the corner of a page in my year end issue of Artforum. It was a tiny little image included on someone’s Top Ten list of art exhibits, but despite its small size, the photograph immediately caught my eye like no other image in the whole issue. This image was so familiar to me. I never heard of the artist Mark Morrisroe before, but it seemed like this photograph was somehow reaching out to me. In fact my response to the photo was so personal and so visceral that it seemed like it could almost be a mirror. The image is so simple - a young man lying in bed with his arm outstretched, yet it hit my heart and my gut with a ferocious storm of feelings. I felt like I had been in that room. I know the light, the wrinkles in the sheets, the nakedness of the arm, the nakedness of the image. I have been there before.
Before I even read about the artist, I knew he was dead. I knew this image taken in 1983 was taken by an artist no longer in this world. Indeed, I read about him and discovered that he died of AIDS at age 30 in 1989. I was overwhelmed by my intense sense of grief over not just this individual artist, but over the fragility of life, of all those who I have lost, all of those the world has lost, and also somehow over some internal sense of loss inside myself. I felt really connected to the image but also a profound sense of mourning over the loss of the life of the person who created the image. The paragraph written about the artist contained very little information, but what it did contain filled me with such intense personal feelings that I felt I needed to learn more about the artist and also share his work here with you.
The photographs in this show spanned the brief decade of Morrisroe’s feverish artistic output, which came to an abrupt end in 1989, when he died at the age of thirty. With the artist’s short and difficult life in mind, one can hardly bear to watch the succession of events documented in his pictures. An undertone of inevitability lends the work a sense of innocence and tranquility. There is an implicit sweetness and unique sensitivity to his work. Morrisroe’s images have the texture of a lived life.
--Zipora Fried, Artforum, December 2011
Certainly my first conscious response to reading about Mark Morrisroe is one I am not unfamiliar with. He is yet another reminder of not only all the people who died from AIDS during the “great die off,” but also of what a profound effect AIDS had on art. So many visionary artists were wiped off the planet, and we have never seen that force in queer art surface again. Certainly the title of this exhibit -- "From This Moment On" - amplifies that sense of lost because there will be no more moments for Mark Morrisroe or others who have died of AIDS. From this moment on, there will be no more moments for Morrisroe and everyone else who has died from AIDS. The world has exists without them, but we have the legacy of their art. And I think that is part of the emotional intensity of Morrisroe’s photographs. They are like ghosts captured on Polaroid film. Looking at these photos, that era seems so long ago but it is also very much alive in the lingering presence of the images on film.
The photos and the fact that they are situated in a moment of history - the 1980s - seems to make AIDS a thing of history, a thing of the past, but I am also reminded of the fragility of the present and the role AIDS plays now. It has not gone away. Its reality has become part of the collective suppression, buried in the realm of the unconscious. We have to also consider that with the right amount of economic privilege, people can access the drugs to keep them alive, even if they have AIDS. Like in so many other things in Life Under Capitalism, those who “have” can survive, and those who don’t won’t make it. It’s not surprising that there has been an uptick in AIDS in the gay community because the disease has become so historicized. But let me just say here, AIDS has not gone away. It is very real, and it is happily morphing and spreading daily.
Blow Both of Us, Gail Thacker and Me, Summer 1978 (1986)
But I need to get back to the photos of Mark Morrisroe. Certainly there is an urgency and fragility to his use of the Polaroid snapshot. The scrawled markings on the borders are both part of history (signifiers of the punk era of art) but they also seem so ephemeral, like they could be erased and disappear into the trash bin of history any day. The documents themselves are as fragile and rough, as punk and tender as the images of the people (most of whom are now dead) that they contain. It was interesting for me to experience the tremendous pang of loss that overtook when I saw Morrisroe’s little photograph and read about him. I responded so strongly that I had to question why my personal response was so powerful.
It turns out that Mark Morrisroe spent his young teenage years as a street hustler, just like yours truly. He lived a hard life that ended short, yet he documented his life furiously in his collection of photographs. Apparently he incessantly documented his life - his self, his sexuality, his eventual illness, and his own death - as a way of validating his existence and trying to beat life, but in the end death won. But it didn’t really win, because Morrisroe by making his own death part of his art, he lives both through his death and through his art. And he is speaking to us now. He sure in the hell is speaking to me.
The theoretical significance of Morrisroe's efforts to 'write a new life' lies in his recognition that the compulsive and repeated effort to invent and re-invent oneself is fundamentally a form of 'lying' - or fictionalization - and that 'truth' is made up of a succession of lies. As an artist, Morrisroe located this performance of self at the heart of the photographic process. His complex manipulations of the photo negative - a preoccupation which persisted and developed throughout his career - allowed him a means of transposing truth into lies, and lies into truth, or, of 'writing a new photograph.'
--D. Joselit, Mark Morrisroe’s Photographic Masquerade, 1995
Fascination (1983)
Even though it may seem “unfair” or “self-serving,” I cannot help but read about Morrisroe and think about myself. Certainly, I feel compelled to create constantly as a way of validating my existence and beating life at its own tough game. I am no stranger to death nor to the streets. Not only do I carry the burden of those who died, but I also carry the burden of my own survival. I have spent my entire adult life writing, drawing and painting my way through life as a way to process my own survival. For the record, surviving the streets, surviving the sex industry, surviving drug addiction, alcoholism, rape, violence, molestation and everything that I survived is no easy game. There are times when I wished I didn’t survive. Life would have been so much easier. I say that in moments when I am overwhelmed by the battleground inside myself - the one when the “me then” comes fist-to-cuffs with the “me now.” I like to think that those moments are getting more rare the older I get, but then at times I think I’m just holding the door shut tighter and tighter. So when I saw that arm reaching out in Morrisroe’s photograph, I think I responded so strongly because I saw my own arm, felt so intensely my own burden of survival.
Untitled (Baby Steffanelli) (1985)
Last night I had an opportunity to visit with my friend Jason (a.k.a. fogbear) from San Francisco. He is one of the two friends who accompanied me when I went back to San Francisco two summers ago and visited many of the places from my teen years on the streets. That was an intensely emotional experience, looking at myself in those buildings, seeing the girl I buried there, digging her out, bringing her home with me. Seeing Jason last night was kind of like looking at a Polaroid photo of myself. I am alive. I make art to convince myself that my life has worth, to mark my survival with ink, words, anything I can get my hands on. I have buried a lot of people in my life. I have buried myself. Every day is a reminder that I am alive and is a reminder of the people who aren’t.
Mark Morrisroe didn’t survive AIDS. His photos come from an era that many young people alive today never witnessed and never knew. I lived through it. My art helps me stitch the part of me who survived that time to the part of me who exists now. I’m stitching myself together with strokes of the pen in artwork that is fragile, ephemeral, vulnerable and urgent just like that arm reaching out in Morrisroe’s photograph, just like I am. I think that’s why I cried when I saw his photo. Mark Morrisroe’s photograph reminded me of the girl inside me who I thought was dead. It reminded me that she is far from dead, that she survived the streets, survived AIDS, survived a whole world of hell and that she is alive and kicking now. It reminded me that the history she carries is a heavy load to bear.