Mark Morrisroe in Boston: Creating Mark Morrisroe

Self Portrait [to Brent], 1982
C-print, 16 x 20 inches
Collection of Brent Sikkema, © The Estate of Mark Morrisroe

In the early 1980s, prior to becoming seen as the doyenne of the New York underground art world as it was beginning to transform into the professionalized industry it is today, artist and performer turned gallerist Pat Hearn produced The Pat Hearn show, a closed-circuit cable broadcast from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was a chance for young artists and performers who were existing on the fringes of the social norm within the Boston area to reach a wider audience, often showcasing sensationalist material. In one infamous episode filmed by Steve Stain, a punk musician and performance artist, Mark Morrisroe found a cat that was about to be put to sleep and decided to do it himself in the most abhorrent way he could, live.

“Mark was shown injecting the cat with a syringe full of house paint, which didn’t work, so he tried to strangle the cat with his hands. The camera jumped all over the place making the film all the more authentic and horrifying. After all his attempts failed, with the cat suffering terribly, Mark limped into the bathroom and threw the cat’s head in the toilet. The drowning took forever. Finally, Mark dabbed paint onto the dripping wet cadaver as though it were a canvas,” recalls Ramsey McPhillips in Who Turned Out the Limelight? The Tragi-Comedy of Mark Morrisroe. 

The Pat Hearn show was immediately cancelled, and in the fallout, Stain fled to California and Hearn, having not realized what was airing until after it was broadcast, refused to identify Morrisroe as the perpetrator. Discussing the incident with Stuart Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, McPhillips, who was Morrisroe’s final partner, said, “Mark was a snivelling person when it came to those sorts of things. Whenever there was a huge controversy and he was about to lose credit or fame or trajectory forward, he would back into the shadows.” 

Today however, it is difficult not to view Morrisroe’s life and work through the lens of his illness and early death in 1989, from complications of AIDS, aged 30-years-old. Because of this overarching and more powerful narrative that he became a part of, we reflexively imbue loss, suffering, and decay spectrally into his work, particularly his photographic work. But there is an inherent danger in this, overshadowing what was the driving force behind his work: the mythologizing of Mark Morrisroe. The incident on The Pat Hearn Show as cruel and misguided as it was, “was part of the legend that made you afraid of him,” remembers Jack Pierson, his partner during his time in Boston. It was indicative of just how far Morrisroe was prepared to go in order to achieve this. “Mark had real aspirations-slash-delusions; he would have taken fame in any form.” 

The role of Boston in Morrisroe’s oeuvre, in this respect, draws a striking parallel to the pivotal role residencies at various Hamburg clubs between 1960 and 1962 played in laying the foundations for The Beatles and Beatlemania. In much the same way that it allowed the band to hone their performance skills and image, and to begin widening their reputation, which led to their first recording that brought them to the attention of Brian Epstein, Boston was where Morrisroe came to categorically understand that creating myths was not just a way of building cultural capital but the way. Boston had no artistic commercialization in which Morrisroe could leverage a career out of, therefore mythologization was the only attainable aspiration, until inevitably, like Hearn and Pierson, and many others had done before him, Morrisroe left for New York. 

This can be attributed to two main overlapping influences. First, more broadly, was the punk scenes of America that were often built around a hierarchy of extreme transgression in order to attain a form of mythologization, and which Boston’s punk scene was nationally known for being notorious. Second, and more deeply encoded into DNA of Morrisroe’s work and life, was John Waters’ first book: Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste. 

In much the same way that Pat Hearn came to represent an authentic inversion to the industry forming around visual art scenes in New York, the punk scenes that formed around America in the late 1970s can be seen as being united on grounds of a similar ethos of non-conformity against the dominance of consumer and mass culture, and stringent conservative social values. The scenes formed in each city were often based on hierarchies fuelled by self-aggrandising and self-mythologizing that was typically reinforced by increasingly extreme acts and provocative behaviour, proving to audiences that they were the most authentic punks. GG Allin and Darby Crash are two notable examples. Their gigs were rife with violence, sexual assault, drug use, masturbation, self-harm, defecation, urination, blood, and vomiting, and were often shut down by riot police. And with their early deaths, both from drug overdoses, with Crash’s was said to have been as part of a suicide pact with Casey ‘Cola’ Hopkins that was upstaged by John Lennon’s murder the same day, their martyrdom nevertheless set in stone the personas they came to embody, establishing them as the gold standard for generations of punks to come. 

At this time, Boston was plagued by segregation, high unemployment, and soaring violent crime rates, it “gave space and incentive for people to experiment with their lives,” writes historian Tim Devin. One area populated by strip clubs, brothels, and X-rated movie theatres, described in a 1976 Wall Street Journal article as "a sexual Disneyland,” was known as “the combat zone” because of the frequency of violent crime. This became the backdrop for clubs like the Rat, which Vinny Stigma, guitarist for hardcore punk band Agnostic Front, once remarked had the most violent dance floor he had ever witnessed and was where Morrisroe got his start while still attending Catholic high school. 

Adopting the alias Mark Dirt, Morrisroe, along with his then-girlfriend Lynelle White, who called themselves the Dirts, created and distributed the fanzine Dirt. They produced five issues of the xeroxed, collaged, and handwritten fanzine between 1975 and 1976 to gain attention and ingratiate themselves into the Boston punk scene. The content mixes fabricated stories about friends and celebrities, riffing on the gossip magazines of the day, but in a way that mimics the extreme causticness that was underpinning the punk scene. For example, in one issue there is a column titled, “CHER ARRESTED FOR CHILD ABUSE,” that continues, quoting her as saying, ““I’ve been on edge, and I may have taken too many diet pills, and there has been some word that the ratings were down, maybe I am not the best mother in the world, but I wouldn’t lay a hand on my children.”” Followed by, “Last year Chastity had a broken arm.” Next to a crude annotation that reads “Cher and battered baby,” with an arrow to a photo of Cher holding her child. It illustrates a degree of ingenuity in Morrisroe’s concerted effort in attempting to build cultural capital, especially considering he was still a teenager. Yet the black, adolescent “humour” is ominous of how Morrisroe would spearhead later attempts like that he would do on the The Pat Hearn show. 

Scrawled on another, in a way that precursors the handwritten annotations of his most revered and accomplished body of work, his sandwich prints, is the provocation, “Have you ever wanted to use a fake name? Tell lies?” This is telling too because throughout his life Morrisroe was well known for and alienated people by lying about and exaggerating his experiences and the events of his biography, to the point that now many biographical details are hard to pinpoint for certain. One claim that he perpetuated that has had an effect in so far as it is still written about and discussed widely, is that he was the illegitimate son of Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler. While it is true that DeSalvo lived next door to his mother and was at a time her landlord, this claim has largely been discredited and his father remains unknown. Morrisroe would also tell people that his mother was a drug addicted prostitute. However, White dispelled this when Teresa Gruber was writing her biography of Morrisroe, instead, describing his mother as a sad, lonely woman drinking in a darkened kitchen, who her son was ashamed of. It must be seen as no small coincidence that Morrisroe who abused drugs, would in reality briefly become a prostitute, also under the name Mark Dirt, and later star as a drug addicted prostitute in his Super 8 film Hello from Bertha (1983). Yet the question remains, why would Morrisroe say this? To feed “the legend that made you afraid of him.”

Morrisroe’s prostitution signifies an interesting conflation between fantasy and reality because of how this episode was riffed on repeatedly in his art. He prostituted himself in 1976 in order to escape his mother and live independently. Yet, when he was shot by a client and left with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life, it must be hypothesized that Morrisroe saw ample opportunity in which to grow “the legend that made you afraid of him.” He references this most prominently in the sandwich print provocatively titled Sweet Little Me as a Child Prostitute, June 6, 1984. The work is a reappropriated polaroid that shows a young Morrisroe lying back on a bed naked, one arm propping up his head, his legs spread. The aesthetic of the sandwiching technique giving the image a soft, painterly haziness which, along with the title scrawled across the bottom along with other annotations, not only awards the work a romanticized, diaristic air of significance, but is a clear example of how Morrisroe sought to revisit this part of his life, to extract as much out of it as possible. A tactic lifted straight from Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste, where Waters writes, “My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.”

Morrisroe first became aware of Waters’ films in 1975 through White. With Morrisroe later claiming that Pink Flamingos (1972), Waters’ exploitation comedy film infamous for its explicit and shocking scenes designed to cause maximum offense and disgust to viewers, gave him licence to make films too. By the time Pierson entered his life, which he recalls was at a “transitional moment,” Morrisroe was “phasing out” the Mark Dirt persona. He was “eschewing punk clothing” and experimenting with a more “normative” look, wearing white shirts with a red tie, that stemmed from reading John T. Molloy’s Dress for Success, which examined the effect of clothing on a person's success in business and their personal life. However, he adds, this was quickly superseded by his “John Waters phase” with the release of Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste which led to his first Super 8 film The Laziest Girl in Town (1981), “based on the recipe” John Waters provides in the book to make films like his.

With this in mind, the ending of Morrisroe’s final Super 8 film Nymph-O-Maniac (1984) becomes almost pathetic in how derivative it is, especially in its use of Waters-esq shock, that perversely recalls the violence and cruelty he carried out during the incident on The Pat Hearn Show. Here, Pia Howard’s character is attacked by two thugs while in the bath. They then administer an abortion, rape her, and cut off one of her hands, with the violence becoming too much for one of the thugs causing him to vomit – perhaps a cloaked nod to Waters writing “if someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation,” – and finally, leaving her for dead. 

Recently during an interview, when questioned about the use of shock in his work, Waters stated that “it is easy to be disgusting, it is easy to be obscene, but it’s not easy to be witty about it, and that’s what we tried to do.” And it is true, in Waters’ films even at their most shocking, there is a mirror held up to critique the collective failings of the American dream in the post war years that makes them somewhat more palatable. But this nuance is mostly absent or so incredibly imbalanced in Morrisroe’s Super 8 films that it becomes diminished to the point of near invisibility, as evidenced above. This is also true of his life. Echoing the infamous scene where Divine eats real dog excrement in Pink Flamingos, in one class at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, after receiving an assignment to bring or do something that no one would ever forget, Morrisroe ran outside, stripped off his clothes, found and smeared himself with dog excrement and came back into the class singing. On another occasion remembers Lourdes Sanchez, Morrisroe had offered to make her dinner one evening, but instead being too high on heroin, devoured raw hamburger meat in front of her in order to disgust her. But as Waters stated, it is easy to be disgusting, it is easy to be obscene, and shock for the sake of shock quickly becomes seen as tedious and often results in attempts to top it to regain that initial edge, and not only is the case with each Super 8 film escalating in its employment of shock, but also in Morrisroe’s antics and lies.

What becomes fascinating then, when watching Morrisroe brazenly and unevenly careen through tropes from various genres in his Super 8 films, from horror and slasher films, midnight movies to home videos, porn, exploitation, and underground films, to the severe detriment of artistic quality, is what this reveals about Morrisroe trying to make his own version of Waters’ recipe. What Adrian Rifkin refers to as, “I see too much; I hear too much,” in his essay The Value of Mark Morrisroe. Because Morrisroe is plainly and naively testing the limits of what new artistic ground “the legend that made you afraid of him” may find a new voice in. In much the same way as handing out Dirt at punk clubs under the name Mark Dirt was Morrisroe testing how to become noticed. 

Added to this is a friction caused by Morrisroe’s desire to have everything appear fluid and of the moment while at the same time, Pierson remembers of making Hello from Bertha (1983), orchestrating every detail, making the actors repeat their lines until he thought they were satisfactory. In the film, about a dying, penniless prostitute in a low-class bordello, “Morrisroe was a natural Bertha,” Comer points out in his essay Lipstick Traces: The Films of Mark Morrisroe, “wallowing in misery and indecision, writhing around in bed in only a dark wig and white bustier, his buttocks and genitals exposed.” The affinities that some of the audience would have seen between his life and Bertha’s must have thrilled him. Yet, for all its chaotic, vampy, nihilistic ostentatiousness, only those involved in making it would have known that what they were seeing was in fact, nearly word for word, a long-forgotten Tennessee Williams single act play of the same name. When discussing this aspect with Comer, McPhillips talks about one of Goldin’s photographs from the Ballad of Sexual Dependency that shows a shirtless Morrisroe holding a bottle of Jack Daniels with his head slumped back. “It was completely staged. It wasn’t Nan at a party catching Mark in a moment, it was like, Nan, Nan, Nan! I’ll take my shirt off, and I’ll hold the bottle like this, and you can take your picture… but that’s woven into Nan’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency as though it is a moment. Uh-uh, it was a Mark Morrisroe moment.”  

Yet Morrisroe’s Super 8 films remain a far cry from the potential achieved in his photographic work and are held at a distance from the rest of his oeuvre because the sandwich prints offer the perfect compression of captured spontaneity and beauty by design that he struggled to replicate in his Super 8 films. While the danger, the chaos and the sexual ambiguity that coloured the lives that Morrisroe and his peers were leading is far richer and spectacular when alluded to than when it is explicitly and outrageously over-acted, as evidenced in subtly sublime Pre-Nympho Pia, Young Pia Howard (Nude in Bathtub) (1982).

At the end of his life, Morrisroe was working on the script for a fourth Super 8 film based on another Tennessee Williams play, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969). He wanted to reverse the genders of the characters and play the lead himself, which, writes Comer in his essay Lipstick Traces: The Films of Mark Morrisroe, “uncannily” focuses on the demise of Mark, an alcoholic painter who is determined to revive his fledging career. He deludes himself into thinking that he is the first artist to discover colour, spraying paint on to canvases on the hotel room floor, and rolling around in them nude, while his duplicitous and sexually repressed wife seduces the bar tender in the hotel lounge. However, he dies before his gallerist can lure him back to New York, “a casualty between artistic ambition and carnal need.” 

What this would have looked like in actuality, or if the character’s death was something that Morrisroe recognized as happening in his own life, is down to speculation but it echoes sentiments by Johnny Rotten in the wake of Sid Vicious’ death and Nancy Spungen’s murder in 1978. “The only way he could live up to what he wanted everyone to believe about him was to die. That was tragic, but more for Sid than anyone else. He really bought his public image.” 

Tellingly, then, in the throes of his actual death, Morrisroe found the opportunity to create “an incredible finale, that he completely orchestrated,” recalls McPhillips. His room was next to the nurse’s station and viewable to them like a window gallery. In a state of delusion from various medicines and the final reaches of the disease, he asked McPhillips to hand him a contract to sign for his 3 Super 8 films, McPhillips humouring the delusion, instead handed him his diagnostic chart, and told him he would photograph him signing it. Morrisroe then announced, “turn Oprah off, I don’t want her to see this,” as he signed it. But there was no television on. Moments later he was dead. “Mark’s dramatized life was exacerbated by his HIV,” wrote McPhillips in Who Turned Out the Limelight? The Tragi-Comedy of Mark Morrisroe, “Death was his biggest leading role.”

Mark Morrisroe
Curated by artist Ryan McGinley, Mark Morrisroeis on view at David Zwirner, 34 East 69th Street in New York from June 24 through August 3, 2021. https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2021/more-life/mark-morrisroe