“Mark Morrisroe was an outlaw on every front - sexually, socially, and artistically. He was marked by his dramatic and violent adolescence as a teenage prostitute with a deep distrust and a fierce sense of his uniqueness. I met him in Art School in 1977; he left shit in my mailbox as a gesture of friendship. Limping wildly down the halls in his torn t-shirts, calling himself Mark Dirt, he was Boston’s first punk. He developed into a photographer with a completely distinctive artistic vision and signature. Both his pictures of his lovers, close friends, and objects of desire, and his touching still-lifes of rooms, dead flowers, and dream images stand as timeless fragments of his life, resonating with sexual longing, loneliness, and loss.”
The perennially fierce Nan Goldin reminiscing about her friend and peer, doomed queer performance artist, photographer, troublemaker and punk provocateur Mark Morrisroe (10 January 1959 – 24 July 1989) who was born 66 years ago today. I first read about Morrisroe’s vivid, wrenching art and brief, turbulent life via Dennis Cooper's blog years ago. Pictured: “Mark Dirt as a Blond, NYC 1982” by Nan Goldin.