From Miss Sara Rosen’s article and interview with Brian Paul Clamp about Mark Morrisroe for DAZED:
Morrisroe was the unofficial leader of The Boston School, a group of artists including Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tabboo!, and Gail Thacker who attended either the School of the Museum of Fine Arts or Massachusetts College of Art between 1971 and 1984. Here, he helped kindle the nascent punk scene while also acting as a catalyst in bringing autobiographical photography to the forefront of the art world.
Morrisroe was an enigmatic figure whose diaristic artwork was fueled by his notoriously radical persona. A teenage prostitute raised by an alcoholic mother, he walked with a cane and a pronounced limp due to a bullet lodged deep within his chest, a wound inflicted while in high school when he was shot by a john. The artist turned to photography to mediate his experiences of life. Working in Polaroids, he embraced the immediacy of the moment transformed into an object that could be manipulated at will. Morrisroe forsook the sanctity of the print in favour of engaging with a mixed-media approach, presciently prefiguring so much of the digital culture in which we currently live.
Browse the exhibition “Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989): Boy Next Door (Beautiful But Dumb)” at ClampArt
Browse all of Mark Morrisroe’s work at ClampArt