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Morrisroe: Erasures
About the Book (by Jameson Fitzpatrick, February 2014):
Performance artist and photographer Mark Morrisroe died of AIDS-related illness on July 24, 1989. Almost six months later, just after the start of the new decade, I was born.
Twenty-one years later, in 2011, I was first introduced to his work through the exhibition Mark Morrisroe: From This Moment On at Artists Space, New York, curated by Richard Birkett, Stefan Kalmár, and Beatrix Ruf. The last page of the exhibition’s companion book was a reproduction of an untitled and undated text piece, from which these erasures have all been drawn.
The original work is an explicit, celebratory account of a casual sexual encounter, written in the second person and accompanied by a tag that suggests the intended context (“to be printed on a mirror”). I was immediately struck by how the scene Morrisroe describes (riddled with typographical errors, perhaps hurriedly) perfectly encapsulates the ecstasy, anxiety, and ephemerality of a particular moment of queer desire. His words then became a template for me—the media with which to make similar inquiries of my own.
This series is also meant to pay homage to Morrisroe, who died at age 30 with 2,000 works to his name. As a young queer poet writing today, I am deeply indebted to his articulations of queer life in the ’70s and ’80s, as well as of the terrible, eternal beauty of the male form.
Performance artist and photographer Mark Morrisroe died of AIDS-related illness on July 24, 1989. Almost six months later, just after the start of the new decade, I was born.
Twenty-one years later, in 2011, I was first introduced to his work through the exhibition Mark Morrisroe: From This Moment On at Artists Space, New York, curated by Richard Birkett, Stefan Kalmár, and Beatrix Ruf. The last page of the exhibition’s companion book was a reproduction of an untitled and undated text piece, from which these erasures have all been drawn.
The original work is an explicit, celebratory account of a casual sexual encounter, written in the second person and accompanied by a tag that suggests the intended context (“to be printed on a mirror”). I was immediately struck by how the scene Morrisroe describes (riddled with typographical errors, perhaps hurriedly) perfectly encapsulates the ecstasy, anxiety, and ephemerality of a particular moment of queer desire. His words then became a template for me—the media with which to make similar inquiries of my own.
This series is also meant to pay homage to Morrisroe, who died at age 30 with 2,000 works to his name. As a young queer poet writing today, I am deeply indebted to his articulations of queer life in the ’70s and ’80s, as well as of the terrible, eternal beauty of the male form.
- GenresPoetry
60 pages, Paperback
First published February 3, 2014
About the author
Jameson Fitzpatrick
8 books11 followersJameson Fitzpatrick holds a BA and an MFA from New York University, where she now teaches in the Expository Writing Program. Her poems have appeared in The American Reader, The Awl, The Literary Review, and Poetry, among elsewhere; she is also the author of a chapbook, Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus/LUMA Publications), which comprises 24 erasures of a single text by the artist Mark Morrisroe.
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