Mark Bloch (born 1956) is an American conceptual artist, mail artist, performance artist, visual artist, archivist and writer whose work combines visuals and text as well as performance and media [1] to explore ideas of long-distance communication, including across time. [2]
Mark Bloch was born to American parents in Würzburg, West Germany, in 1956 where his father was based as soldier of the US Army. [3] Bloch grew up in Cleveland and then Akron, Ohio. Exposure in his youth to Robert Wyatt, the Fugs, and Yoko Ono and the unexpected discovery of Frank Zappa's album Freak Out! in his junior high school library led to an interest in the fringes of art. [4] Coincidentally, Bloch later referred to his mentor Ray Johnson as the "fringe of the fringe." [5]
Bloch attended Kent State University, where he was influenced by faculty members Adrian DeWitt, a Jungian who taught in the Romance Languages department, Robert Schimmel and Robert Culley, [6] another Jungian, in the School of Art, Robert West [7] in the Telecommunications Department and finally, visiting artists Joan Jonas from New York and Takahiko Iimura from Japan, both videographers. Bloch attended Kent in the aftermath of the 1970 Kent State shootings and was present during protests of a gymnasium that was built on the site of that incident in the late 1970s. [8] Following his work with Jonas, and switching his focus from art to TV, Bloch received his B.A. degree in Broadcasting and was the creator of a "punk" performance art movement called The New Irreverence [9] and other avant-garde provocations. [10] [11] Bloch was part of the M'bwebwe group that began in Kent, Ohio in 1974.
After Kent, Bloch moved to Southern California, experimenting with performance, [12] studying with artist Rachel Rosenthal, and supporting himself as a maker of corporate communications for corporate clients from 1978 to 1982. He continued these activities in Manhattan from 1982 to 1990, moving later into print media and then web design while continuing to work in performance art and mail art. [13]
Bloch performed "Heart and Technology" [14] and "East Meats West" in Laguna Beach, California where he lived until 1981. On November 16, 1980, Bloch produced an early issue of his D.I.Y. zine, Panmag, numbered "451" in honor of the famed Fahrenheit 451 Books bookstore inviting visitors to create work which he later mailed and spending the day "in the window of the bookstore working on his postal art magazine," performing a work called "Artist for Sale," in which he made himself available to "buy or rent" for "$10,000 an hour." Bloch also typed on a typewriter in the window and gave a lecture on his "Postal Art Network" and its relationship to Laguna's status as an "art colony." [15]
After moving to New York City in 1982, he met many of the Sixties generation of avant garde artists whom he had long been studying in written form, artistic heirs to the legacy of Marcel Duchamp such as Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, Jackson MacLow, Al Hansen, Nam June Paik and others. [16] Bloch also met Ray Johnson who had heard of Bloch's mailed performance art pieces and invited him into his New York Correspondence School. [17]
In 2012, after studying Digital Marketing, Bloch received a Master of Science degree from the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York. [18]
Since 1978, Bloch has worked in various jobs related to the graphic design industry. From 1978 to 1990 he created slide shows for corporate clients in the audio-visual industry. Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, he worked at various publications including Rolling Stone and CosmoGirl and participated in early cyberspace efforts for The New York Times, and ABCNews. Bloch helped create "Themes of the Times," among the earliest New Media projects at The New York Times [19] and Bloch worked creating interactive maps and graphics for ABCNews.com at a time when it was jointly owned and operated by Paul Allen's Starwave and Internet news was still being invented. [20] Bloch also wrote several articles for ABCNews.com and other Starwave-owned sites including features on art, music and animation. [21]
Since 1980, Bloch has published Panmag, [22] [23] his mail art-related zine which documented much of the activity of the New York mail art scene in the 1980s and beyond including the visits of various mail artists to New York, his travel in Europe and opinions about the goings on in the fringes of the art world. Bloch's writings on Fluxus, performance, communication, Conceptual art, mail art and contemporary art are referred to on mail art-related blogs. [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] In 1984, Bloch published details of his mail art practice in "The P.A.N. Project" in the "Mail Art Then and Now" issue of the "Franklin Furnace Flue," edited by Dr. Ronny Cohen. [29]
Later, in an "Open Letter to the Network," Bloch offered a "critique of mail artists’ relations with the existing gallery system, attempting to distinguish 'the differences... between mail art and certified art.' While calling on mail artists to 'ask the difficult questions' and 'digress from the backslapping that is so prevalent in mail art,' Bloch's proposals are limited to an exhortation to 'pursue a more rigorous dialogue than exists right now.' Bloch asserts that 'we concentrate on content rather than appearance.'" [30]
In "Offener brief an jeden im netzwerk" (Open Letter to everyone in the Network) Bloch and visiting mail artist H. R. Fricker of Trogen, Switzerland created a six-point manifesto in English and German that highlighted the importance of person to person correspondence in the mail art network, as opposed to mail art shows, which were increasing in popularity at that time. [31] This focus on the "communicative processes arising from the exchanges between... artists" was shared by Bloch and Fricker and many of the other mail artists who entered the fray in the late 70s and early 80s.
Fricker and Bloch's bi-lingual "Phantastische Gebete Revisited," with its title referring to a famous dada tome [32] translated as "Fantastic Prayers," stated, "1) An important function of the exhibitions and other group projects in the network is: to open channels to other human beings. 2) After your exhibition is shown and the documentation sent, or after you have received such a documentation with a list of addresses, use the channels! 3) Create person-to-person correspondence... 4) You have your own unique energy which you can give to others through your work: visual audio, verbal, etc. 5) This energy is best used when it is exchanged for energy from another person with the same intentions. 6) the power of the network is in the quality of the direct correspondence, not the quantity." The manifesto concludes, "We have learned this from our own mistakes." [33]
Bloch participated in several "Tourism" mail art congresses of 1986 and attended the Neoist Festival of Plagiarism in Glasgow [34] and other events in 1989 but felt that two events of that nature were enough so he decided to "boycott the 1992 congress year" as well as the "incongruous meetings year 1998," opting, instead, for a "year of decompression" in 2004 that was eventually manifested in lieu of Congress participation. [35]
Bloch's work both parodied and penetrated avant garde circles with his writings on Neoism, Stewart Home and the Festival of Plagiarism in Issue 28 of his zine Panmag, subtitled "The Last Word" [36] in which he proposed a Word Strike which put forth the oft-repeated motto of that period, "Don’t say art unless you mean money." [37] [38] Bloch later pushed that emphasis in the Panscan area of the Echo Communication teleconferencing system. [39]
Bloch is a vehement defender in online communities of the purity of the Fluxus generation that preceded him, insisting that his contemporaries are free to be influenced by what he calls the Fluxus "movement" (as opposed to those who see it as an open-ended "spirit" or "attitude") but should not call themselves or their work "Fluxus" directly. "Mark Bloch’s views on the current situation of Fluxus in the mail art network (as well as newer generation artists who call themselves Fluxus) can and do generate heated debate." [40] Bloch calls the overuse of the word "Fluxus" by younger artists "misinformation" and a distortion of the historical record.
Since 1980, Bloch has published a zine called Panmag and tried to use it a in various ways to push back the boundaries of what art can be. Bloch "situates his practices within the new expanded field of publishing. As the editor of Panmag, he has combined both digital and traditional media in his periodical… He presents an interesting case for the… periodical to be considered as performance art," said scholars Marie Boivent and Stephen Perkins, citing "his expansion of the traditionally static nature of the periodical into a new role as an active physical agent." [41]
Bloch is recognized as being one of a handful of early converts from mail art to online communities. [42] In 1989, Bloch began his experimental foray into the digital space when he founded Panscan, part of the Echo NYC text-based teleconferencing system, the first online art discussion group in New York City. [43] Panscan lasted from 1990 to 1995. [44]
Following the death of Ray Johnson in 1995, Bloch left Echo and began a twenty-year research project on Communication art and Johnson [45] and wrote several texts on him that were among the earliest to appear online and were cited elsewhere in other media. [46] Bloch and writer/editor Elizabeth Zuba brought together "their distinct visual and literary perspectives to explore Ray Johnson’s innovative interpretations of 'the book'" at the Printed Matter New York Book Fair in 2014. [47] Bloch has since acted as a resource [48] for new generations of Johnson and Fluxus followers on fact-finding missions. [49]
It was Ray Johnson who introduced Bloch to Robert Delford Brown and his wife Rhett Cone Brown by bringing him in the 1980s to their home "that Mr. Brown called 'The Great Building Crack-Up'" in Greenwich Village which eventually led to Bloch becoming Brown's biographer, writing Robert Delford Brown: Meat, Maps, and Militant Metaphysics," published by the Cameron Art Museum in 2007. [50]
In 1984, Johnson stated in a radio interview, "Ray Johnson is playing the role of Ray Johnson. But there was another possibility, which is that the role of Ray Johnson might have been played by Mark Bloch... Mark Bloch, whose introduction to me consists of some letters in which he wrote to me to tell me that he had been impersonating me on the West Coast, which I found rather intriguing. And I wrote back immediately to tell him that if he was impersonating me, that I would impersonate him and so we began this correspondence; we finally did meet." [51]
Bloch corresponded with Johnson from 1982 until the latter's suicide in 1995. Bloch has written extensively about Johnson and other art for The Brooklyn Rail, Paper Magazine, New Observations, [52] Whitehot Magazine, The New Art Examiner and others.
Mark Bloch works in a variety of media and calls himself a "pan-media" artist.
Bloch's one man show "Secrets of the Ancient 20th Century Gamers" was presented at Emily Harvey Foundation in NYC March 18 through April 2, 2010 [53] and received favorable reviews. [54] It featured paintings, collage works, assemblage, issues of his zine "Panmag" and other works. [55]
In 2014, Bloch curated a New York City arts festival celebrating the centenary of cult hero artist-collector Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, [56] at various venues around Manhattan including the Museum of Modern Art Library, Richard L. Feigen & Co., Lynch Tham, and the Whitebox Art Center on the Lower East Side where a 55 foot long wall covered with artworks from the mail art network and local artists and a 14 by 14 foot drawing of Cavellini by Bloch was revealed during a three hour-plus opening marathon of performances, spoken word and music. [57]
In 2016, Bloch and the granddaughter of Dada founder Marcel Janco, the Israeli art journaler and art therapist, Michaela Mende Janco, created "Dadawatch," a one-year communications project to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Dada and inviting public online participation. [58]
On February 22, 2019, Emily Harvey Foundation presented the world premiere of "Not Jean Brown" by Bloch and the artists Rimma & Valeriy Gerlovin, a 16-minute short film about the Massachusetts art collector, Jean Brown (1916-1994), some 35 years after it was originally begun in 1985. [59] The video covers highlights of Brown's vast archives, now at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. [60] Bloch edited the film and created the soundtrack that featured "Sink Sound (for Jean Brown)," a "music of contingency" contributed by composer by John Cage. [61]
Bloch exhibited several issues of his Panmag zine and some artistbook works at Paris Koh Gallery in Fort Lee, NJ in 2024. Critic Robert C. Morgan called it "fascinating work that rethinks how communication is done in the digital era" and cited the ability of Bloch's "The Museum of Good Ideas III (2014)" to "transcend its material constraints." [62] [63]
Bloch curated an exhibition called “Panmodern!” at the Bobst Library of New York University featuring papers and archives of his Postal Art Network (P.A.N.) activities that utilized the international postal system as a distribution system. The exhibition will open September 17, 2024 by Fales Library's "Downtown Collection," founded in 1994, which documents the downtown Manhattan arts scene that evolved in SoHo and the Lower East Side during the 1970s and through the early 1990s. [64] The “Panmodern!” exhibition was previously scheduled to run from March 26 to June 30, 2020 but it was postponed [65] by NYU due to the Covid-19 virus.
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines and for generating new art forms. These art forms include intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins; conceptual art, first developed by Henry Flynt, an artist contentiously associated with Fluxus; and video art, first pioneered by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell. Dutch gallerist and art critic Harry Ruhé describes Fluxus as "the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties".
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane mass-produced objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material.
Ruud Janssen is a Dutch Fluxus and mail artist currently living in Breda in the Netherlands.
Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service. It developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School and the Fluxus movements of the 1960s. It has since developed into a global, ongoing movement.
Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as "New York's most famous unknown artist". Johnson also staged and participated in early performance art events as the founder of a far-ranging mail art network – the New York Correspondence School – which picked up momentum in the 1960s and is still active today. He is occasionally associated with members of the Fluxus movement but was never a member. He lived in New York City from 1949 to 1968, when he moved to a small town in Long Island and remained there until his suicide.
Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement. Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an early pioneer of electronic correspondence. Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable audio contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s.
The M'bwebwe painters and poets originally met while attending Kent State University in the U.S. state of Ohio in the mid-1970s. They include painters David Wayne Cole, Thomas David Little (1955–2006), and James F. Quinlan, sculptor Christopher Cosma, computer artist Jeff Brice, and multi-media artists Peter Brill and Mark Bloch. The group soon grew to include others including Douglas Ferguson, Sylvia Sherry, Susan Cole, Lauren Silver, Nan Truitt and John Fletcher.
Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, also known as GAC, was an Italian artist and art collector. After his initial activity as a painter, in the 1940s and 1950s, he became one of the major collectors of contemporary Italian abstract art, developing a deep relationship of patronage and friendship with the artists. This experience has its pinnacle in the exhibition Modern painters of the Cavellini collection at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 1957. In the 1960s Cavellini resumed his activity as an artist, with an ample production spanning from Neo-Dada to performance art to mail art, of which he became one of the prime exponents with the Exhibitions at Home and the Round Trip works. In 1971 he invented autostoricizzazione (self-historicization), upon which he acted to create a deliberate popular history surrounding his existence. He also authored the books Abstract Art (1959), Man painter (1960), Diary of Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (1975), Encounters/Clashes in the Jungle of Art (1977) and Life of a Genius (1989).
Water Yam is an artist's book by the American artist George Brecht. Originally published in Germany, June 1963 in a box designed by George Maciunas and typeset by Tomas Schmit, it has been re-published in various countries several times since. It is now considered one of the most influential artworks released by Fluxus, the internationalist avant-garde art movement active predominantly in the 1960s and '70s. The box, sometimes referred to as a Fluxbox or Fluxkit, contains a large number of small printed cards, containing instructions known as event-scores, or fluxscores. Typically open-ended, these scores, whether performed in public, private or left to the imagination, leave a lot of space for chance and indeterminancy, forcing a large degree of interpretation upon the performers and audience.
In some cases [event-scores] would arise out of the creation of the object, while in others the object was discovered and Brecht subsequently wrote a score for it, thus highlighting the relationship between language and perception. Or, in the words of the artist, "ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed." The event-score was as much a critique of conventional artistic representation as it was a gesture of firm resistance against individual alienation.
Artpool Art Research Center is an archive, research space, specialist and media library in Budapest, Hungary, dedicated to international contemporary and avant-garde arts, such as Artist's books, artistamp, mail art, visual poetry, sound poetry, conceptual art, fluxus, installation, performance.
John Held Jr. , is an American mailartist, author and performance artist who has been an active participant in alternative art since 1975, particularly in the fields of rubber stamp art, zine culture, and artistamps. He is one of the most prominent and respected promoters and chroniclers of mail art.
Originale, musical theatre with Kontakte, is a music theatre work by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in collaboration with the artist Mary Bauermeister. It was first performed in 1961 in Cologne, and is given the work number 12⅔ in Stockhausen's catalogue of works.
Anna Banana is a Canadian artist known for her performance art, writing, and work as a small press publisher. She has been described as an "entrepreneur and critic", and pioneered the artistamp, a postage-stamp-sized medium. She has been prominent in the mail art movement since the early 1970s, acting as a bridge between the movement's early history and its second generation. As a publisher, Banana launched Vile magazine and the "Banana Rag" newsletter; the latter became Artistamp News in 1996.
PostHype was a mail art zine founded by John P. Jacob in 1981. The first issue was created, using pressed Letraset on paper, as a birthday gift to the artist Steven Durland, and modeled on Durland's satirical mini-magazine Tacit. Each of the first four post-card sized issues of PostHype was printed using an original rubber stamp by Jacob, hand carved from photographs made using the photo-booth machine at the Times Square arcade known as Playland, which recorded the visits of other mail artists to New York City. Later issues expanded to document various mail art projects organized by Jacob.
Davi Det Hompson (1939–1996), also known as David E. Thompson, born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and raised in Warren, Ohio, was a Fluxus book artist, concrete poet, creator of mail art, sculptor and painter living and working in Richmond, Virginia. Hompson's chosen professional name was a nom d'art for David E. Thompson and a transposition of the letters of his name.
Ginny Lloyd is an American artist, noted for her work with mail art, photocopy art, performance art and photography. She organized the Copy Art Exhibition in San Francisco in 1980 with programming devoted to promoting xerography. Her work was included in the exhibition, From Bonnard to Baselitz: A Decade of Acquisitions by the Prints Collection 1978–1988 and listed annually since 1992 in Benezit Dictionary of Artists.
Larry Miller is an American artist, most strongly linked to the Fluxus movement after 1969. He is "an intermedia artist whose work questions the borders between artistic, scientific and theological disciplines. He was in the vanguard of using DNA and genetic technologies as new art media." Electronic Arts Intermix, a pioneering international resource for video and new media art has said, "Miller has produced a diverse body of experimental art works as a key figure in the emergent installation and performance movements in New York in the 1970s... His installations and performances have integrated diverse mediums [sic] and materials."
Chuck Welch, also known as the CrackerJack Kid or Jack Kid, was born in Kearney, Nebraska in 1948. He wrote "Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology", with a foreword by Ken Friedman, which was published and edited by University of Calgary Press in 1995. The Eternal Network and the Crackerjack Kid were mentioned in a review of mail art titled "Pushing the Envelope" in 2001, and the archivist and curator Judith Hoffberg wrote about him in her publication Umbrella. His awards include a Fulbright Grant and NEA Hilda Maehling Fellowship.
Joel S. Cohen is an American graphic artist and cofounder, along with Diane E. Milder, of Ragged Edge Press, an independent offset printing company in New York City. Principally recognized for his creative mail art projects and artistic collaborations with Thomas Kerr and Kurt Vonnegut, Cohen has been creating, printing, and distributing progressive political art since the early 1970s.
Russell Butler, best known by the pseudonym buZ blurr, was an American artist and photographer primarily known for his contributions to the modern mail art network and for the boxcar art he produced under the monikers Gypsy Sphinx and Colossus of Roads.