Dear friends, Just finished a new item for our Mail-Art Encyclopaedia project. The item is about Mark Bloch, a Mail-artists who was active till the beginning of the nineties and who was a pioneer in Mail-Art online. Recently he showed up at the Dada meeting in New York. The item is also now online at our website: www.sztuka-fabryka.be
Bloch, Mark (U.S.A.): Mark Bloch (23 January 1956) - Mail-artist, zine editor, performer, computer pioneer - used 'PAN' (Postal Art Network) as pseudonym for his networking activities. Bloch calls himself part of the "Third Generation" of Mail-artists, who came in around 1977-'78 such as Lon Spiegelman (U.S.A.), Vittore Baroni (Italy), Cracker Jack Kid (U.S.A.) and hundreds of others. Beginning in 1980, Bloch edited the Mail-Art zine Panmag and through Carlo Pittore (U.S.A.) he met Ray Johnson (U.S.A.) and became a chronicler and archivist of information on Johnson. As a Mail-artist, Bloch questioned the wisdom of those interested in helping Mail-Art find its way to cultural institutions or the commercial art world. But at the same time he was against Mail-Art "rules" to be carved in stone. Bloch was one of the first Mail-Artists who moved his postal activities towards the electronic networks of BBS-boards at first and later the internet, under the name of Panscan. Bloch took his first steps in Mail-Art as early as 1968. As a twelve year old child, Bloch was interested in the uniqueness of a kid in his sixth grade class and he immortalised him with an artistamp. The artistamp was drawn on an envelope in the upper right hand corner. It was a gift for his mother who saved it all those years for him. Around 1976-1977 Bloch bought some used rubberstamps from a little shop in Kent Ohio where he was in college. He was told the stamps had once belonged to the members of the then local band 'Devo', who were involved in the fringe art movements of the day. Bloch used the stamps to embellish postcards on which he also watercoloured and drew, without knowing what Mail-Art was. After Bloch graduated and moved to California in 1978, he saw a mention in a newspaper about a rubberstamp exhibition by Stephen Vincent Benes (U.S.A.) in Santa Monica, California. At this exhibition he heard about the Rubber Stamp Album in which he found an article about Mail-Art. He realised that he was not the only one doing it. In the same publication he also found the address of Ed Higgins (U.S.A.), to whom he mailed some Mail-Art, and also saw some of the work of Ray Johnson. He realised that the Mail-Art network would allow him to collaborate with people he found interesting. Bloch tried to meet them if they were local, and was very impressed with the spirit of Dada that engulfed the various events Bloch attended. Bloch called his activities 'PAN' which stood for "Postal Art Network", eventually he shortened it to "Post Art Network" to reflect his belief that after Mail-Art and other developments of the sixties, art was no longer necessary, so we are living in a "Post Art era". He began to dress himself up like Pan, the Greek God of fields, forests and flocks and did performances as Pan in the U.S.A. and later in two trips to Europe in 1986 and 1989. In late 1978 Bloch contacted his friend Kim Kristensen (U.S.A.) in Ohio, where he used to live, and asked him if he wanted to be "PAN Midwest", he agreed. Michael Heaton (U.S.A.) another contact who moved to New York, became 'PAN East'. Bloch who was living in Laguna Beach (California), became 'PAN West'. At that time Bloch was not aware of Fluxus, which also was geographically notated in this way at one time. However within a year, Bloch was in touch with people all over the world, including some of the Fluxus people as well as Shozo Shimamoto (Japan) and Ryosuke Cohen (Japan) who sent some of their first Mail-Art to him. Bloch also became inspired by the 'Inter-Dada '80' festival where he met some Mail-artists in person such as G.A. Cavellini (Italy), Buster Cleveland (U.S.A.), Ed Higgins, Bill Gaglione (U.S.A.) and others. Meeting the Mail-artists in person helped him to understand the network. In 1982 Bloch moved from Los Angeles to New York, around the same period others ceased to use 'PAN'. He saw a poster that said the G.A. Cavellini was going to be in New York. He phoned Buster Cleveland and arranged the possibility to perform. At this meeting and others to follow, he was able to meet lots of correspondents he was in contact with from California such as Carlo Pittore (U.S.A.), who introduced him to John Evans (U.S.A.), John Jacob (U.S.A.), Ray Johnson, Steve Random (U.S.A.), Jean Brown (U.S.A.), Zona (Bernard Banville) (U.S.A.) and many other Mail-Artists. From this period on he started to correspondence with Johnson. During the early 1980s many foreigners came to visit including Arno Arts (the Netherlands), Jürgen Olbrich (Germany), H.R. Fricker (Switzerland), Henryk Gajewsky (Poland), Sonja Van Der Burg (the Netherlands) and Günther Ruch (Switzerland). Carlo Pittore and others hosted performances, parties and events for each of them. Bloch valued these collaborative meetings a great deal and continues to feel that personal contact in the network is very important. It was also an important time in the network when things heated up to a boil. Bloch did not always agree with the statement Lon Spiegelman made "Mail-Art and money don't mix" arguing "Mail-Art and guilt don't mix". Bloch also questioned whether the artists with most resources and money made the best Mail-Art. He also reacted on the "unwritten rules" of Mail-Art from Spiegelman. However, there was a time when he supported them. This came to a climax when he accused Dr. Ronnie Cohen (U.S..A.) of not following the rules in the 'Franklin Furnace' Mail-Art show, which she promised to do. "A careful reading of the talks' transcripts reveal in retrospect that it was the costumed and irreverent Bloch that pushed Dr. Cohen (and the previous week, critic Robert Morgan) over the edge. Cohen abruptly took her leave from the "Mail-Art melee," (as it was described in the Village Voice) which exploded into chaos. Bloch still sees Cohen as guilty of violating the "unwritten rules of Mail-Art" which she volunteered to follow but now questions those rules himself and regrets the divisive direction his actions took. He believes they hurt the Mail-Art network at a critical (pun intended) juncture. "I'm sick of the mail-art-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-school," he once told Ray Johnson in reference to another incident. "You didn't learn that in my School," Johnson appropriately replied. Johnson also told Bloch that it was Marcia Tucker of the Whitney Museum who created the rules of mail art when she hosted the first mail art show there at the Whitney via Johnson." Ochone, I. (n.d.). The Performance Works of Mark Bloch [WWW page]. URL http://www.panmodern.com/mbloch_performance.html Before Bloch came in contact with the Mail-Art network, he was into zine making and has been always interested in self publishing. Around 1970 he made one of a kind zines with names like Anthill that were inspired by Mad magazine. Later he made zines with his friends in college including one they did on a mimeograph machine. When 'Devo' played once behind the art dorm Bloch lived in, three people showed up and he reported it in his zine called The Sprout, which may have been the first ever review of the band in print. The Sprout was a political and arty zine at a time when the 'Kent State University' campus was embroiled in a controversy that had evolved from the 'war in Vietnam'-protests of May 4th, 1970 resulting in the tragic killing of four students. When he came in contact with Mail-Art Bloch, published Panmag which he began in 1980 in Southern California, to describe his activities and to continue a flyer-as-art trend he began with Bloch is Here, a guerilla performance piece. Bloch has been making performance, movies and videotapes since 1977, many of them are related to Mail-Art. They are now encapsulated in his weekly New York cable TV show Panscan TV. This show is for several years (beginning in the late nineties), every week on the Manhattan Cable Network. Bloch studied TV in college (1974-1978) and later videoart, teached by Joan Jonas (U.S.A.) and Taka Iimura (Japan) as artists-in-residence at 'Kent State University' in Ohio. On his TV show he does interviews with artists, he walks around New York with his camera shooting and talking, from commercial TV he records images and change them, etc. It is an experiment with the medium of television, creating TV as art. He uses the TV to document computer art also, by taking stuff from his computer and putting it directly on TV. He plays videotapes that other people send or give him, such as the interviews Peter Küstermann (Germany) made with himself, Jacques Massa (France), Lon Spiegelman and many others. Mail-Art and Mail-Art events have often been showed and there is an ongoing Ray Johnson tape that Bloch shows every time he add something to it. It was also his teacher and performance artist Jonas, who inspired and performed with Bloch in his first performance piece on videotape. His performance art starting in 1977 was inspired by Jonas and later the do-it-yourself attitude of artists Brian Eno (U.S.A.), Robert Wyatt (U.S.A.) and 'Devo'. "Despite the formal concerns being espoused by his teacher Jonas, Bloch's first performance was captured on a Sony black and white reel to reel videotape machine in the form of a Johnny Carson-inspired 'art talk show' called The Cryptic Pyramid Show that featured Jonas, herself, a hired magician and various show biz influenced stunts by Bloch that included, among other things, a vow to quit smoking and a subsequent 'last smoke' that was 'brought to you by the League of Women Smokers.'" Ochone, I. (n.d.). The Performance Works of Mark Bloch [WWW page]. URL http://www.panmodern.com/mbloch_performance.html His earlier performances were large events with some interaction with audience and with a multi-media flavour, such as an event with dancers moving through the audience, jazz guitarists playing a duet accompanied by projected laser beams, and a 'Koto' ensemble. In 1978 he made a performance with a local multi-media artist William Hermann (U.S.A.), drinking coffee and eating toast at several public places in town became, this piece was called Breakfast Around Town and was documented on audio and video tape and photographed. This performance was the start of some more performances outside art spaces. Later when he became active in Mail-Art he began to describe in letters his daily activities as performances, which he called "AE" or "Actual Events". And also began largely undocumented but important series of "mailings as action" in which he speedily and frenetically would prepare mass mailings and then travel to the post office to disperse them, collaborating with the US Postal Service as the distributor of his work. The preparation of the works as well as the interactions with postal employees and even the subsequent "out of control" reception of the works by the addressees were part of the work. Eventually this philosophy led to an oft-copied rubber stamp that Bloch sent around the world "The Address is the Art" meaning that the long distance interaction with the unseen recipient and all that led to it was the essence of the work. It was like the mano a mano transference of a flyer in Bloch Is Here but disembodied, and assisted by the various institutions that comprise the international postal system. Yet another manifestation of Bloch's Mail-Art work in performance, was in the form of partially or fully staged theatrical pieces that had some overlap with correspondence or "correspondance" (as Ray Johnson called the process). East Meats West was an elaborate "meating" between Bloch and two corespondents known as Reva and Maia in Laguna Beach (California) that caused a local scandal then led to a long friendship between the participants. Cat and Mouse was a partially realized cat and mouse game in the streets of Los Angeles between Bloch and a correspondent called the 'LA Obscurist Club' that involved maps, large props, found objects and mailed clues. Bloch have continued with his performances throughout the eighties and the nineties beside his Mail-Art activities where he made performances as 'Pan the goat God' or as the 'Panman', a God which is half man and half animal. These performances he has made for over ten years. He also continued with many other performances with inter-media, postal experiments, sound poetry, musical experiments, as well as Mail-Art related, including performances in Europe. Bloch's performance work and other art activities imploded into a decade-long period of self-reflection from 1990 to 2001, called the "Word Strike", in this period Bloch ceased producing artwork publicly as a reaction to what he saw as "art world insanity." He took credit for the collapse of prices in the art markets, citing his Word Strike as the cause. He finally called the strike off after ten years when the learned members of the art community came together in an altruistic gathering of humanistic support for the ailing art dealer Pat Hearn (U.S.A.). He felt that signalled a sea change for the cold art market. Hearn died of liver cancer on August 18th, 2000, at the age of forty five. During his "Art Strike", Bloch secretly completed hundreds, if not thousands, of projects. These were unleashed when he came out of his spiritually necessitated isolation in 2002. Bloch, who was a pioneer of the use of computers in Mail-Art, made his first work of computer art in 1977 around the same time he started with rubberstamps. It was a collage with a portrait made by a computer done in a shopping mall, made in a time before he ever heard of Mail-Art. Later his interest in computers came together with Mail-Art in the early 1980's. In Panmag number one, (which followed Panmags 451 and 391) he made a sticker that announced that the next logical step for Mail-Art was computers. It was around 1987 when he had his first computer. By 1990 he started Panscan on the billboard system "Echo Teleconferencing BBS", an early text based stage of the internet. Panscan was intended to be a link between Mail-Art and the network of computers, only not many Mail-artists had computers. Therefore Panscan went into another direction away from Mail-Art, such as: a collaborative poem, discussions about the "Art Strike" and "Word Strike", talking about Marcel Duchamp (U.S.A.) and Dada, as well as Mail-Art. In 1995 he created a web tribute and biography about Ray Johnson which is still online. Bloch believes that it was the earliest such information about Ray on the World Wide Web and also the longest lasting. "I prefer ASCII, very low tech computer communications. Why? Because then we have to rely on the written word. That requires a person goes into their INTERNAL network of experiences and feelings and thoughts and COMMUNICATE through the written word. I like that. . I have never believed that being an artist meant being a visual artist. Though I also see opportunities for visual artists in computers." Janssen, R. (1995). [Interview with Mark Bloch]. TAM Mail-Interview Project [WWW page]. URL http://www.iuoma.org/ Bloch had and still has one long running project which is called 'The Last Mail-Art Show', which he started around 1983. He solicited texts and statements about Mail-Art, as he thought it would be interesting to document what people thought about Mail-Art. At that time it was not common to do so, from the eighties on Mail-artists started to publish their Mail-Art texts. Also he interviewed people about Mail-Art as early as 1986. These interviews have not yet found their way to the public but they are stored in his archive. The 'Last Mail-Art Show' was supposed to take the form of a project that showed what was Mail-Art all about in words and in pictures with self references and self reflection. Bloch actually never finished the project and the results have never been published. In fact he see the storage of the show as an art form: storage just like collage, decollage, frottage, and assemblage. He ironically says he has created an art form of his tendency to save things for twenty years before even beginning to consider showing them to the world. Bloch never saw "important" art, including Mail-Art, as something that would wither away if it were not enjoyed within a week or even a year or two. "Important" art is art that sticks around for a long time. He felt like the best art was art that could have longevity. That could live on for centuries. The best art lasts and so he did spent his adult life thus far creating his vision for the 'Last Mail-Art Show' and someday, when it is ready, he hopes he will have a chance to publish it or share it in some way. The 'Last Mail-Art Show' have been showed several times in many different ways such as in Carlo Pittore's 'Galleria Del'Occhio ', in the East Village of New York in the mid eighties. it was also brought along to meetings, showed to people in their home and parts were carried to institutions like the United States Post Office and the New York Council on the Arts. He also photographed huge portions of it on thirty five millimetre slides and made many videos about it. He has a lot of video documentation of the show including a beautiful soundtrack audio collage made with interviews he did and tapes he received in the mail. Another project Bloch did was in 1996, the 'United Nations One World Mail-Art Show', a project created in honour of the United Nations fiftieth birthday. Bloch hoped they would help him to create a catalogue, but due to bureaucracy Bloch had to do the show on his own and a catalogue was not send out. However, the entire show has been on the world wide web virtually since it was taken down in its physical form. Bloch's strongest years of Mail-Art were from 1978 till 1990. He thinks that he gave as a Mail-artist the impression that he did not care about Mail-Art. As he did not participate in many projects and did not write articles for some books which turned out to be important sources. In the beginning of the nineties Bloch went on "Art Strike" (1990 - 2000) and on "Word Strike" (1991 - 1995), since then he answers his mail rarely. By the end of the nineties Mark Bloch was not participating in the Mail-Art network any more, besides staying in contact with old time friends. In stead of networking he is working on a biography of Ray Johnson, by interviewing people who knew him. It is a serious book and a huge undertaking for which he writes a lot as he tries to find a publisher. Some of the mail he receives goes to the 'Kent State University Special Collections Library' where he went to college in Ohio. Postcards, artistamps and personal correspondence he keeps in his own archive. From his own Mail-Art he has kept photocopies of almost everything he hand made and has sent out. Since the late eighties, he keeps a personal electronic archive of letters he wrote on his computer and every electronic message he received. Beside the "Art Strike", Bloch also was in other ways active in 'Neoism', he parodied the magazine Smile in one of his Panmags as C-NILE which sounds in English like the word "senile". He used the Neoist concept against itself by creating Pan-Neoism and by creating a new Open Pop Star called 'Martial Panterel'. Since then he have written a novel with 'Panterel' as the protagonist. He always wanted to make a follow up copy D-NILE but he never did. He wrote his last official Panmag before the "Word Strike" about the 'Plagiarist Festival' in Glasgow Scotland. It is called the Last Word and in it he continues his fight against fascism and the hijacking of 'Neoism' by exposing Stewart Home (England) and Istvan Kantor (U.S.A.) who are both associated a little too much with certain aspects of 'Neoism'. Bloch believes in a 'Neoism' that is not about any one person, without that quality, there is no need for 'Neoism', as Mark Bloch says "I think the best Neoist is Florian Kramer who also attended the Glasgow Plagiarist Festival. The reason you probably don't know much about him is because he is the true Neoist. He does the 6 x 9 Squares Website." Related Topics: [01] Zine [02] Computer [03] Pseudonym [04] Generation [05] Spiegelman, Lon [06] Baroni, Vittore [07] Cracker Jack Kid [08] Pittore, Carlo [09] Johnson, Ray [10] Internet [11] Artistamp [12] Rubberstamp [13] Postcard [14] Newspaper [15] Higgins, Ed [16] Network [17] Performance [18] Kristensen, Kim [19] Heaton, Michael [20] Fluxus [21] Shimamoto, Shozo [22] Cohen, Ryosuke [23] Inter-Dada '80 [24] Festival [25] Cavellini, Guglielmo Achille [26] Cleveland, Buster [27] Gaglione, Bill [28] Pittore, Carlo [29] Evans, John [30] Jacob, John [31] Random, Steve [32] Brown, Jean [33] Zona [34] Banville, Bernard [35] Arno Arts [36] Olbrich, Jürgen [37] Fricker, Hans Reudi [38] Gajewsky, Henryk [39] Van Der Burg, Sonja [40] Ruch, Günther [41] Money [42] Rule [43] Cohen, Dr. Ronnie [44] Franklin Furnace [45] Video [46] Television [47] Küstermann, Peter [48] Massa, Jacques [49] Wyatt, Robert [50] Multi-media [51] Address [52] Philosophy [53] Correspondance [54] Word Strike [55] Billboard system [56] Internet [57] Art strike [58] Duchamp, Marcel [60] Dada [61] World wide web [62] Text [63] Collage [64] Decollage [65] Frottage [66] Assemblage [67] Photography [68] United Nations [69] Neoism [70] Parody [71] Smile [72] Multiple name [73] Plagiarism [74] Home, Stewart [75] Kantor, Istvan [76] Kramer, Florian References: [01] (M. Bloch, The Shocking Truth About Neoism, e-mail, January, 2005) [02] (M. Bloch, Lon Spiegelman, e-mail, December, 2005) [03] (M. Bloch, personal interview, September, 2004) [04] Held, John Jr. (1995). Key to the Collection: Correspondence, 1976-1995 [WWW page]. URL http://www.geocities.com/johnheldjr/ [05] Janssen, R. (1995). [Interview with Mark Bloch]. TAM Mail-Interview Project [WWW page]. URL http://www.iuoma.org/ [06] Ochone, I. (n.d.). The Performance Works of Mark Bloch [WWW page]. URL http://www.panmodern.com/mbloch_performance.html Date last update: 27 Augustus 2006 Greetings, Sztuka Fabryka www.sztuka-fabryka.be Sztuka Fabryka online: MySpace: www.myspace.com/sztuka_fabryka Fotolog: www.fotolog.com/sztuka_fabryka flickR: www.flickr.com/photos/sztuka_fabryka/ Mail-Art mailinglist: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ma-network/ Address of correspondence: Sztuka Fabryka - c/o De Decker Geert - Kerkstraat 290 - 9140 Tielrode - Belgium [address of residence] available only in case of visits. Tel. & Fax (24 hours a day): ++32 (0)3-770 84 64 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [address of residence, only available in case of visit] This e-mail is intended exclusively for its addressees and may contain information that is either confidential or protected by professional privilege, any publication or forwarding this message to a third person without permission is prohibited. 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