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 mediaWNYC-FM "Artists in the City" radio broadcast transcript, March 1985 in Welch, Chuck. editor. Networking Currents: Contemporary Mail Art Subjects and Issues, Sandbar Willow Press, June 1986. pp. 68-80. to explore ideas of long-distance communication, including across time.Zuba, Elizabeth. Not Nothing. Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2014. p. 368
Early years and education Mark Bloch was born to American parents in Würzburg, West Germany, in 1956 where his father was based as a soldier of the US Army.Wohlrab, Lutz. "Mark Bloch," Mail Artists' Index May 2008. 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. Coincidentally, Bloch later referred to his mentor Ray Johnson as the "fringe of the fringe."Thaler, Lisa. Look Up, The Life and Art of Sacha Kolin. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2008. p. 164.
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, another Jungian, in the School of Art, Robert West 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.Retiring KSU President Glenn Olds mistakenly refers to Bloch's "The Sprout," a mimeographed art zine, as the "newspaper on the hill," referring to "Tentropolis...in front of Taylor Hall," where students occupied a construction site from May to July 1977. See Kobasky, Joan and Shane, Paul. "Farewell to KSU, Mr. & Mrs. Olds: reflections, aspirations" Daily Kent Stater, Volume L, Number 117, 3 June 1977. pg. 1. 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 IrreverenceDaily Kent Stater, Volume LI, Number 66, 28 February 1978. Page 3. and other avant-garde provocations.Schultz, Connie. "Presentation Reviews Unconventional Media." Daily Kent Stater, Volume LI, Number 102, 16 May 1978. p.3 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,Bloch, Mark. "Bloch Is Here" High Performance Magazine #10. 1979. Astro-Arts. Los Angeles, Ca. 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.
Bloch performed "Heart and Technology""Bloch's 'Heart and Tech' show pleases," Panmag Issue 451 (November 16, 1980), p. 7, Laguna Beach, New York. 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."Bloch, Mark. "Why Am I Sitting in the Window of the Farehheit 451 Bookstore?," Panmag Issue 451 (November 16, 1980), pp. 1,2,8, Laguna Beach, New York.
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."Secrets of the ancient 20th century gamers." , The Emily Harvey Foundation. 2010. Bloch also met Ray Johnson who had heard of Bloch's mailed performance art pieces and invited him into his New York Correspondence School.Zuba.
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.
Graphic Design 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 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. Bloch also wrote several articles for ABCNews.com and other Starwave-owned sites including features on art, music and animation.
Mail Art and Pre-Digital Networking Since 1980, Bloch has published Panmag,See reviews of Panmags 1,2,4,6,8,12,13,15,16,21,22,22 and 37 in https://merzmail.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/the_museum_of_modern_art_library.pdf 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.Mobius. "The Art of Storàge by Mark Bloch." 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.
Later, in an "Open Letter to the Network," in Art Papers magazine,Bloch, Mark "Open Letter to the Network," Art Papers: Contemporary Art in the Southeast Vol. 15 No. 3, MAIL ART ISSUE, 1991, p. 16. 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.'"
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.Röder, Kornelia "H. R. Fricker, Mail Art and Social Networks," HR Fricker: Conquer the Living Rooms of the World, Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Warth, Switzerland: Edition Fink, 2014, p. 38. 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 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."Bloch, Mark and Fricker, Hans Ruedi."Phantastische Gebete Revisited" in Panmag International Magazine 6, ISSN 0738-4777, February 1984. pg. 8.
Bloch participated in several "Tourism" mail art congresses of 1986 and attended the Neoist Festival of Plagiarism in GlasgowHome, Stewart. ASSESSING THE ART STRIKE, "Notes from a talk given at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 30 January 1993. in Yawn No. 38. page 1856. 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 instead of Congress participation.György Galántai, Julia Klaniczay. p. 394
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"Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. MIT Press, Dec 27, 2013, pg 424 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."Huth, Geof, "Art Strike." Kostelanetz, Richard, editor. Dictionary of the Avant Gardes, 2nd edition . New York: Routledge; 2001. p 34.Yawn: A Sporadic Critique of Culture. July 15, 1990 and January 20, 1992. https://psrf.detritus.net/pdf/yawn.pdf Bloch later pushed that emphasis in the Panscan area of the EchoNYC Communication teleconferencing system.Horn, Stacy. Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town. Grand Central Publishing, Jan 30, 2010. pg. 120.
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." Bloch calls the overuse of the word "Fluxus" by younger artists "misinformation" and a distortion of the historical record.
Early cyber-migration and Ray Johnson's research Since 1980, Bloch has published a zine called Panmag and tried to use it 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."Boivent, Marie and Perkins, Stephen. "Introduction," The Territories of Artists' Periodicals. Editions Provissoires & Plagiarist Press, Rennes, France and De Pere, Wisconsin. pp. 8-9.