“Panmodern!” An Exhibition of the Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive To Open March 26 to June 30, 2020 at New York University's Bobst Library

Posted:
December 1, 2019

“Panmodern!”

The Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive
Fales Library- Downtown Collection
New York University

Exhibition on view March 26 to June 30, 2020

Hours: Monday through Friday, 10am to 5pm
Location: Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South, Floor 2
New York City

For More information contact Mark Bloch, panman<a>panmodern.com

NEW YORK CITY—From March 26 to June 30, 2020, three new galleries on the second floor of the Bobst Library of NYU will be the site of an exhibition called “Panmodern!” featuring the papers and archives of Mark Bloch and his Postal Art Network (P.A.N.) that utilized the international postal system as a distribition system for social media prior to the prevalence of personal computers.

The show will feature a selection of works by artists from some 30 countries and all 50 states, as well as contributions from a few art world superstars who overlapped with the “no superstars, please” world of mail art over the years including Ray Johnson, the founder of Correspondence Art in the 1950s, Christo, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Fluxus artists Alison Knowles, Larry Miller, Geoff Hendricks, Yoko Ono, and Jonas Mekas, as well as Robert Delford Brown, Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (1914-2014), Anna Banana, Buster Cleveland, General Idea, the Image Bank and others.

The show will be accompanied by several live events at NYU including panel discussions exploring topics such as the economics of mail art (gift economy vs. the art market), early computer networking in the 1980s and a screening of several mail art-related films and videos, some to be seen for the first time.

This exhibition will provide a provocative overview of the international mail art network which has thrived “below the radar” of the traditional art world and the general public with its own rules and aesthetics since the mid-1950s and which continues today in the era of social media. The mail art “scene” has been cited as an important precursor to social media prior to the ubiquity of Internet-based communications.

Thousands of artworks

The exhibition will highlight the Postal Art Network collection, which contains thousands of examples of original international “mail art” sent to and archived by Mark Bloch in New York City in the form of objects, envelopes, artwork, and enclosures as well as publications, postcards, announcements and media documenting avant garde cultural activities in various media during the years 1977 to 2020.

A link to more information about mail art by Mark Bloch appears here.

Some topics to be covered

The show itself will explore the decentralized, non-hierarchical and often misunderstood or mischaracterized nature of mail art, also known as “correspondence art” and “postal art.” The exhibition will be broken down into smaller categories that will tackle the following topics via objects sent to Bloch's Postal Art Network (also known as P.A.N.): how Bloch discovered mail art; the basics of the medium/movement/activity; mail art as a distribution system; the meeting of new correspondents in various performance rituals; travel in Europe meeting mail artists, visiting archives; Bloch’s zine Panmag; the rules of a game without rules; experimentation; visual poetry, Beat poetry, kitsch and cuteness, politics, anonymity, pseudonyms, artist books, zines, DIY culture, cassette culture, music, sound art, video, slides and super 8 film; sub-genres such as Tourism, artistamps, rubberstamps, performance, Neoism, multiple names, the Art Strike, self-publishing, Factsheet Five, book fairs, art fairs, sci-fi, visual poetry, and early cyber-activity; the Whole Earth Catalog, early computers, cyberpunk; the international, geographic angle; and the future: mail art today and tomorrow. The timely topic of international mail art’s relationship to social networking will also be explored.

Mark Bloch's work was included in the exhibition at the Cullman Education Building Analog Network: Mail Art, 1960–1999 at the Museum of Modern Art.

The curator

Mark Bloch, author of Robert Delford Brown: Meat Maps and Militant Metaphysics (Cameron Art Museum, 2008) and writer for Brooklyn Rail, Whitehot Magazine, New Observations, Factsheet Five and other publications, is an American artist and writer whose work uses both visuals and text to explore ideas of long distance communication.

Born in 1956, Bloch grew up in Cleveland and Akron, Ohio, received his B.A. degree in Broadcasting from Kent State University. He received his M.S. degree in Digital Marketing from Baruch College, 2013. In 1977, after studying traditional art forms as well as performance and video art with Joan Jonas and Taka Iimura, Bloch discovered the international mail art network and eventually began to correspond with most of the key figures in that far-flung collection of artists worldwide. While living in Southern California from 1978-1982, Bloch made slide shows for corporate clients until he moved to New York City in 1982, becoming a central character in the activities of the New York group of mail art enthusiasts at that time as a member of Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School. Bloch’s work with an extended version of the mail art network continues today on the Internet. In 1989, Bloch began his experimental foray into the digital space when he founded Panscan, part of a text-based teleconferencing system, one of the first online art discussion groups in New York City. Bloch also wrote the first texts on Ray Johnson on the Internet.

For 40 plus years, using the international postal system as a distriibution network for his art, Bloch reached out to thousands of artists and cultural workers all over the world, exchanging publications, objects, postcards, letters and artifacts and amassing an extensive collection that now serves as a significant barometer of the culture of the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. While Bloch’s work now resides in hundreds of personal and public archives internationally as well as many important institutions and museums, his archive of mail art reflects the experimental circumventing and strategic navigation of such institutions in favor of the Do It Yourself culture of the late 20th century, which has become commonplace in the digital age.

Information about a 2014 mail art-related festival created by Mark Bloch is here.

Updates

Please watch this space for more information about this exhibition. It will expand as more details become available.

For More information contact Mark Bloch at panman<a>panmodern.com.