Mark Bloch: Panmodern!
Curated by Mark Bloch and Nicholas Martin

New York University Bobst Library, 2nd Floor
By appointment: [email protected]

September 17, 2024-January 28, 2025

“Panmodern! The Postal Art Network Archives at New York University’s Special Collections Library, located on the second floor of the Bobst Library, is a collection of ephemera curated by the archivist, collector, and artist Mark Bloch. Recently extended into late January, it is mostly paper shown in vitrines, a remarkable collection of newspapers, zines, flyers, handwritten and typed manuscripts, paintings, drawings, and other manner of detritus that was received in the mail, pulled out of envelopes and collected, accompanied by objects and video. Most of the materials are in English, but more than a score of other languages can be found in Panmodern!

The exhibition is divided into nine sections within the three rooms of the Special Collections Library. Each section addressed a different thematic aspect of the show, including “A Golden Age Of User-Friendly Mail,” “Medium, Movement, Or Aesthetic Style?,” “Superstars And Precursors,” and “Art As An International Language.” Each explains the mailed papers and art gathered under glass. Bloch’s materials illuminate a time before he entered the genre: the Sixties and early Seventies, driven by a free-for-all esthetic known for hedonism and radical politics. Bloch entered in 1977, becoming friends with Ray Johnson and a network that developed around the Pop artist and inspired creator of mail art, whose life tragically ended when he committed suicide in 1995. By then, Bloch had already spent six years on the early Internet in a period before pictures, covered here in a section called “Cyber-Mail Art: Panscan And Other Developments.”

The other developments included a broad array of photography, often casual in nature, both in the “cyber” area, foreshadowing selfies, and in another vitrine depicting groups of mail artists convening in various cities worldwide labeled “Tourism and Congresses.” Nonetheless, with this sort of low-key, understated budget collecting, it looks like everyday life is valued over high-minded cultural statements as the ephemeral takes charge, to the point of approaching the display of detritus.

From early “cyber” documentation to middle-period Mail art relics that underscore the random nature of the ephemera and its distribution, to examples of fine art, Panmodern! becomes a capsule of the culture at hand, leaning in the direction of pure chance and not always strongly joined in thought. Problems might attach to the massive amount of stuff Bloch has put together over the years and the freehandedness of such a collection. Yet the decision by the show’s curators to separate the insights by thematic interest enabled the assembled gatherings to establish an alignment with time. Thus, Bloch’s ragtag assemblages take on specificity when we look at particular parts of the show, as well as a convincing overall wholeness.

You can see it in Bloch’s latest zine edition, Panmag 70, chocked full of the 115 plus contributors to the show. Yet its title, both the show and the zine, includes the classical Greek word “pan,” which in translation means “all,” (from P.A.N., the “postal art network.”) A gathering of the covers of his “Panmag” series and some outgoing postcards demonstrate how he attracted an international collective in the direction of a gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, central to his vision. Bloch’s ambition to accumulate responses from all over the world was unusually large.

New York University has been in the heart of the West Village for more than one hundred years, the center of the city’s radical groups and cultural innovation. Indeed, Bobst Library, the school’s main center for study, is located on the southeast corner of Washington Square Park and is still known for its alternative approaches. Bobst’s Special Collections includes NYU’s “Downtown Collection”, where Bloch’s show is housed. While the geographic origin and innately progressive style of Bloch’s acquisitions speciate, quite literally, from all over the place, they are, at the same time, academically displayed. For example, in the section entitled “Isolation and Alienation,” we see a yellow copy of a call to arms for students, displaying the unanswerable question, “How can we stop WORLD WAR?!” Directly to the left is another mass-produced sheet with a picture of a young, crouching boy, likely of minority origin, next to the galvanizing statement, “Art isn’t sufficient.” This curt dismissal of aesthetics as a solution must have caught the eye of an educated young man—Bloch—seeking to extend his (political) vision in the late 1970s.

Social concerns also occur in the category “Neoism and the Art Strike,” a collection of highly politicized photocopied pages deliberately condemning art as an inadequate critique of the economic and cultural circumstances of the times. One image displays the word “Art” with a red strip though it: “No Art.” No goodbye to the public usefulness of art, in a progressive sense, could be more direct.

A final image by Bloch to be commented on proposes a Word Strike, his contribution to the Art Strike (1990-1993) with the slogan “Give Up Art,” in which the individual letters of the word “Art” have been turned into simple drawings. Taking a radical stance, he freely acknowledged the inability of both image and word to erase the social and economic suffering that, sadly, seems to attend all societies at all times—no matter what party or ideology a country supports.

In a way, then, we might criticize this stream of politicized ephemera of Bloch’s—both as creator and collector—as wrong from the start. What art has ever truly transformed even the bottom ten percent of society, which resists change for reasons beyond our best intentions? On the other hand, these artifacts were collected during the ‘80s: a time when extremism and unrest in America were pushed down—and Bloch’s collection illustrates very well both the disorganization and dysfunctionality as well as the idealism of that period.

When art raises the expectation of permanent social change, we hope for an idealism that, at least historically, hasn’t seemed to work. But that does not lessen the impulse, in any way, to build a new world. As discussed here, some of Bloch’s mail art materials rule out image-making as an antidote to human suffering.

Bloch does not make it fully clear the extent to which his sensibilities align with the radical pamphlets he has gathered. But surely his sympathies, as evidenced by what he has pulled together, suggest a tough attitude toward American materialism. While there was so much to read, under difficult circumstances, the bias comes through and can hardly be dismissed: even art’s recognized failure to change much of anything suggests the need for new ways of thinking—and supporting, as best we can, the results. Thus, this wonderful, if anarchic, set of all kinds of revolt and difference becomes more than a eulogy of a lost time. It successfully articulates what was possible—before we succumbed to uniformity in thinking.

On January 21 there will be a panel discussion about Panscan– the mail art online discussion group that Bloch created. Panel with David Ross, the former Director of the Whitney Museum, Bloch and others. The moderator will be Scott Fitzgerald, a Global Network Arts professor in the Integrated Design and Media department in NYU’s School of Engineering.

On January 28 there will be a Q and A with Bloch and a closing celebration and performance moderated by Sukhdev Sandhu, a professor at the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, Center for Experimental Humanities at  at New York University.

For more information see https://guides.nyu.edu/blog/NYU-Libraries-Exhibition-Explores-Mail-Art-Movement-and-Mark-Blochs-Postal-Art-Network