Mark Bloch

Mark Bloch (born 1956) is an American mail artist, performance artist, archivist and writer whose work combines visuals and text as well as performance and media to explore ideas of long distance communication.

Mark Bloch was born to American parents in Würzburg, Germany, in 1956 where his father was based as soldier of the US Army. Bloch grew up in Cleveland and Akron, Ohio. Exposure in his youth to Robert Wyatt, the Fugs, Frank Zappa and Yoko Ono led to an interest in the fringes of art. Coincidentally, Bloch later referred to his mentor Ray Johnson as the "fringe of the fringe."

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 and visiting artists Joan Jonas from New York and Iimura Takahiko 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. 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 and other avant garde provocations. 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, studying with artist Rachel Rosenthal, and supporting himself as a maker of corporate communications for corporate clients from 1978 to 1982.

Bloch performed "Heart and Technology" 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."

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