Mark Bloch Talks Mail Art with Anthony Haden-Guest

Installation view of “Panmodern!” at NYU's Fales Library. 2024-2025. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

Mark Bloch
Panmodern! The Postal Art Network Archive
New York University Bobst Library, 2nd Floor
September 17, 2024 - January 28, 2025
Curated by Mark Bloch and Nicholas Martin

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST  February 13, 2025

In the mid 70s I was a recent arrival in Manhattan and writing pieces for New York magazine, some about the art world. Which was when Ray Johnson, the creator of Mail Art, reached out, sending me material at the mag. It happened that not long before I had myself launched a mail art project in London, but quite different. I had got artists including David Hockney and Eduardo Paolozzi  to design stamps in support of an ongoing post office strike, so it was a time during which anybody was allowed to stamp and deliver mail. But I didn’t follow up with Ray Johnson. Dumdum me.

A meet with Mark Bloch has given me a second shot. Bloch, a longtime collector and exhibitor of mail art, is at work on a bio of Ray Johnson, who had begun using the postal service as an art making and delivery system in the 1950s. He did this by sending his friends texts, images, xeroxes, cut-ups, collages and drawings, sometimes his signature cartoon, a bunny head, meanwhile prodding them to do the same, to develop their own networks. In the 60s he named his movement The New York Correspondence School, sometimes whimsically spelling it Correspondance.

So what of the U.S. Femail sock with the embroidered address? “That was sent to me. Obviously they were mocking me. No envelope, just the way it was.” Above: recto. Below: verso. Anonymous sender, 1984. Detail from“Panmodern!” at NYU's Fales Library. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

Other Mail Artists fed in ideas. Bloch remembers Lon Spiegelman, one of them, insisting that Mail Art and money shouldn’t mix. “He was interested in creating an artform that didn’t involve money,” Bloch said. “But we were like, ‘Mail Art and rules don’t mix either.’” The spread of the movement was organic. “How it would begin was getting an invitation to be in a show,” Bloch said. “Then, when you’re in the show they’ll send you a mailing list. Once you have these lists you can write to all these people. And that was how it spread. We didn’t have the Internet back then. You couldn’t just look up stuff online. Mail Art was very social. It was relational aesthetics, meaning art which is about people. And Ray Johnson kind of invented that by sending things to people and getting them to send it on to someone else.”

What of Above the Couch? “That’s just to make a statement that Mail Art is not to be hung in your house to match the sofa or the drapes. It’s art that comes from the heart.” Arno Arts, Arnhem, Netherlands, mail art show invitation flyer. Detail from“Panmodern!” at NYU's Fales Library. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

That was the first Mail Art generation. Then in the early 70s Gugliemo Cavellini came on board. “Cavellini had a fortune,” Bloch says. “He was in the supermarket business in Brescia, Italy. First he became an artist, then he heard about Mail Art. And it was a perfect match for him to get his work out. You can imagine all these kids in all these countries all over the world, instead of getting a little scrawny Ray Johnson envelope in the mail they get a great big package with five books and fifty stickers and whatever. So he was a natural for the Mail Art network.”

“The guy with a gun pointed to his head by a nun, and vice versa, was later a New York artist, Buster Cleveland, originally from Ukiah, California.” Buster Cleveland, folding card. Left: top. Right: bottom. Detail from“Panmodern!” at NYU's Fales Library. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

The fluid nature of the movement, the sense it was a human continuum, generated further  moves. “These guys who were part of the correspondence network were sitting around,” Bloch said, specifying Istvan Kantor, the Hungary-born Canadian, a performance artist and activist, and David Zack, who wrote An Authentik and Historikal Discourse on the Phenomenon of Mail Art, which was published in Art in America in 1973, giving the form its first critical attention. 

The Cavellini bull makes the artist’s case for himself. “He wanted to make himself famous and put himself intø art history. So that’s what he did” Bloch says. Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, sticker, circa 1975. Detail from“Panmodern!” at NYU's Fales Library. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.Cavellini, Bull,Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

“Basically these guys were shooting the shit about an Open Pop Star idea, where anybody could assume a name,” Bloch says. “And they thought up the name Monty Cantsin. Everybody should do work as Monty Cantsin and sign the work Monty Cantsin.” Istvan Kantor, though, who founded Neoism, a group that drew on Fluxus and Punk, would become so identified with the name that he effectively became Monty Cantsin and other Open Pop Star names were swiftly birthed: Karen Eliot, Luther Blissett, Sandy Larson.

How big did the Mail Art movement become?

There was no way of keeping wholly accurate track, Bloch says, adding. “But we had the lists. In the 80s we used to estimate that there were maybe 5000 people in the world who had done it at one time or another.” And there had been another relevant offshoot of Mail Art, which he called Tourism, enunciating the word with the emphasis on the Ism, as in Cubism or Abstract Expressionism. “I would go and visit wherever there was a group of Mail artists.” Bloch said, indicating an image. “This is me with a group of London mail artists. I traveled around everywhere there was a group. We would call that a Mail Art Congress. Mail Art is one of the largest and longest lasting art movements ever.”

“The two sheets of abstract typewriter marks are visual poetry by an East Berlin artist, the late Ruth Rehfeldt,” Ruth Rehfeldt, postcards. Detail from“Panmodern!” at NYU's Fales Library. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

So what did happen to Ray Johnson? And to Mail Art? In 1963 Johnson, then 36, began A Book About Death. thirteen separate pages that took him four years to complete. “Instead of being a book that you buy, one page at a time would be sent to you,” Bloch said. “And nobody received all the pages.”

What would be on those pages?

 “Collages and images. Some would relate to Andy Warhol, who was his good friend, and some would relate to Karl Wirsum of Chicago, who was one of the Hairy Who guys. It was called A Book About Death because there were a lot of references to death.”

“

  What of the Word Strike? “It was that an art strike that was proposed by a Monty Cantsin and the other Neoists. It was that everybody should stop making art from 1990 to 1993. It was a bit of a joke. And that was my answer to it. I decided that we don’t have to go on strike as artists. Instead we just have to change the meaning of the word Art to mean anything done for money. If I cook you a meal, that’s not art. If I make love to my wife, then that’s not art.” But if you charge money, that’s art? “Yes. It was basically to make fun of the art market. It’s so great that that was happening back in 1989, before it all became as ridiculous as it is now.” Mark Bloch, postcard, 1989. Detail from“Panmodern!” at NYU's Fales Library. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

In early 1995 Ray Johnson was hyperactive. “He told a lot of people that he was going to do his greatest work,” Mark Bloch says. He called Bloch to tell him he was going to do a “Nothing” at the Sandra Gering gallery, “Nothings” being his dry word for Happenings, the artist-created events that were then a potent artworld presence. He never went to the gallery. On January 13, 1995, he drove out to Long Island and jumped off Sag Harbor bridge. He was 67. Bloch adds that “All his life if you look at his work, it was about death and water. When he leapt into the water it was almost like he was doing a performance.”

“He is one of the most political South American artists,” Bloch says of Clemente Padin. “He was jailed with another mail artist named Jorge Caraballo for doing Mail Art in Uruguay in the 70s.” Clemente Padin, flyer. Detail from“Panmodern!” at NYU's Fales Library. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

Mail Art as it was did not long survive Ray Johnson as an organized art movement but that wasn’t down to its creator’s death. New tech and the evolving social behaviors have always impacted the art-making culture, as when Jan van Eyck, the 15^th century Flemish artist, became the first European to use oil paint or as when Paul Delaroche, the classical French painter, saw dageurrotypes, the first photographs, in 1839 and famously said  “From today, painting is dead.” Not so. But just as one of Americas’s the most distinctive and globally famous popular arts, the Funny Pages, home of Li’l Abner, Dagwood, Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, were smooshed by the shrinkage of newsprint, has Mail Art been blown into nothingness, like so much of our longtime social glue, indeed like personal letter-writing generally, by email, iPhonery and social media?   

“The Reagan double was by an Australian couple, Dick and Pat Larter,” Pat and Dick Larter, flyer. Yass, New South Wales, Australia, 1983. Detail from“Panmodern!” at NYU's Fales Library. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

That’s what you might have expected but there are dozens of Mail Art-related groups on Facebook and these are choc-a-bloc with newbies fresh out of art school, reinventing the Mail Art wheel by channeling forms available on video, such as Performance Art, and by generating images which include not just the routine paintings, drawings, collages, but Word Art and hand-cut images from rubber stamps. Often indeed they get so over-excited that they post their Mail art piece to the online world at large before it has reached the single correspondent, who will also naturally be on line.

Which infuriates Mark Bloch, a bearer of the Ray Johnson torch, who approaches the perps, also on-line.

 RAT was Reseach in Art and Telecommunication and RATOS was their Reseach in Art and Telecommunication Online Service. Whose names are listed on the sheet marked R.A.T.? “That is everybody who had a computer in 1989 when the computers first came in,” Bloch says. “I was one of  the people. In the whole world of Mail Art only twenty had computers. There weren’t even pictures on the Internet in those days.” Charles Francois, RATOS, Liege, Belgium. Flyer and letter, 1989. Detail from“Panmodern!” at NYU's Fales Library. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

 “I plead with them not to ruin the element of surprise that getting a piece in the mailbox used to bring” he says. “But such requests fall on deaf ears. I try to explain that it was the mystery that made the mail art network thrive. They don’t seem to care that this activity used to be decentralized, word of mouth, whereas now you can google off in directions that earlier generations of mail artists couldn’t have dreamed of.”

“The envelope lettered FAKE with a Ray Johnson bunny head on it is,” says Bloch, “just that, a fake.” Kristof D’Haeseleer a.k.a. Kristof Debris, Gijzegem, Belgium. envelope, 1991. Detail at NYU's Fales Library. Courtesy of Mark Bloch/Postal Art Network Archive, New York University Special Collections Library.

Bloch added “What once was edgy now looks ho-hum, and mainstream. Maybe that’s a good thing. Could be we live in a Mail Art culture now. For decades it was an activity art school grads could dabble in as they contemplated a future in which they were slowly accepting the fact that they would never be an art star. The Internet does this plus. And postal prices make them wonder whether actually mailing the art to an individual is even necessary.” WM