The Green Lantern Press: A Case Study of Digital-Age Publishing and Community Art Practices

This project seeks to explore the printed book as art-object in relation to the digital technologies of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, and the new modes of production and consumption---the digital copy and the dialectical desires for immediacy and transparency---spurred by those technologies. The catalogue of the Green Lantern Press will serve as my primary source for this project because their publications are exemplary models for the distribution and presentation of contemporary books and artwork in the alternative art community. My analysis will be grounded in Walter Benjamin's seminal essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" through which I will develop the concept of art(work), which refers to the duality of meaning inherent in Benjamin's title: the "work of art" and the "work" of art. The former meaning the individual, material artwork; and the latter meaning the socially conscious nature of the artwork, which emerges from the communal labor of politicizing art. These concepts are intrinsically linked, which is why I prefer the single term---art(work)---to encapsulate both the materiality and the cultural work of Green Lantern books.;Throughout, I argue that the art(work) of the Green Lantern Press is characterized by remediation (the appropriation of "the techniques, forms, and social significance" of one medium by another), hypermediation (the integration of diverse artistic media in the bounds of a single book), and cultural work (the politicization of art) (Bolter and Grusin 65). Although these art practices are not necessarily specific to the press, Green Lantern artists do remediate reformatively rather than uncritically, making present, rather than further obscuring, the past. The Green Lantern tendency to hypermediate is also practiced critically insofar as the inclusion of diverse media "slows" perception, emphasizing tactile sensation (the objectness of the object) and reader participation, rather than the desire of contemporary masses for immediacy (further stimulated by the digital forms), which Benjamin first condemned in the age of mechanical reproduction. The three-pronged approach of remediation, hypermediation, and politicization works to make meaning for both audience and author to the extent that it brings the liberatory idea(l)s of alternative artists to marginalized communities that are otherwise saturated by the pernicious application of market theory to every aspect of contemporary life. However, this is not a hierarchical transaction between artist and community; instead, dialogue is generated by the politicization and practice of art(work) within the alternative art community, and the ephemeral social interactions that arise from such discourse are privileged, rather than the individual art-object or printed book. In terms of mediation, this approach to art(work) debunks the ontological primacy of the imperative to the new by bridging the gap between the historical and the contemporary through adaptation and reproduction. The integration of diverse artistic media and the inclusion of ephemeral inserts (e.g. 45 records, digital prints, mail-order postcards) disrupt the contemporary desires for medial transparency and immediate experience by causing the critical reader to shift focus from content to medium, recalling and reinforcing Marshall McLuhan's initial formulation that "the medium is the message." The message of such hypermediation is that form, and especially the interplay of forms, calls attention to the tactile experience of reading (e.g. the turning of pages, the weight of the book in one's hands, etc.) that digital media disallow. My thesis: that this three-pronged approach to contemporary art(work) provides the Green Lantern Press---and other artist-run, non-profit presses---with a sustainable model, both financially and artistically, for the continuation of non-commercial art(work) into the digital age by supplying something that the larger culture is not: a critical manipulation of artistic media that emphasizes socially-engaged practice rather than self-interested profitability.