Airplayers Book, 1990

AIRPLAYERS is a translation of sculptural installation into book form. The texts, computer printouts and other documentation relate the artist’s conceptual thinking to the technology through which her works are realized; drawings and photographs of Armstrong’s sculptures show parallels between logic and intuition in art and science, the organic and the man-made. A self-powered light-up centerfold is included. Introduction by art critic Carlo McCormick and essay by filmmaker Robert Ross.

 

Edition of 1,000  

Cover: screen-printed plastic

Inside: white vellum and UV Ultra II papers, screen-printed vinyl envelopes, sandblasted optical lenses

Centerfold: LED, sandblasted optical lens, screen-printed vinyl envelope; light turns on with opening of page

Size: 8.5″ × 6.25″

Willis, Locker & Owens, NYC

ISBN 0-930279-17-4

Press:

ON THE BOOKS - ART & AUCTION
Contemporary galleries introduce the catalogue as art by Calvin Reid, 1990

Sculptor Sara Garden Armstrong's Airplayers, done in collaboration with New York's Souyun Yi Gallery and New York publisher Willis, Locker & Owens, is an ambitious project whose limited edition of 65 combines four components: a book, a videotape, a sculptural installation and a handcrafted housing for the whole lot. Like a Duchampian exhibition-in-a-suitcase, Airplayers is a portable museum. The book contains two silkscreened vinyl envelopes, grommeted inside a cover of optical plastic, with an optical lens and an ultrabright battery-powered LED. On the book's pages, transparent images alternate with transparent computer printouts and text. No ordinary catalogue, this is a vital component of a complex work. Produced in an edition of 1,000, the book alone goes for $30. Self-contained, critical, wildly creative and exhaustively researched, it manages, in its many forms, to appropriate the elements of the generic catalogue while signaling its impending decline. We have entered the era of the interactive exhibition catalogue.

HIGH PERFORMANCE            
Airplayers: A New Book Form Born of Technology by Judith Hoffberg, 1990

When Art meets Technology and the marriage works, the magic can hardly be contained. So we have in Airplayers by Sara Garden Armstrong a remarkable translation of a large sculptural environment into a book, a video, and a reduced-in-scale sculptural environment housed in a handcrafted box. Just when you thought that everything that could be done with a book has been done, something comes along to make you stand up in amazement. And Airplavers does amaze in so many ways.

Time, transformation and movement are consistent in Armstrong's art and to translate these themes into photographic documentation would have been self-defeating. Instead, the artist has sought to translate time, space, evolution, and repetition as well as kinetic sound sculptures into the three-dimensional book medium. To have succeeded in creating a new bookform, one that has the dynamics of all those themes, makes this book experience different from all others. Read More