El título parte de “Very Large Array”, un campo de radio-telescopios situado en Nuevo México, a través de los que se puede enfocar un mismo punto desde diferentes posiciones para poder tener visión del universo más amplia y más desarrollada. Tyson utiliza esta metáfora para crear una serie de esculturas de poliestireno cuidadosamente pintadas, y ubicadas a modo de retícula, con la que hace las veces de lente con la que mirar a los diferentes factores que conforman la realidad que nos rodea.
La pieza, en su conjunto, es monumental y ambiciosa. Son casi 200 figuras que forman una cuadricula que se despliega tanto por el suelo como por los muros de la sala. El visitante puede caminar entre ellas siguiendo el orden que quiera, puede vincular unas piezas a unas y a otras obteniendo así diferentes niveles de conocimiento. Las esculturas se conectan entre sí a través de diferentes nexos que van desde lo puramente visual hasta lo psicológico o lo conceptual.
Los mecanismos del pensamiento son un tema recurrente en la obra de este inglés nacido en Ulverston en 1969 y su trayectoria viene proponiendo un amplio catálogo de reflexiones sobre cómo y por qué ocurren las cosas que nos ocurren. Todo está conectado, dice el artista, y son esos nexos que conectan unas cosas a otras, los que nos sitúan ante el punto de partida de su trabajo.
Entitled Large Field Array (or LFA) it consists of almost 300 sculptures, twisted incarnations of things we know – animals, clothes, gods, white goods, food. Donald Trump’s wedding cake is there, alongside a ‘toothpaste’ silicone Buddha, an electrical storm, and a cube of hairy human skin. Tyson and a huge team of assistants spent two years making the work and completed it in 2006. Two years later, the Zabs bought it and kept it in storage for almost a decade.
‘I know it’s ambitious to install 300 sculptures in the middle of nowhere, but I hated not having LFA on show,’ says Anita Zabludowicz from her London gallery, a former 19th-century Methodist chapel in Chalk Farm. ‘When we founded the Collection on Sarvisalo in 2010, it made sense to take LFA there and give it its own building.’ In 2014, she called on Finnish architect Jukka Siren, who has renovated three art venues on the island, to create a space for the work. ‘LFA is so complex that the building needed to be as simple as possible,’ explains Siren, whose 25 sq m barn is made in local spruce lacquered with pineapple juice and crushed granite (a weathering technique that stops the wood from rotting).
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vie3RO5vBGM&w=560&h=315]
‘From the outside, the barn is totally reflective of its environment, but inside, it’s like entering a white cube,’ says Tyson, who approved wholly of Siren’s design. ‘You’re in this extraordinary, natural landscape, then you step inside the barn and enter another universe.’
It’s an overwhelming, incomprehensible universe. The cubes are arranged on floors and walls, almost a metre apart in a sequence that makes sense to Tyson but is unfathomable to everyone else. A sort of three-dimensional visual wordsearch, it encourages you to try to seek narratives and make connections, but they don’t exist. Which is the whole point. ‘It’s wholly autobiographical and so vast that you can’t get an overview of what it’s about,’ says Tyson. ‘There’s no rulebook. You have to work it out on the fly, construct your own interpretation, as all these objects mean something different to each of us.’…