Nikolay Polissky

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much to Nikola-Lenivets. Perched on a scenic outcropping over a bend in the Ugra river, it has a clump of well-tended dachas, some ancient Slavic burial mounds and a 19th-century church. The village hasn’t seen much action since the 13th century, when Tatar troops approached the Ugra, sized up the Russians assembled on the opposite bank, decided the fight wasn’t worth it and retreated. Legend has it that the soporific spirit of the place made the Tatars give up, and the village’s name gained the word lenivets, or sloth.

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To locals preoccupied with survival, a former Muscovite’s artful towers of twigs or wood or snow are either madness or inspiration.

Nikola-Lenivets, Russia — In this dying village, people don’t carve out a living. They scrape it with their nails from the soil.

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In Nikola-Lenivets, a rustic hamlet 125 miles outside of Moscow, the winters are nasty, brutish, and long. As such, landscape art isn’t the first career choice that comes to mind fonts residents. But 10 years after the painter Nikolai Polissky built a country home on the village’s frozen turf, he decided he wanted nothing more than to coax art out of his new neighborhood. Using whatever was lying around—twigs, snow, hay—the 58-year-old Muscovite proceeded to create large-scale installations that straddle sculpture, architecture, and land art. For his first piece, in 2000, Polissky enlisted tough-skinned villagers to help erect a brigade of 220 snowmen in the sloping terrain. After some grousing about the relevance of art when many scramble just to keep borscht on the table, an “art colony” of unwitting assistants began to congregate. (That Polissky was paying them helped.) This fall the artist unveiled two installations commissioned by the city of Moscow: one a triumphal arch resembling La Defense in Paris, the other a dinosaur skeleton-like structure placed near a suburban subway station. Both are made almost entirely of tree branches.

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Russian land-artist Polissky works with peasants in the countryside to build huge structures and hand-crafted sculptures that have drawn the attention of the Kremlin and Russia’s elite.

Comparing Russia to Britain is always a tricky feat, but a recent article by Vladislav Surkov in the Moscow-based art magazine Artchronika is the equivalent of Alistair Campbell writing for Frieze about Andy Goldsworthy. The deputy of the Presidential Administration, Surkov is not just the ideologue behind Vladimir Putin but a master of PR, widely credited with winning the presidential election of 2004. For him yo put pen to paper and write that artist Nikolai Polissky is a conduit for the Russian spirit would be akin to the old New Labour spin-doctor claiming that land art tunes us into our collective Celtic identity. It was an important moment for Polissky proving that he is admired by both the establishment and the intelligentsia, who are traditionally opposed to each other.

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