Recently, though, the village has come to be associated with physical labor and painstalking handiwork. A six-year-old artist’ collective called the Nikola-Lenivets Craftsmen has brought the village fame by building huge structures out of unstripped branches, twigs and logs – gnarled, woven works of art that are at once futuristic and hauntingly archaic. The group’s founder and ideological leader is Nikolai Polissky, an artist who left Moscow for the countryside in the mid-1990s to paint landscapes, but eventually decided to seek out a more radical artistic medium.

Thanks to his efforts, Nikola-Lenivets now stands for art with a social and environmental conscience. Last weekend, the village hosted Arkhstoyaniye, a festival that served as a platform for discussing a wide range of topics, from innovative uses for Russia’s park space to finding employment for rural artisans (other than turning out cheap souvenirs) to new directions in contemporary art and architecture.

The event’s name is suitably ambitious. It refers to the biggest thing ever to happen in the neighborhood: the standoff, or stoyaniye, against the Tatars. It got its impulse from the management of the relatively new Ugra National Park, which had previously collaborated with Polissky to devise new ways of attracting visitors. These included building armies of snowmen along the riverbank to honor the heroics of the medieval Slavs, as well as hosting a vaguely pagan celebration of the Orthodox Shrovetide, when thatch rockets were launched skyward, leaving a roaring bonfire in their wake.

Last weekend’s festival was made possible by a grant from the Vladimir Potanin Charity Fund, which sponsors a program called “Changing Museum in a Changing World.” The program is designed to support creative initiatives to keep Russia’s cultural institutions relevant.
About 500 architects, critics and curious guests made the four-hour drive southwest from Moscow to attend the festival’s opening on Saturday afternoon. After sampling some local delicacies – homemade vodka and pirozhki – they set off to explore the exhibition. Objects by 17 architects and architectural bureaus, all from Moscow except for one team from the Netherlands, were displayed on a territory that stretched from the parking lot through groves, fields and clearings to the bank of the Ugra.

The objects were made mostly of wood, and none had an interior frame – two of the technical requirements decreed by the organizers. The ideological requirements were discussed at a forum on Saturday evening, around a table typical of the Craftsmen’s handiwork: It was woven from branches, and a live green sapling sprouted from a hole in the middle.

Art critic Alexander Panov, a curator of Arkhstoyaniye, talked about the importance of ecology for the festival. “The projects could not harm nature in any way,” he said. “We’re in a national park, let’s not forget that.”

Other participants spoke of a “new Russian architecture” that would draw on native traditions but also incorporate newer ideas like sustainability and harmony with nature. One work that fit that description particularly well was “Letaflin,” a triangular grouping of logs designed by the architectural bureau Taf. Its name — a riff on “Letatlin,” the flying apparatus designed (but never launched) by Vladimir Tatlin – and its dynamic, upward-thrusting form hark back to the Constructivism movement of the early 20th century. But its construction technique, which involved fitting the pieces together with tight notches rather than fastening devices, evokes the medieval wooden churches on the island of Kizhi that were built without nails.

The designs for Alexei Kozyr’s “Bunker” initially drew protests from the park authorities because they involved digging. But the crawl space, situated in the slope of the riverbank and equipped with benches where visitors can sit and admire a sweeping view of the Ugra, is nearly invisible from the outside. It blends in perfectly with its surroundings.

In most cases, the actual construction work was done by the Nikola-Lenivets Craftsmen. Professional carpenters were hired to build complex structures where safety was an issue, like Timur Bashkayev’s “Half-Bridge of Hope,” a giant wedge that plunges over the outcropping’s edge and tapers to nothing at a height of about 10 meters above the ground.

The Craftsmen did not develop or build any projects of their own for Arkhstoyaniye. “If we had used our own resources and decided to do something, it would have blown everyone else away,” Polissky said with a smirk. “We sacrificed ourselves for our friends, the stars of Russian architecture.”

Abstaining from participation reflects one of the key messages of the Craftsmen’s work, which is about erasing the ego of the individual artist and extolling the creative power of the collective. It is a revival of the anonymity of medieval art – we’ll never know who made Russia’s old churches and the icons inside them — and a reaction to an art market where an artist’s name is a brand and a work is a commodity.

The collective spirit was alive at Arkhstoyaniye, with visitors lending a hand to put the finishing touches on some of the objects. Throughout the afternoon, passersby were asked to pick up a drill and put holes in “Shed,” so by nightfall it would glow with thousands of tiny lights when illuminated from within. As a young man perched on a rafter drilling holes in the ceiling, one visitor asked if he was the architect. “Everyone who came and drilled a hole is an architect,” the young man replied. Pavel Lisykhin, the architect whose bureau, Project Meganom, officially got credit for “Shed,” said he was surprised by what came out of his bureau’s plans. “We thought it would be more theatrical, but it came off as landscape art,” he said. “We thought it would come into conflict with its surroundings, but it blended in.”

Strict adherence to the architects’ plans was never the goal of the Craftsmen. Dmitry Mozgunov, a longtime member of the collective, wasn’t shy about tampering. “Of course we added our own ideas,” he said. “They didn’t order it to be built by just anyone, they ordered it from artists.”

The Craftsmen don’t look like, stereotypical artists, nor do they look like “peasants.” The words that Russian art critics often use to describe them give the impression of men in sackcloth and straw hats from a Repin painting, or at least the tractor-driving heroes of Socialist Realism. But in fact they wear tracksuits, sweatshirts and jeans, and during the festival some of them tooled around the park grounds in a shiny white Volga with Russian hip-hop blaring out the windows.

Polissky has been praised for finding a constructive activity for young men in the depressed rural stretches, of the Kaluga region. Among other things, he encouraged them to have faith in their own ideas. “When we started, [Polissky] thought everything up himself,” said Yevgeny Zelensky, another of the Craftsmen. “Now he offers a couple of ideas, and we think something up ourselves.”

Many consider Polissky’s real work of art to be the changing attitudes and improving socioeco-nomic makeup of Nikola-Lenivets and nearby villages — rather than anything that can be seen or touched. This is underscored by the fact that the objects the Craftsmen build are often transient, like the snowmen that melt and the wooden rockets that go up in smoke.

Lately, the group has been building more things meant to last, such as the sculptures it installed in a park in northwestern Moscow last year, or the objects of Arkhstoyaniye, most of which the Ugra National Park plans to leave up until they erode naturally. But permanence does not necessarily change the meaning of their work.

Panov, the curator, emphasized the importance of the creation process itself as a medium in contemporary art. “It’s the synergy of Moscow curators and architects and the local population, the local government and the park administration, that is the artwork, not the dry things left over,” he said at the forum. “Those are the rules of the game in the 21st century.”

For directions to Nikola-Levinets, where the wooden objects will remain until they erode, see www.arch.stoyanie.ru.

Brian Droitcour, The Moscow Times / Context №3468, Aug 4-6, 2006

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

For the old women who have to chop their own kindling and the lonely widows who shed tears at giving their last cow up to the butcher, what use is art?
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Thirteen years ago, artist Nikolai Polissky came to this village from Moscow, burning with creativity. He built armies of snowmen and whimsical towers out of hay, or firewood or twigs, whatever was lying around.

To some villagers, he’s a madman, the spark for a bonfire of resentment. To others, he’s an inspiration who showed them the beauty of art in a place devoid of opportunity or hope.

Radiantly impractical, the towers irritate some locals, who grumble that they create a nuisance. Residents are too busy struggling at the grinding business of survival to shuffle the few hundred yards from their homes to gaze and wonder what the constructions signify.

That someone would pay a Paris gallery $2,000 for a photograph of one of these confections is far beyond the locals’ understanding, and only serves to reinforce a sense of heartless lunacy in a market that values people like them at nothing.

But other villagers, who at first couldn’t see the point of Polissky’s works, now are moved by their majesty, ablaze with twinkling light on a purple moonlit night.

“The funny thing is, they talk and say: ‘What’s the point? Why do we need this?’ ” said Ivan Parygin, 17, one of the many locals drawn like moths to Polissky’s light. “But when they come down and see it, you can see their eyes shining.”

Standing at the top of Polissky’s latest creation, a 90-foot tower of twigs and branches that sways and creaks in any gust of wind, it is at first a little difficult to catch a sense of his artistic vision.

The whole thing is hammered up with a properly artistic sense of haphazard asymmetry, a structure so untouched by safety considerations that it makes your feet tingle as you clamber up on slippery birch branches and rustic, homemade ladders.

The reward up top is a splendid view, if you can forget for a moment what lies beneath your soles.

The giant basket-weave structure might recall the ethereal 1922 Shukhovskaya radio tower–pride of the Soviet Union–that inspired it. To some, it’s a rocket. It even conjures up elements of the Eiffel Tower.

“It’s great when people move inside the tower. You can’t see them, but it creaks and groans and you can sense they are there,” Polissky burbled excitedly.

But the construction is not quite finished yet. Polissky’s team of builders began in June, and by late this month it will be complete. Then Polissky will take out his camera. He has a talent for lighting and photographing his creations, capturing the sunlight, the dawn mists, frost and snow that nature’s charity adds.
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“The snow will come. When there is a thaw followed by a cold snap, the tower will be covered in ice,” he said. “It will look beautiful.”

Polissky, who devoted himself to painting, and a few close friends first arrived here from Moscow, 125 miles away, in 1989 and squatted on the land.

“The land was like a mysterious island, and we felt we had to build something unusual,” he said. “We wanted to make something monumental.”

They faced hostility.

“The locals did not take to us,” Polissky recalled. “There’s a traditional Russian fear of strangers. There was quite a bit of aggression toward us. They were against us as Muscovites. But that was a long time ago.”

After a dormant period, when he did little painting, Polissky understood he had failed to find the new, vital direction in painting that he craved.

He is a onetime “Mityok,” one of the leaders of an art movement famous in the mid-1980s for rejecting socialism and finding artistic inspiration not by opposition but by a devil-may-care lifestyle of permanent, joyful inebriation.

“We had a reputation as being people who knew how to live. But either you die a heroic death as an alcoholic or you get on the wagon,” said Polissky, who never embraced the port wine breakfasts of others in the group.

Two years ago, he put aside his oils and brushes, inspired by new materials that were free or cheap and widely available: snow, hay and wood.

Enlisting villagers, he created 220 snowmen, with carrot noses and bucket helmets, straggling down a slope. He made a structure of hay prosaically named “The Tower” that resembled a great golden spiral shell, inspired by the biblical tower of Babel.

He designed and built a 330-foot aqueduct of snow, and a tower of chopped firewood.

These creations stood in soft harmony with this serene piece of Russia, where the afternoon sun paints a silvery light on every leaf, where the river lies cloaked in unctuous fog under a full moon. At the end of each season, the creations melted, or he destroyed them.

“In the summer of 2000, everyone called me ‘the madman,’ ” he said of artist friends back in Moscow. “People gave me a hard time, saying: ‘What are you doing? You’re working with hay?’ They didn’t think it was art. They said: ‘Get your act together. Go back to real art. Go back to painting.’ ”

The hay tower photographs, exhibited widely in Moscow, as well as in Paris and at Montenegro’s contemporary art biennial, show the golden spiral baking in the midday summer sun, and in misty autumnal dawn, dusted like sugared icing with frost. They show the hay mowers with their scythes, villagers with faraway eyes and careworn faces.
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The works made Polissky so well known that people now come from Moscow and surrounding areas to view them.

But Polissky’s time in the village is a blink compared with Natalya Bubnova’s 95 years. Her horizon has shrunk with the years.

“A tower?” said Bubnova, a bent, withered figure. “Yes, we have a tower.” Pausing as she hacked branches for kindling, she gestured toward an ugly rusting water tower. She was bemused to hear about another tower, this one of branches, a few hundred yards from her door.

“No. There were no towers of wood here. Never.”

The village seems paralyzed by tragedy. There is no work. The place is dying. It never recovered from the collapse of the local Soviet-era collective farm and the slaughter of its 1,500 pigs and 1,000 cows in the mid-’90s.

Maria Kozhevnikova, 65, has harvested a life of hardship.

The widow, alone these last 20 years except for a succession of cats, dogs, pigs and her cow, Malyshka–”little one”–always rose at 4 a.m. to milk, and struggled in bitter snows up the long hill from the river carrying water for the stock. By June, it got to be too much and she knew that Malyshka would have to go to the butcher.

“It was a very sorry day. I even cried. But I couldn’t look after her anymore. My legs don’t work now.”

Some Consider the Works Frivolous

The fantastical constructions of wood and hay might have made Polissky famous, but they can’t save the village or bring back the past. So one might forgive those here who are a little cynical or skeptical of the artist and his work.

“Of course it’s no good to us babushkas,” Kozhevnikova said. Polissky and his friends “haven’t achieved anything that we could put to good use.”

When Polissky asked villagers to help him build the 220 snowmen for his first creation, most thought that he was crazy. But money is money.

To Alexander Kondrashov, 48, a former collective-farm worker, the project was “just a job. There was pay. We weren’t wasting our time.” But to Dmitry Mozgunov, a 22-year-old unemployed man who was born in a milder Central Asian city, it was a fantastic gift, compensation for the snowmen he could never build as a little boy.

“When we built a lot of them, it turned out all the snowmen had different individual faces. Of course, we had our favorites,” Polissky said. “They all had their own fates too. Some fell down straight away. Some lived longer.”
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Mozgunov, who moved here when he was 12, said, “There were some that turned out evil. It wasn’t that we wanted it that way. The material would tell what it had to tell.”

Perhaps making snowmen was too much fun to be considered worthwhile, because that’s when the criticism started, much of it whispered behind hands.

“They said, ‘It’s all a worthless prank, it’s useless,’ ” Mozgunov said. “I tried to explain that it’s art. It’s like a painting, to create something with your hands and photograph it.”

Kondrashov endures poverty of both time and money, working from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on a small farm plot, and from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. as a national park watchman earning $30 a month. He snatches sleep on the job.

To him, Polissky has what seems a wealth of time and money and he expends it on whimsies.

“It gives the village nothing. It’s like childish games. It has no relation to life, production, reality,” Kondrashov said. “It’s simply nothing. It has no meaning for me.

“I think it only causes inconvenience for the locals. In the past, it was a quiet village. No one ever bothered us. Right now there’s more dust, more cars, more people. It bothers people, irritates them.”

Project Takes Up Resident’s Free Time

Villager Yevgeny Zelensky, 22, spends most of his free time working on the latest project, despite opposition from his parents, who see it as a dead end.

“They want me to leave the village as soon as possible and get a job,” said Zelensky, who wants to find work as a car mechanic.

For other parents, it’s a relief that their sons have something to occupy them, even if that is standing atop a 90-foot tower with no safety rope.

And when they see these short-lived skyscrapers, the feeling can be magical.

“A lot of villagers have never been any higher than their rooftops,” said Mozgunov, standing near the latest tower of branches and twigs. “The idea scares them. But they go up the tower and they’re lost for words.”

After three triumphant creations, villagers now “expect us to pull off something grandiose every year,” he said.

Since 2000, Polissky and his team have created a big project every summer and a snow project in winter, though the weather has played havoc with their snow sculptures.

Yevgeny Zheltov, 44, who was born here, said Polissky and his friends have brought new blood to a dying village and inspired the young. “They’ve changed the place beyond recognition,” he said.

“It’s changed my life. It’s changed me,” said Mozgunov, struggling to put into words his awe of and love for Polissky. “He’s like a guru. He’s an inspiration.”

There was a shy pause when other volunteers were asked what the artist means to them. Ivan Parygin finally found words.

“I think he’s a genius.”

Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times Sep 11, 2002

Like his contemporaries in land art Andy Goldsworthy and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Polissky takes photos of his wprks before they melt or are blown away, then sells them in galleries. But unlike those artists, he and his team build the pieces without detailed drawings or plans. “Materials usually suggest the form,” he says.

Polissky’s influences include massive public building projects like the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia,-the Roman aqueducts, medieval fortresses, even the Eiffel Tower. But in a nation where human interference has brought widespread ecological devastation, the artist takes pride in creating works that can always return to a natural state. And in true Soviet tradition, Polissky’s monuments are created by and for the people. “There is constant interaction with the villagers,” he says. “It’s really a collaborative effort.”

Paul Abelsky, Readymade #20 DEC 2005 / JAN 2006

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.

Polissky himself is an impressive man. He has the appearance of a Russian muzhik (peasant man) – sturdy and red-faced, with a great beard. In addition to the physical stamina that enables him to erect towers of wood, hay or snow, and to drink gallons of moonshine, his artistic strength lies in the breadth of his mind and his ability to inspire a group to work together as a collective.

He trained in ceramics in St Petersburg and then became one of the group of Mitki artists there. This group, well-known within Russia, formed in the 1980s, and were an important part of Russian subculture. It was named after one of the group, artist Dmitry Shagin, and has been described as ‘an ironic hybrid of Tolstoyism and the hippy philosophy.’ Their subject matter and personal style combined city bohemia with working class chic.

From this original group, it is only Polissky who has taken art to the common man. In 1989 he and some of his fellow artists went in search of a quiet place to work, which they found in Nikola-Lenivets, a village 200km west of Polissky’s native Moscow. In 2000 he found himself making an army of snowmen in a nearby field. ‘I invited the peasants to join in, and they enjoyed it,’ he says. Soon there was a procession of 400 snowmen, frozen mid-trek across Russia. The celebrated clown, Slava Polunin, saw photographs and invited Polissky to fill Moscow and St Petersburg’s main streets with snowmen. It was delightful to turn into Arbat Street in central Moscow, where normally all you see is tourists, to be greeted by a crowd of snow people with twig-teeth and bucket- hats in various states of melting.

Polissky believes that life is art. In 2003 the villagers of Nikola-Lenivets came to Moscow for the first time, and took part in an art festival outside the capital called ArtKlyazma. Polissky and many of the villagers put on a ‘reality show’ with which the public interacted. The villagers weaved shelters that mountaineers might build, bivouacs, for themselves in various forms, from a racing car to Alexander the Great’s tent, and became the installation.

They lived there throughout the festival and sold food and moonshine made from produce from the village trendy architects and designers from Moscow. The event was such a success that the art festival then transferred to Nikola-Lenivets, and is now called ArchStoyanie. Although Polissky says he and the organizers have drifted apart, and that it is now more about architecture and design than about art, it remains an important annual cultural event. It takes people out of the cities into the wilds of the countryside, where they are greeted by a mind-bending Polissky creation.

In Russia there is a sharp divide between the country and the town which we, in more developed countries, are not used to. It is not politically incorrect to refer to people from the country as peasants. As a rule, life there is basic. The village consists of simple one-storey houses, izbas, made from wooden beams. There is electricity, but usually no phone or plumbing. They wash in the banya, steam house, and plunge into the snow or river to cool down. Drinking, mostly moonshine, is part of their way of life.

Polissky has made a short but telling film in which one of the villagers he knows, Zhenya Golubets, accompanies him to Moscow to take part in the Art Bazaar. ‘But I don’t have anything to wear only these trousers, and they won’t do,’ says Golubets.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Polissky, in his reassuring tone, ‘we’ll sort you out. You can buy some. You’ll earn some money there.’

‘Ok then, I’ll go. But I won’t be able to drink will I?’ says Golubets. ‘I mean I’ll be able to have one or two, but not really drink, right?’

Golubets does go to Moscow, he does get a new pair of trousers, and, at the Art Bazaar, he has a few drinks. The next video shows him singing while a chic Moscow beauty wraps her legs around him from behind, and powders her nose, and then his. Golubets died a month later from cancer, which nobody knew he had, but that night he was an artist, and he was happy.

The tragedy of the Russian countryside is that the villages are emptying and the rural way of life is in decline. Like the aristocrats and landowners at the end of the 19th century who revived peasant crafts by investing money in workshops and teaching, however, Polissky sees the beauty of peasant labour in everyday objects made by hand. For although he is still an artist, he has, in a sense, returned to the peasant in himself.
Unlike the social realist artists of the 1950s, who, as part of official propaganda, created an idealised image of the peasant, Polissky is working with real peasants and their actual labours, chopping wood, making hay and moonshine, and clearing snow. Chopped wood and hay have been made into towers, snow has been made into aqueducts stretching across fields and giant snow slides. Polissky acknowledges that he has helped give meaning to some villagers’ lives and provided them with an alternative to drinking. ‘But I’m not a doctor,’ he says, ‘and in any case, artists drink a lot too so they’re going from one drinking environment into another.’

Yet, despite his clear sympathy with peasant culture, one of the things that makes Polissky so interesting is the relationship that his work reveals between urban and rural forms. He is not a fan of the city, which he describes as aggressive, but he is from Moscow; one of the biggest and most adrenalin-charged cities on the planet. In 2004 he and the villagers constructed a La Defense-style arch from branches in the Moscow suburbs, the Likhoborskiye Gates, almost the only example of modern public art in the Russian capital. ‘When it first went up/ says Polissky, ‘there were traffic jams beside it and the buses were nearly falling over as everyone went over to one side of the bus to have a look when they passed by.’
His interpretation of the arch is typical. ‘It could have been made by a raven, who, returning to the city after taking a course in construction techniques, builds himself an unusual, cutting-edge nest/ he says.

It is the materials, though, that root the pieces into their surroundings. The field, on which the army of snowmen stood, produced hay that was used to build a tower the following spring. ‘There has to be a ready supply of whatever material is to be used, and it has to be cheap,’ says Polissky. ‘The principle is to take what you know and not something exotic.’ Yet, the very materials and sites that he uses introduces a temporary nature to his work.

Often the record is all that is left of his creations. He loves fire and the ritualistic aspect of burning. This belief connects him to the shamans and Russia’s pagan practices. Russia was pagan as late as 998 AD, when Russian Orthodoxy was adopted as the official faith.

One can certainly feel the influence of pagan rituals in last year’s Firebird. This is a giant hollow double-headed bird made of metal with a stove at the base. It was erected on a flat field close to Nikola-Lenivets, under the expansive Russian sky. The whole thing was filled with two lorry- loads of oak, and set on fire. Smoke, and then flames and sparks leapt from its mouths and the tips of its outspread wings. Yet, Polissky is a modern man as well, carefully recording the process of creating a work as well as its completion and then uploading it on to his website.

Polissky believes land-art is something ancient. ‘It’s from the earth, from our ancestors, which means that it died a long time ago. So for us it is a new and unfamiliar spectacle.’ Surkov believes that Polissky is reviving something deep and ancient from within the Russian mass-consciousness. Whatever it is, it is working – his unselfconscious belief in what he is doing inspires everyone who comes into contact with the work, not least the villagers themselves. Today, some 10 of the villagers work full-time as professional artists, earning money from their labours. Polissky finds it hard to get enough financing, but the projects continue. Future plans include a project for the Centre of Contemporary Art in Luxembourg, a monument to science made by peasant hands.

Surkov, the voice of the Kremlin, is right: Polissky does represent something quintessentially Russian. The collective that he has formed is more equal than communism was able to achieve. His work is also remarkable for its lack of sentimentality. Its scale, boldness, and wit excludes it from accusations of folksiness.

The Kremlin could take a leaf out of his book, for rather than uniting Russia by fuelling national pride through warmongering, Polissky is reuniting Russians with themselves and their surroundings through art,

Clementine Cecil, Blueprint, January 2009.