In the spirit of Joseph Beuys, he believes that all life can be art and that anyone can be an artist if they live an artful life. News of these installations soon travelled through the grapevine in Russia attracting the heartier and often trendy to undergo the difficult trek to the village. In 2003, the village came to Moscow and attracted a more urban audience which appreciated the mix of sophisticated art forms put together with local materials and basic manual skills, as well as the readily available copious quantities of local moonshine. Nikolai remains the father figure, his sturdy figure reflecting his great physical strength. He also has the necessary charm to inspire others to work with him, a gift that has enabled the production of extensive structures, as well as well-attended feasts. The yearly festival allows urban Russians the rare incentive to travel outside the city and enjoy the fast disappearing peasant life. His work has recently emerged from his native Russia and he was recently in group shows in Bordeaux, France and Miami, Florida. Karen Wright

An imposing bale of hay, swept up into a tower of Babel a Ia Brueghel – that’s the first thing a visitor sees at an exhibit called ‘Futurologies. Russian Utopias’, which opened in March at Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture. It’s clear what the Parisian curator Herve Mikaeloff and his Moscow colleagues saw in this work by the collective Nikolai Polissky and Nikola-Lenivets Crafts. After all, Vladimir Tatlin wrapped his Monument to the Third International in the same spiral. But it seems as if a reference to the Russian avant-garde is the last thing on Nikolai Polissky’s mind – his artistic utopia does not aspire to be of worldwide proportions. This is a different story altogether, which, to paraphrase the title of Alexander Solzehnitsyn’s pamphlet ‘How to Rebuild Russia’, could be called ‘How to Develop the Village of Nikola-Lenivets’.

To be fair, when the successful Moscow artist Nikolai Polissky (a participant in the art group Mitki, which was unbelievably popular in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s) bought a house in the early 2000s in a semi-abandoned, picturesque village called Nikola-Lenivets on the banks of the Ugra river in the Kaluga Oblast (200 kilometers from Moscow down a bumpy, battered road), he wasn’t driven by missionary zeal. Nor did he have an intricate plan devoted to the social rehabilitation of a remote corner through artistic production. The idea of drawing local residents to the making of art emerged by accident, almost as a lark-their first collaborative work was an army of several hundred snowmen occupying the Nikola-Lenivets hillside. Behind this lay a joking reference to a famous episode in Russian history: according to legend, it was exactly on this spot that the Great Stand on the Ugra River took place in 1480, after standing across from each other for a while, the cavalry of the Golden Horde (under the command of Ahhmat Khan) and the troops of Moscow’s Ivan III (who had stopped paying the Horde its annual tribute) peacefully parted ways without engaging in a battle, and as it’s now written in schoolbooks, this moment marked the end of the Tatar Yoke.

But Nikolai Polissky did not merely limit himself to Russian themes: in the summer, hay was stacked in the form of Mesopotamian ziggurats; in the winter, Roman aqueducts were built out of snow, and logs were arranged to resemble Egyptian pyramids. The impulse to recreate these monuments of world civilization from local materials in and around the village became more and more ambitious, calling for the involvement of not just the odd volunteer, but a qualified, close-knit brigade, which could plan and create sophisticated projects: many meter-high towers of cane and brush that recalled Eiffel’s constructions or the lighthouse at Alexandria; a Taj Mahal made out of twigs; or even the Baikonur cosmodrome, complete with rocket-shaped baskets. And since there was no industry to speak of in this abandoned village – it’s located within the Ugra National Park and Nature Preserve – able-bodied locals willingly joined the artistic collective under the leadership of ‘Uncle Kolya’, – the villagers’ nickname for Nikolai. The undertaking took the name ‘Nikola-Lenivets Crafts’, but you won’t find gift boxes, embroidery, toys, or other tourist souvenirs, which are usually associated in Russia with folk art-what you’ll find instead is contemporary art, which closely engages with the question of nationality.

What’s important is not merely that the collective employs so-called common peasants (the collective currently has about fifteen members); nor is it that Nikolai Polissky himself hides his own urbane professionalism under the mask of ‘an artist of the people’. It’s possible that the central element of the project is that the artwork made in this field has a truly national popularity. And this is a unique event in contemporary Russian art, which the broader Russian public traditionally refuses to accept as its own, accusing it of elitism and ‘incomprehensibility’. The collective’s constructions, on the other hand, seem native and natural to the Russian soul, at least at the level of materials – the construction of sculptures out of fallen branches found in the woods is a widespread Russian hobby.

Ever since Polissky`s helping hand led Nikola-Lenivets to hold ArchStoyanie, a yearly Land Art festival, it’s not just art critics who head to the Kalugan village, but thousands of tourists. For a few days, all of the attention transforms this remote corner into a site of mass promenades. Happy to take a break from big construction sites, leading Russian architects, as well as their international colleagues, build an ingenious little shack in nature’s midst, or a pavilion on a float on the river, or an ecologically pure gazebo, In the summer of 2009, Nikola-Lenivets was even visited by a delegation from Versailles, which, with its typically French grace, graced the Russian field with its landscaping prowess. And of course the main draw and attraction of Nikola-Lenivets remain the works of Polissky and company, which have brought the artist real fame and rare commissions to design public spaces – that’s why a 280-meter-long ice slide was constructed in the center of Nizhny Novgorod, something that hadn’t been built since the era of empresses Elizabeth, Anna, and Katherine the Great, who loved such entertainments, And in the Moscow suburb of Likhobori, an impressive triumphal arch has appeared-almost like the one in Paris’s La Defense, only assembled out of branches of wood from the banks of the Ugra.

In 2007, Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov wrote a sympathetic essay about Polissky’s artwork, which was published in the journal ArtChronika. This publication gave some critics an excuse to speculate that Polissky was a government artist, and that his art was something akin to a contemporary Potemkin village, an optimistic decoration with decorative peasants, concealing the wasteland that reigns in the rural Russian backwater. But to get a sense of the artist’s skeptical attitude toward the Russian authorities’ imperial rhetoric, it’s enough to glance at works like Firebird, his fireworks-breathing oven, topped with a two-headed eagle, which, in spite of its fairytale name, is more likely to evoke associations with a terrifying dragon-or his Border of Empire, a stockade of wooden totem poles placed in an empty field, on top of which sit the very same officious two-headed birds. Moreover, the work of Polissky’s collective, with his (artistic) deliberate archaic character, emphasis on gumption and manual labor, and his use of available natural materials (from the neighboring wood), could realistically be seen as a mockery of the current official doctrine of Russian progress toward modernization and the high-tech realm.

When Polissky was asked to explain the idea of one of the collective’s most recent works, a grandiose installation called the Large Hadron Collider, he said, not without irony, ‘Yes, we’re also scientists, but from the village. What can you do, we live in the forest’. What those who live in homes still healed by wood fires think about the great scientific experiment to split matter was clarified last summer in all of its wooden glory at Luxembourg’s museum of contemporary art (MUDAM). The entire entourage of a high-tech science laboratory, which was perfectly suited for a sci-fi film set, was built of natural materials – even the electrical wires, which were made of cane. Despite the fame and numerous prizes as well as the national adoration that have all come his way, there has still been no official recognition in Nikola-Lenivets’s home country. There has yet to be a one-man show in a Russian museum. While, on the other hand, foreigners compete to invite Polissky to build something for them.

In spite of all of its patriarchal qualities, this artistic production has turned out to be sympathetic to the international ecological movement. Polissky’s projects don’t harm a single tree – instead, he only uses trees that are dry, fallen, or ravaged by insects. In Nikola-Lenivets, the principle of a product’s purity is sacrosanct, and it’s a principle that extends even to the local home-brew and other delicacies used to welcome guests.

In Russia, Nikolai Polissky is often associated with Land art, but this is only part of the picture. His work touches on national mythology, while It ill being grounded in historical reality. The experience of developing a village with natural materials using art as the subject no longer seems so utopian. Unlike Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, which was never realized, the towers of Nikola-Lenivets stand firmly on the ground.
Milena Orlova

www.phillipsdepury.com

Thanks Iggy Cortez & Fiona Hayes

In 1989 Polissky took part in the exhibition ‘Mitki in Europe’, which visited Cologne, Paris, and Antwerp. 1993 brought a retrospective exhibition at the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, held to mark the movement’s 10th anniversary. In 1995-1996 an exhibition/action entitled ‘How to draw a horse’ was held in the Manezh. Polissky was one of the Mitki participating in Art Moscow in 1996 and then in the Vodka exhibition at the Marat Guelman Gallery in 1997, the ‘Mitki honours the Navy’ action in St Petersburg, and Mitki. The General Staff Headquarters’ on Gogolevsky bul’var in Moscow. On December 31st, 1997, Nikolay Polissky organized the Mitki New Year’s Party during the New Year’s celebrations on Manezhnaya ploshchad’ in Moscow. In 1998 he took part in the Manilov Project together with other Moscow Mitki including Konstantin Batynkov and Sergey Lobanov.

In 2000 Polissky, together with Batynkov and Lobanov, created Snowmen, the first project in the village of Nikola-Lenivets and the start of Nikolay Polissky’s career as a Russian land artist. The project involved endless ranks of snowmen marching over the fields.220 snow warriors were made that winter, and Polissky’s neighbours from the village joined in. The snowmen looked like a snow army mustered against an unseen opponent, a resemblance which provoked memories of a historical event that had happened in these parts in 1480 — the ‘Camp on the River Ugra’, when the army of the Tatar-Mongol Khan Akhmat had been opposed by united Russian troops. At the initiative of Vyacheslav Polunin, snow guards were soon erected on the canals of St Petersburg and on the Arbat in Moscow.

Nikolay Polissky’s next project was the ziggurat (2001). The ziggurat of Nikola-Lenivets was made from wooden bases on which hay was laid along spiral ramps. The initial idea was to build a ten-metre-high tower, but subsequently the structure sank to seven metres. Almost all the inhabitants of the village took part in building the ziggurat. Polissky says that, to begin with, the locals could not understand what the point of the exercise was. He had first used their services in the creation of the horde of snowmen. “Everyone treated this as a fun winter game and eagerly came along to do their bit with the snow… But when it came to building the tower of hay, this was done by volunteers, groups of 30 who twice a week helped us lay the hay, providing their services free of charge.” The idea was that when the project was over the tower would be used to feed the cattle, but the hay began to rot and so the tower had to be ‘ceremonially’ burnt — the concluding performance in this project. Only one person expressed a desire to come in the spring to collect a little hay, but, in the opinion of the authors, he only spoilt everything. The following winter (2001-2002), an enormous Wood Pile’ — a huge tog pile — appeared on the village’s fields. Again the locals took part in creating the project. The wood pile was four-stepped, narrowing towards the top. If the tower made of hay resembled a temple, the Wood Pile looked like a strange defensive structure, the frontier post of an imaginary state — a kind of castle made of firewood.

In 2002 a 27-metre ‘Television Tower’ appeared in the village. This structure was fashioned from twigs of alder and birch, like an enormous basket with a lantern on the top. At the bottom were arch-like structures, which served as entrances. Once inside, the visitor could climb intricate staircases through the interior of the tower. The structure was a humorous imitation of Shukhov’s Radio Tower in Moscow. The Television Tower stood for two and a half years before being incinerated during the Shrovetide celebrations one year.

In the winter of 2002 a structure made from snow again appeared on the land outside the city; this time it was an aqueduct. But it did not exist for long. The winter was a warm one and the aqueduct kept melting; parts of it had to be rebuilt. In the end, about 100 metres of aqueduct were constructed, although the original idea had been to have it cross the river.

In 2003 in the little town of Disse in France Polissky was able to create another ‘tower’ made from natural materials — a column made from ‘grapewood’. This project was part of the West-East Festival. Eastern Europe was on this occasion represented by the Ukraine, Armenia, and Russia, which in its turn was divided into Moscow and Povolzh’e. A large part of the credit for creation of the tower belongs to engineer Mikhail Bulanenkov, who thought up the concept for the column. Together, the curving curly’ branches created an uneven, living surface, and there was a feeling that this surface could stir at any moment. Polissky built the column in France using materials that would be comprehensible and appealing to the French.

In 2003 Nikolay Polissky and his ‘Crafts from Nikola-Lenivets’ took part in the Art Klyaz’ma Festival, which for several years running took place in the grounds of what used to be the Klyaz’ma Reservoir Guesthouse. The festival was one of the largest open-air shows of contemporary art in Russia. At Art Klyaz’ma 2003 Polissky created a project entitled Bathhouse’. This was an ordinary bathhouse — only all the walls were transparent, made from film. Polissky brought almost half the population of Nikola-Lenivets to the festival, and they created a wicker installation-village called Art Bazaar. For the duration of the festival the authors lived in their works of art, cooked food, and plied the amazed general public with samogon [homemade vodka]. Polissky’s original plan was that the structures built in this nomad camp should include something resembling an Orthodox church, but the responsive Russian narod [simple people], who had greeted all other initiatives with such enthusiasm, refused point blank in this case. Instead, they built a Field Camp — in the eyes of its creators, a more suitable structure for horseplay than a church, which has no room for such carefree activity and merriment. The camp was likewise made of wickerwork; it took the form of a large circular haystack-shaped tower surrounded by four projecting minarets.

At the end of 2004 the entire ‘creative team’ from the village of Nikola-Lenivets travelled to Nizhny Novgorod to build an enormous ice slide beside the walls of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, based on the Tower of Babel in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s eponymous painting. This 12-metre-high tower had ziggurat-like ramps and a 280-metre-long slide that started at the height of a four-storey house. It took three weeks to build. Snow for the tower was brought from the environs of Nizhny Nogorod — approximately 17,000 cubic metres in all. That year’s winter was very warm and the tower constantly collapsed and melted, losing shape.

The following summer (2005), yet another tower appeared in Nikolay Polissky’s ‘art village’, this time made from large branches. The tower narrowed towards the top and ended in a circular ‘turret’, which visitors could ascend using an internal spiral staircase, giving them a view over the surrounding landscape from a height of about ten metres. The crude wooden branches from which the tower was made not only gave it strength, but also visually connected it with the environs and the forest, which begins a short distance away. The observation turret was circular, and its exterior was spiked with long metal rods which made it look like a wooden hedgehog that had climbed to the top of a tree or bush. This was a kind of village ‘Beacon’. On the top you could light a fire and send out secret signs. The Beacon is still to be seen in the village of Nikola-Lenivets; it is Polissky’s most long-lived work to date, having functioned as a ‘natural’ exhibit for a number of years.

In the autumn of 2005 a strange-looking object made from intertwined branches appeared on the Altuf’evskoe Highroad. The structure was as high as a three-storey house and looked like an enormous, roughly hewn rectangular arch. A geometrical construction consisting of four rectangles joined at the top, this unusual arch symbolized the fact that travellers were entering Moscow’s North-Eastern Administrative District and a landscaped park which is soon to be built on the shore of the River Likhoborka. Its name was ‘the Likhoborka Gate’. According to Polissky, the arch could have come into being as the creation of an intelligent raven who, returning to the city after taking a course in construction techniques, decided to build himself this strange and fashionable nest.

At Shrovetide 2006 Nikolay Polissky and his team set fire to the symbolic rocket ‘Baykonur’ to celebrate Shrovetide in the village of Nikola-Lenivets, but also another important date — the 49th anniversary of the first space flight. The artist directed a team of twelve local craftsmen in creating the Baykonur rocket tower from birch osiers, hay, and straw. It stood for more than a year outside the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, but its creators’ dream was that it should lift off. Eyewitnesses say that during its incineration Baykonur several times rose into the air.

In June 2006 a project involving the recreation of a landscape park ‘for the duration of one day’ was carried out in the grounds of Krivyakino, a country house in the town of Voskresensk in Moscow Region. This 18th-century country estate belonged to the writer Ivan Lazhechnikov. A two-storey brick house in the Baroque style is surrounded by a neglected park, which was originally divided into regular gardens dating to the second half of the 18th century and a landscape park, created in the middle of the 19th century and featuring a system of cascading ponds. The park buildings — summer houses, grottoes, and fountains — have not survived; and it was these that Nikolay Polissky decided to recreate from wood, using slender tree trunks. He gave them a fairy-tale or toy-like appearance in an attempt to imitate the architectural forms of a park at the turn of the 18th century. Construction lasted three weeks. By June 17th the park had acquired summer houses, arches, benches, chairs, swings, a covered gallery or walks, a green stage, a ha-ha ditch, and a ‘palace’. Nikolay Polissky’s structures stood on the two banks of the cascade of old overgrown ponds. On one bank stood the ‘palace’ (30 metres long and 9 metres high) with whimsical summerhouses scattered round about. One of the latter was circular with a supporting pole in the middle; another consisted of a swing on cart wheels covered by a triangular roof. The ‘palace’ was the largest structure. Its massive forms stood out in silhouette against the greenery and rose above the crowns of the trees. A polyhedral turret on the top gave it the appearance of a defensive structure, but the swings around the perimeter — and the children who had occupied them — dispelled this initially threatening impression. There were swings involved in almost all the structures — around the ’round table’, on the green stage, in the summerhouses and arches, and in the ‘palace’; they were a motif that linked all parts of the project. Having sat a while on one swing, you could move on to another in the next summerhouse. On the opposite bank stood the so-called ’round table’, named after the shape of the tree trunks from which it was made. The two banks of the ponds were linked by a wooden colonnade standing in the most commanding position, on an artificial dike between the top and middle pond.

In July 2006 the first Arch-Stoyanie festival was held in the village of Nikola-Lenivets. Apart from Polissky and his helpers, the festival also involved architects from Moscow. Polissky let his Moscow guests take the initiative, believing the smooth running of the festival to be more important than the chance to build another of his own designs — and all the villagers worked on realizing projects by their visitors. On the other hand, at the second Arch-Stoyanie Polissky got his own back, so to speak, with a grand installation entitled ‘Borders of the Empire’. This was an entire ancient city, reminiscent of the archaeological cities of Asia Minor and Africa, Palmyra, or Timgad. There was a columned street of approximately 200 metres in length with a central tetrapylon and, standing in disorder some way away, a collection of mysterious votive pillars. On the log/columns and transverse beams a large flock of wooden two-headed eagle/ravens stood picturesquely. This structure remains to this day one of the most captivating three-dimensional spectacles at the village of Nikola-Lenivets.

In the spring of 2008 the village craftsmen of Nikola-Lenivets realized their first project without the direct involvement of Nikolay Polissky (he merely gave them the idea). In the snow in the graveyard beside the Church of St Nicholas they planted large black wooden rooks in a kind of pantomime on the theme of Aleksey Savrasov’s cult painting ‘The Rooks have Returned”.

At Shrovetide 2008 Nikolay Polissky presented a project which is a continuation of the ideas in Borders of Empire: a Firebird made of metal. Of enormous size — as big as a house, — this metal two-headed eagle with a built-in stove lit up in a terrifying fashion, flared, filled the whole field with back smoke, and then started to give out tongues of flame, and itself changed colour from black to dark red. The damp air and wet earth underneath the bird started spitting with the heat. In the course of just 20 minutes, the bird consumed two large lorry-loads of wood. All in all, this was an impressive image of the Russian state.

2008, Catalog ‘XI Venice Architecture Biennale. Russian pavilion. A game of chess. tournament for Russia’.

But the long years of Sotsrealism [socialist realism] with their portraits of Stakhanovites and other workers and paintings of regional landscapes nevertheless compelled free-thinking artists to lose all interest in nature and the common people. Such subjects almost entirely disappeared from the most advanced parts of Russian unofficial art — those parts from which subsequently sprang all contemporary art in Russia today. The Russian narod [common people] was transformed into either the Soviet crowd (depicted with full expressionist horror and disgust) or a vehicle of the abstract collective unconscious of the ideology studied by the artist. And the Russian landscape either dissolved in objectlessness or became a crude theatre set, yet another phantom of the same ideology, which served as a substitute for reality.

The land-artist and narodnik [man of the people] Nikolay Polissky is a unique figure, but at the same one that is by no means alien to the Russian cultural tradition. On the contrary, Polissky’s project restores connections between all kinds of different areas and periods in Russian and world art. It is no coincidence that his first works of land art took a typically Russian landscape and fitted into it the most diverse recognizable forms of world architecture. Even his very first creation — a myriad army of snowmen blundering over the snowy banks of the River Ugra — could, if you wish, be interpreted not just as the customary popular amusement (only on an utterly titanic scale), but also as an unexpected paraphrase of the celebrated Chinese terracotta army. Just like the clay warriors who were so long buried in the earth, the snowmen sunk in snowdrifts demonstrated with piercing vividness that all that which is created by the human hand will sooner or later merge again with the material from which it was made. Nikolay Polissky’s subsequent works maintained similarly delicate relations (sometimes to the point of self-sacrifice) with the environment. Or, to be more exact, they revealed the ambiguity which has always existed in this concept, so beloved of ecologists. For, however much we care for our natural surroundings, the environment will always remain something irrevocably external and alien to us. Polissky’s works of land art have seemed to refrain from thinking of themselves as something surrounded by nature, erected in the middle of a landscape and dominating it but at the same time existing in a certain vacuum. His early works — an aqueduct made from snow, a ziggurat made from sheaves of hay, a pyramid assembled from logs — now exist only in photographs. They have suffered the natural fate of the materials from which they were made. The aqueduct melted and trickled away into the very same field in which subsequently there grew the grass that supplied the hay for the ziggurat. This tower was in its turn eventually dismantled — and the hay, as is right, fed to the cows. The same fate befell the pyramid, which was dismantled for its firewood. Nikolay Polissky would never dispute the fact that having a fire in one’s stove is more important than the Babylonian ambitions of a builder. The names of the projects are in themselves an indication of their practical value. The tower made of hay was called ‘Food Pyramid’; the gigantic log pile, the “Power Pile’. Unlike the creations of long-dead architects which served as their prototypes, these pyramids and ziggurats lay no claim to eternity. Nikolay Polissky modestly renounces any such ambition. His creations are in tune with today’s eco ethic, which says that the products of human activity should be recyclable and biodegradable. For all its grandeur, Polissky’s land art has seemed not so much the work of human hands as the product of strange whims of nature or the play of the imagination; it resembles cliffs or stalactites, things in which the human eye will sometimes make out castles or temples.

The fantastic structures which took shape on the banks of the River Ugra, reproducing the archetypal architectural forms of various cultures — from the Tower of Babel to the Eiffel Tower or the radio mast devised by the Russian engineer Shukhov — make one think of a Utopian civilization of the future in which it is not nature that will be subservient to culture, but culture that will be a function of nature. The permanent and temporary objects which Polissky and his co-authors have built both at Nikola-Lenivets and in other locations have seemed miraculous instances of nature mimicking the surrounding culture. The ‘Arc de Triomphe’ — resembling the famous skyscraper arch at La Defence, only made from brushwood — with which Polissky embellished a gloomy dormitory district on the outskirts of Moscow (almost the only example of modern public art in the Russian capital) is undergrowth attempting to reproduce the ascetic forms of the surrounding block-built multi-storey buildings. And the summer houses, pavilions, and swings with which Polissky has enriched the park in the town of Voskresensk in a reproduction of motifs taken from park architecture on Russia country estates of the 18th and 19th centuries are not so much a reconstruction of a now dilapidated stately park as a kind of revenge taken by that same Russian countryside — irrepressible, knotty, and overgrown with vigorous weeds — which enlightened Russian landowners tried to screen off when they surrounded themselves with imitations of regular French gardens.

All these deliberately irregular, spiky, organic structures created from simple and profoundly local materials — firewood, stoops of hay, alder branches — are often seen as craftwork in the firm tradition of Russian folk crafts and pochvenichestvo [a 19th-century Russian movement which proposed a return to the soil' and to the values of the traditional Russian peasant community]; and Polissky’s art is similarly interpreted in a patriotic vein, as in a recent article in the Moscow magazine ArtKhronika by the Kremlin political technologist Vladislav Surkov. In fact, however, his works do not even look as if they have been made by skilled village craftsmen; they are more like bird’s nests or beaver’s dams. They are more a natural than a cultural phenomenon, and they refer not to a specific national tradition, but to the soil in the literal meaning of that word — to the climate and the flora and fauna of a specific locality.

Nikolay Polissky’s work has avoided contradiction not only with the natural landscape, but also with the customary way of life of residents of Nikola-Lenivets. For Polissky himself the social aspect of his project is almost more important than the visual, and the transformation of a dying village into an artistic community means almost as much as the construction of Babylonian towers from ecologically pure local materials. It’s not just that hay, snow, and firewood may serve as excellent materials for avant-garde landscape objects, but also traditional peasant occupations can become a wonderful way of creating contemporary art. Polissky himself talks of his project as a social utopia reminiscent perhaps of fantastic images from the peasant futurism of Velimir Khlebnikov — who dreamed of tree houses, wind-driven sleds, and teams of clouds ploughing the communal fields — or perhaps of Joseph Beuys’s famous theory of ‘social sculpture’, a theory born from the conviction that the creator’s business is not to produce commercialized works of art, but to change the world by telling every person that he or she is an artist. Nikolay Polissky likewise believes that his mission has consisted in explaining to the residents of Nikola-Lenivets that it is possible to make snowmen and hay not unthinkingly, but as art; and he likes dreaming of how any village can, without any interruption of agricultural work, be transformed into an artistic commune, sparking the onset of universal happiness. He says he would like the villagers to learn to see each of their daily occupations as art. But in actual fact it is thanks to Polissky that Nikola-Lenivets has been transformed into a unique peasant obshchina [traditional commune] making a living through contemporary art. Since 2006 the village has been the venue for Arch-Stoyanie, an international festival of landscape design involving many leading Russian and foreign architects whose projects are realized with help from local residents.

Nikolay Polissky’s social project with its idea of love for the common people — a love which has been convincingly realized in practice — has echoes of the Mitki, the art movement which sprang up in Leningrad in the 1980s and became a notable phenomenon not just in art, but in the subculture as well. This group of underground artists (Polissky himself was a member) not only produced paintings, literary texts and musical recordings (with the participation of stars from Russian rock, which at the time was still an underground movement), but also developed a kind of slang, a way of dressing, and forms of behaviour that stylized and aestheticized the tastes and lifestyle of the most unpretentious and hard-done-by layers of society. Primitivist painting with overtones of the lubok [Russian folk print] and tape-recorder albums with recordings of Soviet songs in a deliberately amateurish ‘kitchen table’ style went together with the folk image of the Mityok — a large-hearted, sentimental, half-drunk figure invariably dressed in a sailor’s shirt and wadded jacket, a cross between an eternal resident of the urban pits and an idealized primordial Russian muzhik [peasant man]. However, for the Mitki, who were an ironic hybrid of Tolstoyism and the hippy philosophy, this stylized personality was nevertheless a personality — a conventional camouflage mask behind which the cultured artist could hide from accusations of alienation from the common people. Genuinely to take contemporary art — which previously, at the very most, could only stylize itself with ironic reverences to the lubok — to the people is something which as yet only Nikolay Polissky has been able to do.

However, in spite of its wonderfully harmonious relations with nature and ordinary people, the art of Nikolay Polissky has no desire to be a blissful idyll in the mould of a Slavophile new age. On the contrary, one of the most recent projects created by Polissky and his co-authors at Nikola-Lenivets is striking for a mood of fatalism and gloom which is untypical of his work to date. The grand land art installation Borders of the Empire, created by Polissky for the Arch-Stoyanie festival in 2007 and consisting of a mass of towering wooden ‘columns’ set amidst slushy spring fields and crowned with representations of two-headed eagles and cylinders and cones bristling with spikes, brought to mind an Indian temple with totem poles or an ancient execution site used for mass executions (with stocks, gallows, and crucifixion crosses). Polissky had until then essentially been engaged in eliminating all the various boundaries dividing nature from civilization, local culture from universal traditions, and the eternal folk crafts from solo contemporary art. But for the 2007 festival with its theme of ‘the Boundary’ he created a powerful and, it has to be said, fairly horrifying image: a forest of boundary posts fiercely and blindly ‘staking out’ not so much alien space as an uninhabitable no man’s land, and undergoing a transformation into an object of cult worship or weapons of terror. But, however fiercely these landmarks were speared into the earth, the latter is still incapable of accepting boundaries or taking on definite contours; it remains boundless, characterless, and vacant.

2008, Catalog ‘XI Venice Architecture Biennale. Russian pavilion. A game of chess. tournament for Russia’.

Land art in Russia has only a brief history. Essentially, Nikolay Polissky’s precursors were Kollektivnye deystviya ['Collective Action'], a group led by Andrey Monastyrsky which existed from 1975 to 1989. There are few similarities between the two, and the differences are more important than the similarities. In the way it functioned socially, Collective Action was a fringe art group which treated its art as a variant of conceptualism and in its land actions drew on the traditions of zaum [an early-20th-century experimental movement in Russian literature] and the absurd. The special conditions governing the existence of art under the Soviet regime made this group an extremely important phenomenon: society was subconsciously based on the idea of a rigid vertical hierarchy of spiritual values, and the most hermetic art was perceived as the most elite. Collective Action was at the heart of the artistic elite during the final stages of the non-conformist period. But these artists represented the kind of art which is a priori comprehensible only to a small group of adepts and which constitutes a kind of ritual for the enlightened, a ritual which includes scripts for parodying both the ritual itself and enlightenment. To paraphrase a famous author, one may say of these artists that they were terribly far from the common people’.

The unique shift carried out by Nikolay Polissky consists in a change in the way that art functions. His works are created by the inhabitants of the village of Nikola-Lenivets. This fact should not be overestimated: the ideas for the works naturally come from Polissky — it never occurred to the villagers themselves to build a ziggurat of hay or an aqueduct from snow. But at the same time it should not be underestimated. No one in the world has ever had the idea of crossing conceptualism with folk craftwork.

Two circumstances evidently played a role in this discovery. First, the artist experience of the Mitki group, of which Nikolay Polissky was a member in the 1980s and 90s. The artistic strategy of the Mitki may, at the risk of a certain amount of oversimplification, be described as conceptual primitivism. As is well known, the classical Avant-garde was in close contact with Primitivism (Henri Rousseau, Pirosmani). In my view, the Mitki tried to create what Primitivism could have been had it been based on installations, actions, and performance.

Primitivism is a step towards folk art. At least, it has absolutely nothing to do with zaum and absurdism. Primitivism emphasizes comprehensibility. But it is still some way from folk craftwork. Its simplicity is provocative: it is to be found in places where you wouldn’t expect it — in art of extreme professionalism. The simplicity of folk craftwork is natural and provokes no one.

In order to understand what kind of art Polissky does, you have to take into account the fact that he qualified as a ceramic designer. The experiments conducted by Russian arts and crafts during the Style Moderne period at the turn of the 19th century and by the studios at Talashkino and Abramtsevo are for him a kind of grammar-book, a natural guide to how to act. It’s this, I think, that explains the origin of the fantastic idea of combining folk crafts with conceptualism — it’s the kind of thing that you couldn’t invent; it could only come from real-life experience.

All the above is an essential prologue. For me the most important question is the content of this conceptual folk craftwork. Nikolay Polissky has constructed a ziggurat, an aqueduct, a medieval castle, a column resembling Trajan’s Column, a columned street like the one at Palmyra, a triumphal arch like the Arc de Triomphe, and towers resembling the Shukhov and Ostankino towers. These may not literally resemble their prototypes. It’s more as if the wind of rumour has carried word of these structures to the peasants of Nikola-Lenivets and they have built them exactly as they imagined them from these tales. These are archetypal architectural subjects, formulae for different periods in architecture.

Exactly the same subjects were in one form or another the principal subject-matter of paper architecture’ in the 1980s. We find antique ruins, medieval castles, and majestic towers in the fantasies of Mikhail Filippov, Aleksandr Brodsky, ll’ya Utkin, Mikhail Belov, and other masters of paper architecture. I am not all supposing that Nikolay Polissky was under the influence of these architects; that would be absurd. But how can one explain his use of exactly the same themes?

Here I should say a few words on what was distinctive about ‘paper’ design in the 1980s. These were projects entered for competitions of conceptual architecture in Japan, where young Russian architects picked up several prizes each year from 1981 to 1989.

On the one hand, this was a continuation of the traditions of Soviet conceptual design — especially the Avant-garde, but also in part the traditions of the 1960s. Conceptual design is a myth of the Russian architectural school. Due to the fact that most designs by the Russian architectural Avant-garde were never built and yet had a significant influence on international Modernism, the traditional view in Russia has been that we have a very strong conceptual school. Paper architecture was founded on the persistence of this myth. However, there were important differences between this architecture and the conceptual architecture of previous ages.

Avant-garde conceptual design was closely bound up with the idea of a social Utopia. In Russia today, following the renunciation of communism, people prefer not to notice this aspect of the architectural Avant-garde, regarding Constructivism as a non-ideological formal experiment. But this attitude significantly impoverishes Avant-garde architecture. All the characteristics of form that the Avant-garde sought — novelty, asceticism, and an explosive, alarmist architecture — came from the Revolution. Russian conceptual design by the Avant-garde was directly linked to social utopianism, and it is to this material that the term ‘architectural Utopia’ in the strict sense applies.

In distinction to the above, the paper architects of the 1980s, due to the nature of relations between the late-Soviet intelligentsia and the Soviet authorities, felt a strong revulsion not just for the communist idea, but also for all social issues in general. In the paper projects of the 80s you can find all kind of ideas and formal scenarios, but you’ll almost never find in them any social pathos. These are not Utopias, but architectural fantasies.

Fantasy is, of course, an activity which is unconstrained, but it has been noted that different ages fantasize in different directions. If we’re talking about the late-Soviet age, then for some reason the prevailing direction for fantasizing turned out to be the quest for archetypes and symbols, and for the most part these were drawn from the past rather than the future. Culture was interested in myths, ancient texts, and forgotten signs. Partly, this may be seen as a variant of Postmodernism, although in its approach to this subject-matter there were signs of a fundamentalism that was alien to the postmodern. Irony did not come naturally to this culture. This aspiration to discover certain fundamental bases of culture was equally characteristic of high humanitarian scholarship (work by Sergey Averintsev and Vladimir Toporov), elite cinema (Andrey Tarkovsky), popular cinema (Mark Zakharov), late-non-conformist painting (Dmitry Plavinsky), and stage design (Boris Messerer); it found its way into the most diverse cultural fields.

In my view, the installations of Nikolay Polissky are rooted specifically in this culture. It’s not the Shukhov Tower or a castle that Polissky builds, but the archetype of this tower or castle. The mysteriousness, symbolism, timelessness, and abstraction of his structures aligns them with the spirit of the vanished age of the 1970s and 80s.

It is this, I think, that explains the echoes of 1980s paper architecture I spoke of above. And it’s here that architectural history proper begins. After the end of the USSR, the character of Russian architectural life changed dramatically. Russia entered a construction boom that lasted ten years, and architects were snowed under with commissions; they ceased to be interested in anything beyond buildings. This spelt the end of Russian conceptual design. Essentially, the paper architects were the last generation of Russian architects who were interested in architecture as an idea rather than as practice and, above all, as business.

I think it can be said that it’s thanks to Nikolay Polissky that Russian conceptual design did not die. What is distinctive in the kind of conceptual design practiced by this architecture beyond building’ (to use the phrase coined by Aaron Betsky) is not merely that it contains new ideas which go on to inspire real architecture. For the latter is usually not the case. Conceptual design does, however, clearly reveal what the architectural school lives by and what is the structure of its desires. And from this point of view, Nikolay Polissky’s works are incredibly interesting.

Let’s suppose that what we’re looking at is, first and foremost, conceptual design. What can we say of the school to which such concepts belong?

First, that it dreams of unique, fantastic, and incredible objects. Russian conceptual design continues, as during the days of paper architecture, to have little interest in social programmes, new models for solving the housing shortage, or quests for new forms of living. It dreams of building structures whose significance could be compared with that of Roman aqueducts, the ziggurats of the Near East, and crusaders’ castles. It dreams of buildings that are spectacular entertainments. This is a rare type of architectural fantasy — when architecture is engaged in thinking about itself, in a search for form. It dreams not of a new life, but of a fantastic and beautiful architecture that will take your breath away.

Secondly, I would say that the main problem for this school is a certain timidity springing from doubts about the relevance of its own dreams. If we are to talk of the works of Nikolay Polissky in architectural terms, then the main content of this work is concern for fitting a structure into the landscape. I think it’s this that allows us to talk of these works as architecture. Classical land art is, in general, not all concerned with such issues; on the contrary, it constantly introduces into the landscape that which cannot be and never was there — cellophane packaging, metal grass, sand and pebbles from the opposite hemisphere. Polissky fusses over his fields as if over his own children, carefully thinking up forms that will make an ideal fit with them and seem to have grown out of them. For Polissky to plant metal grass would be the same as to give a child a wig of barbed wire. “I dream of building a tower in such a way as not to wound the earth.”

Finally, we come to the third notable feature. If, again, we are to talk of Polissky’s works as architecture, then we cannot but notice that all these structures are essentially ruins. This is not an aqueduct, but a ruin of an aqueduct; not a column, but a ruin of a column; and not even Shukhov’s tower, but its ruin. In this respect, the aesthetic of Nikolay Polissky is closest of all to the architecture of Mikhail Filippov (see volume 1, p. 52). The deciding argument in favour of the appropriateness of this architecture is time: the structures are built in such a way that they seem to have been already there. The main claim to legitimacy of the architecture of this school is its historical rootedness; moreover this history is easily introduced into nature in such a way that virgin land instantly) acquires a historical dimension measured in millennia — from the time when ziggurats and aqueducts were built here. I would say that if Western architecture today focuses on establishing where it stands in relation to nature, today’s Russian architecture is more interested in explicating its relations with history.

It is interesting that almost every important work of Russian architecture defines itself using this system of coordinates. The ideal formula for today’s Russian architecture is an incredible spectacle that is apt and at the same time rooted in history. The Church of Christ the Saviour and Norman Foster’s tower are equally embodiments of this formula. One could say that Russian and Western architects in Russia today compete with one another for the honour of embodying this concept.

All architects are familiar with the feeling you get when you arrive at a site and suddenly feel that the earth already more or less knows what should be built on it and what it dreams of. These are proto-images which although they do not yet exist, nevertheless have a kind of existence: they are hiding in courtyards, sidestreets, under archways or in the folds of the landscape, in the grass, or on the edge of the forest — in misty condensations of seemingness which have to be seen and listened to. The historian is forced to acknowledge that each age for some reason develops different proto-images, and if Le Corbusier everywhere saw machines for living in, Diller and Scofidio probably saw drops of mist. Some — a very few — of these proto-images are destined to sprout and be realized, but the majority will die without trace, and certain architects are very conscious of the tragedy of this death. Nikolay Polissky has learnt to pluck these images from the air.

Polissky translates into material form that of which the earth dreams here and now. This is not yet architecture, but nonetheless it is a relatively distinct statement of what architecture should be. It should be breathtaking. It should make an ideal fit with the landscape. And it should look as if it has always stood here and is even slightly dilapidated.

The author of the present text first met Nikolay Polissky in 1998, when the Mitki group of artists, together with Sergey Tkachenko, organized an action called ‘The Manilov project’. The point of this event was to declare the urban-planning programme then being conducted by the city of Moscow a realization of the dreams of the landowner Manilov from Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls (fantasy in the purest form, unconstrained by pragmatism or responsibility of any kind). “He thought of how wonderful it would be live as friends; of how good it would be to live with a friend on the banks of some river or other, over which his mind began building a bridge and then an enormous house with such a high belvedere that it was even possible to see Moscow from there and drink tea in the open air in the evening and reflect on pleasant things.” This was a moment of rare friendship between architects and artists: afterwards Sergey Tkachenko became Director of the Institute of the Master Plan for Moscow, i.e. in effect began shaping Moscow’s urban-planning policy; and Nikolay Polissky set off for the village of Nikola-Lenivets to realize his unique art project. But this historian is glad to discover that they set off from the same point in space and that he even had the fortune to be present at their point of departure.

Since 2006 the architecture festival ‘Arch-Stoyanie’ has been held annually at Nikola-Lenivets. For three years in a row the leading Russian architects have travelled to Nikolay Polissky to create installations in the same spirit as those made by Polissky himself. It cannot be said that their creations are exactly successful; as yet they are artistically vastly inferior to Polissky’s. But they do try, and this in itself is unexpected and intriguing. Polissky plays the role of artistic guru in today’s Russian architecture. This school is, at any rate, very distinctive. It has its own conceptual design, but this design exists in a slightly unexpected field. I think Piranesi would be extremely surprised were he to learn that the genre of architectural fantasy which he discovered has in Russia become a folk craft.

2008, Catalog ‘XI Venice Architecture Biennale. Russian pavilion. A game of chess. tournament for Russia’.

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.