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

Land art as art is, I think, something altogether ancient. It’s something from the earth, something from our ancestors, which means that it died a long time ago. For us it is a new and unfamiliar spectacle. Of course, you can call it a kolkhoz [collective farm], but then no one now has any need to create a kolkhoz. What we need is to do what is interesting, that which enchants and which forces the viewer to get to grips with the universal, mass nature of the project. In Old Russia, I suppose, all this cost a lot of money and all the folk crafts that were recreated at the end of the 19th century were sponsored by large fortunes and wealthy individuals. Talashkino, Gzhel’, Dulevo: all this was created so as to force the Russian narod [common people] to work for its own good. And for this reason Russian folk art underwent a renaissance and lives to this day in shawls, matryoshki, wooden spoons, and so on. But for us this is a spectacle, a Russian folk festival. It’s not even from the age of Old Russia, but from a proto-age, a primeval period – like the shaman dances of our distant ancestors. It’s commonly thought that cliff paintings with bisons are the most ancient art, but perhaps this status really belongs to dancing at the fireside and ceremonial cremation. Universal unification.

Did the idea of creating a centre for contemporary art in a village occur spontaneously?

Russian folk celebrations are always spontaneous. The idea was undoubtedly spontaneous. One thing led to another. There was, I think, this moment of crisis when we were unsure what to do next, but then everything fell into place. We had the idea of holding a festival, invited everyone we could think of, including many well-known architects, and everyone was willing to take part. All the ideas were born without our having to sweat over them – we would simply have flashes of inspiration and everything would begin to take shape. Personally, I can spend months doing nothing, sitting, drawing… And then suddenly an idea comes long and I begin working intensively on creating a project. It was the same here with the idea for Arch-Stoyaniye and the art centre.

Tell me, do you feel a connection with Western land art? What is distinctive about Russian land art?

There were some Dutch people who came from Adriaan Geuze (Adaiaan Geuze of West 8 made a pavilion of pine cones at Arch-Stoyanie 2007 – M.S.), bring with them entire talmuds, theoretical calculations as to how to make things from pine cones, how to build, how to assemble the material, how to measure the pine cones, using a tape measure – entire tomes of paperwork. But we, you see, do everything wrong. We did the reading, of course, we got that but right, but what next? It’s our practice to do everything without making any calculations. In the Russian manner, as they do in Russian villages. What’s the point of counting pine cones? It’s a waste of time. Of course, the pavilion should have been done a little differently than the way it turned out. But the technique we used is the same. In theory. No, it is possible to work with the West. We’ve had projects in France. But we haven’t yet done a joint project with foreigners. But you can keep talking and then end up with the Tower of Babel. You need a framework indicating who’s going to do what, who will have what duties, and then you can work together to realize the project – and where and how is of little relevance. So far we’ve received no such proposal, but if we were offered the chance, I’m sure a collaborative project would be interesting to do.

Are you easy in the company of architects? There’s no rivalry between you?

There’s no rivalry. I’m not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. They have their own approach to projects and to creating them and I have mine. I don’t understand the way they do their design work, the way they trace everything out, and I don’t understand how they can make a model and plant 20 trees around it, on the model. There’s something slightly absurd about a model of a tree. Of course, in most cases it’s not they who do it. And of course, we too do not simply knock things together. But I don’t use this kind of complicated mathematical calculation, and yet in my projects there’s never anything that comes off or falls down. There was a pillar that fell, but that was because it hadn’t been dug into the ground properly. But everything else is still standing. It’s like in a village when they build an izba [peasant hut] or a bathhouse or shed – no one ever makes any mathematical calculations. And nothing ever falls down.

No, we have no connection with architects. For me the main thing is figurativeness. How a thing looks, how it stands, how it looks in its natural surroundings. I’m an artist; for me figurativeness is more important. For instance, Borders of Empire is an absolutely visual object. There was this land, which became overgrown with forest, and then we came along and built on it what seem to be the remains of a civilization – and it’s not important what kind of civilization this was exactly, how Carthage was organized – maybe someone held ritual processions there or there was a council of some kind, but this is no longer important. What is important is that it stands before us, that it’s majestic to look at, and that it leaves an impression that is profound and memorable.

How do you picture Nikola-Lenivets in 20 years’ time?

Nikola-Lenivets in 20 years’ time is a space filled with projects, and yet it remains within the same boundaries, has not expanded. There’s no point in it expanding; let nature remain and let the grass grow. The projects are always new, but at the same time the old projects are not forgotten and there is no repetition – but there are some beautiful ruins. For instance, if a project turns out to be highly successful for some reason, it automatically becomes a ruin and is preserved – although, of course, this is a deviation from the concept that this art should live its life and then die. In general, I find the idea of restoration and recreation strange; I just don’t understand it. But the way that contemporary architecture dies, leaving absolutely nothing behind it, means there’s nothing left to conserve. Modern architecture mostly turns to dust; it simply goes up in smoke. It’s not at all the same thing as a village shed – which starts to sway, then the roof starts to slide off, first one side subsides, then the other, and you end up with something picturesque. Many of my designs are based on picturesqueness.
And this is the way it should be at the festival too – it’s nature, after all. Land art probably cannot come to an end; it should – and can – be constantly taking on nourishment. Of course, it can veer off into design. And this might happen to the stuff that I do too. But it’s not what I want. In general, I’m lazy. One of the villagers even said to me once when I started complaining of having to work too hard, “No, Kolya, this isn’t work. Work is when it’s hard, dirty, cold, and they don’t pay you any money. But what you’re doing is not work.”

Are you sad that your projects disappear?

Yes. But then people die too. All projects are unrepeatable. No one is going to reproduce them. They existed and then they died. If they died beautifully, all honour to them; if they died without beauty, then they were taken apart and that was it. A project exists and is recorded and photographed. And then it is no longer. I’m always being asked why I don’t do my Hay Tower or Woodpile again. But, no, I won’t. Those projects are beautiful memories, but now I need to think up something new. Everything in this village happens once only. Every project is born, live, and dies. It may be beautiful or it may not, but it has its own life, and when it dies, everything is over. No, it is not forgotten. But nothing is repeated.

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

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’.