Nikolay Polissky

In 1990, Nikolay Polissky, a ceramist by trade and predominantly a landscape painter, moved to the small abandoned village of Nikola-Lenivets, in the region of Kaluga, approximately 200 kilometres from Moscow. He forged a close alliance with the villagers there and started in 2000 working on artistic projects involving Land Art, architecture and walk-in sculptures. Over time various tower-like structures have come and gone, some taking on the Babylonian shapes of the ziggurats, others evoking medieval fortresses, another the famous broadcasting towers of Moscow… These projects, carried out with natural materials sourced on the spot, integrate into the landscape and anchor themselves within a territory. Above all, they are characterised by a community dimension essential to the artist, both in their implementation and the use that they provide. They are ephemeral works, evolving according to the seasons, as they decay and are recycled, even set alight to mark popular celebrations such as Mardi Gras. Beyond this transitory existence, however, they remain etched in the collective memory and embody a form of social utopia. Polissky’s projects in this village have resulted not just in an increase in activity but also in other artists taking up residence. Furthermore, 2006 saw the creation of the international architecture festival ArchStoyanie, enabling this rural province to enjoy a cultural upswing.
Polissky designed Large Hadron Collider on commission for Mudam. The work was freely inspired by the world’s largest particle accelerator bearing the same name, which was in- augurated in 2008 next to Geneva. With this series of monumental constructions in elm wood and rush, the artist occupies the Grand Hall as well as one of the former moats of the fortress on which the museum is built: various futuristic machines, reminiscent of power stations equipped with powerful generators from which thick bundles of cabling emerge, project over the visitor. The handcrafted workmanship and rustic features of these structures evoke ancient objects from a long tradition of popular art, while also calling to mind the Russian modernistand utopian architectures of the 20th century. Large Hadron Collider marks a reorientation in Polissky’s approach while remaining a collective adventure firmly linked to Nikola-Lenivets, during which the artist and his team collected the wood and produced all the individual parts of the structure before reassembling it at the museum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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