Nikolai Polissky, the Russian artist, by the Lighthouse on the river Ugra in the village of the Nikola-Lenivets in the Kaluga region south of Moscow.
Nikola-Lenivets, about a four bumpy hour’s drive south of Moscow in the Kaluga region, has inspired the land-art creations of Nikolai Polissky, and has become both a magnet for Russian contemporary artists and a name on the international art scene.
Mr. Polissky and villagers-turned-artisans under his training have crafted installations for the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and for the museum of modern art in Luxembourg — a wooden rendition of the Large Hadron Collider — and deer for Philippe Starck’s revamp of Le Royal Monceau hotel in Paris, which are to ship out on July 1.
A white-bearded bear of a man with twinkling blue eyes and a beaming smile, Mr. Polissky, 53, receives visitors in his airy dacha — perched on a river bluff and overlooking a church — at a huge wooden table laden with kulebyaka, a traditional cabbage pie, this one baked by his wife, and a state-of-the art laptop.
“I lived here for 10 years,” said Mr. Polissky, a native of Moscow who arrived in Nikola-Lenivets in 1989 as a painter and a member of Mitki, a whimsical Soviet underground art collective started in Leningrad, where he studied. “Then I was pulled into the actual landscape.”
The village is in a national park called Ugra and had just a handful of surviving full-time residents before Mr. Polissky arrived, accompanied by the Moscow architect Vasily Shchetinin. Many people there and in surrounding villages were left without work after the collective farm fell apart. Vodka became a main distraction.
“Everyone drank,” the artist said of village life before 2000, when the art projects began. “People were simply dying off. It was like a strike against the authorities.”
Now, works made under Mr. Polissky’s direction of logs, branches, twigs and metals are scattered along nearby riverbanks and fields.
An installation of double-headed eagles perched astride monumental logs called “Granitsy Imperii” (Borders of the Empire) watches over the edge of the village, along with “Zhar-Ptsitsa,” (Firebird), a flame-shooting metal construction. “Mayak,” a 16-meter, or about 50-foot, lighthouse made of impossibly bent elm tree branches, has stood on the banks of the Ugra River since 2004.
As Mr. Polissky speaks, his back to a window that runs the length of his house, a bald head in a multicolored knit skull cap bops past. Oleg Kulik, a curator, performance artist and photographer, glides into the house.
Mr. Kulik, a devout Buddhist, bows, then hugs Mr. Polissky and sits down to a plate of steaming boiled potatoes. A dreadlocked artist named Hermes wanders the grounds barefoot. They have come with a group of Moscow artists on a scouting mission for Archstoyanie, an architecture festival created by Mr. Polissky, Mr. Shchetinin and others in 2006 and that now attracts thousands each year.
“This is a magical place,” said Mr. Kulik. “Kolya was born here as an artist,” he said, referring to Mr. Polissky by his nickname. “He gathers strength here. It is very rare that real artists are born. Kolya is evolving very much. This is also amazing. It is usually the young who evolve.”
Mr. Polissky’s first local effort, “Snegoviki” (Snowmen), in 2000 was just that, a field of snowmen made by the villagers and photographed by Mr. Polissky for a contemporary art exhibition in Moscow.
“It’s Russian but archetypal for all, understandable to everyone,” Mr. Polissky said of the work.
It was also an experiment in post-Soviet labor management. The villagers were paid by Mr. Polissky for their time.
“They do this so effortlessly and gracefully,” he said, “they simply need to be given this motivation.” But “initiative is very hard here,” he continued, offering a tour of his new workshop, adjacent to his house and the former church that had served as shop. “They always lived in a collective farm here, in some collective. They don’t have that independent energy, entrepreneurship that exists in the West or in Moscow.”
The “Snegoviki” created a furor at the Moscow fair, and many thought the work was a fluke. That spring, Mr. Polissky resisted pressure to create the obvious sequel, a scarecrow.
“I went on the right path again, based on the material,” he said. “The snow that had melted, then grass grew. We cut it and started to make something from the hay,” and, soon “this hay ziggurat appeared.”
Dozens of villagers joined in the cutting and raking. The result was a 30-ton tower of hay with all kinds of historical and mythical associations.
“Why this ziggurat?” Mr. Polissky said. “Because it always seemed to me that ancient architecture, say Babylonian, is like a cosmos, something very significant, like the pyramids, something profoundly mysterious, something profoundly important.”
In 2002, the villagers built a Roman aqueduct from snow, and soon they began creating projects on the road, from the trendy Art-Klyazma festival near Moscow, to the historic main square near the Kremlin in Nizhny Novgorod, to parks in the Russian capital.
Mr. Polissky, who splits his time between Moscow and Nikola-Lenivets, now has a monthly budget of 500,000 rubles, or about $16,000, for the operation, which goes under the name Nikola-Lenivets Handicrafts. His craftsmen earn extra for stints abroad and engagements with Slava Polunin, the clown who recreates the “Snegoviki” in Moscow.
Mr. Polissky believes contemporary art should have a multitude of interpretations, and be accessible both to villagers and urban sophisticates.
“Art should be understood without any explanations,” he said.
On a sunny Saturday in May, Aleksey Bukovsky, 28, and Aleksey Gusev, 34, were hard at work carving deer for the Paris hotel and discussing the pluses and minuses of the elm, walnut, cherry, apple and oak being used.
“It comes by itself,” Mr. Gusev joked of the muse behind their efforts. “It comes spontaneously. One hundred grams of vodka and the muse awakens.”
The Archstoyanie festival, set for July 24 and 25, will be devoted to outdoor installations of contemporary art. Its theme is the labyrinth as a symbol of the quest for God or, as Mr. Kulik, the event’s curator, dubbed it: “The Nine Muses of the Labyrinth. A Forest Liturgy.”
Participating artists include Anatoly Osmolovsky and Evgeny Asse.
Mr. Polissky worries that Archstoyanie is becoming too commercial, too organized and too trendy. But he is well aware that contemporary art in Russia these days needs official support to flourish, and he does network with gallery owners, businessmen and politicians for the sponsorship needed to turn the region into a contemporary art capital.
“I would like the boys to be able to live independently,” Mr. Polissky said of his workers. “It’s clear that they won’t survive in the field of big art, but if we succeed in creating a brand they can probably exist for some time.”
Besides, pre-revolutionary Russia had a tradition of village artists. Maybe post-revolutionary Russia could, too.
“We are fashioning this life from scratch,” he said. “Go, find a stick, and make something.”