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.
Like his contemporaries in land art Andy Goldsworthy and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Polissky takes photos of his works 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.”