Ivan Kramskoy, an artist whose pen was somewhat more accurate than a brush, wrote about the great Russian landscape painter Ivan Shishkin "Shishkin - the milestone of the Russian landscape." It meant that before Shishkin and after the Russian landscape - two different types of art. Before him, the landscape is a decent picture above the table in the office. After - the epic image of Russia, the subject of national pride. Remembering this quote, I will say that Nikolai Polissky is a milestone of Russian land art. Before him, these were the experiences of artistic marginals. After - landscape festivals, gathering thousands of crowds of people. This is a fundamental shift in the structure of the functioning of contemporary art in Russia. Therefore - a milestone.
The history of Russian land-art is short, the predecessors of Nikolai Polissky here, in fact, are only the group "Collective Actions" by Andrei Monastyrsky, which existed from 1975 to 1989. There are few similarities between them and the differences are more important than the similarities. “KD” in their social functioning were a marginal art group, their art was considered as a variant of conceptualism, and in their land-actions they relied on the traditions of zaumi and absurdity. The specifics of the existence of art under Soviet conditions made this group an extremely important phenomenon - society was latently based on the idea of a rigid vertical hierarchy of spiritual values, and the most hermetic art was perceived as the most elite. "KD" were part of the center of the artistic elite of late non-conformism. But they represented such a type of art existence, when it a priori is not understood by anyone except a narrow group of adepts, and is a kind of ritual for initiates, including scenarios of parodying both the ritual itself and initiation. To paraphrase a famous author, we can say about these artists that they are terribly far from the people.
The unique shift that Nikolai Polissky made is the change in the type of art functioning. His works are created by residents of the village of Nikola-Lenivets. This should not be overestimated - the idea of the works, of course, comes from the artist, it did not occur to the peasants themselves to build a ziggurat from hay or an aqueduct from snow. But don't underestimate either. It has never occurred to anyone in the world to cross conceptualism with folk crafts.
Two circumstances appear to have played a role in this discovery. First, the artistic experience of the Mitki group, to which he belonged in the 80-90s. Nikolay Polissky. Mitkov's artistic strategy can be described, with a certain degree of coarseness, as a conceptual primitive. The classical avant-garde, as you know, very actively contacted the primitive (Henri Rousseau, Pirosmani). Artists-Mitka”, in my opinion, tried to compose what a primitive could be based on an installation, action, performance.
A primitive is a step towards folk art, at least, it is no longer suitable for it nonsense and absurdity. The primitive appeals to clarity. But there is still a long way to go to folk crafts. The simplicity of the primitive is provocative, it appears where you don't expect it - in highly professional art. The simplicity of folk craft is natural and does not provoke anyone.
To understand what Polissky proposed, one must take into account that by education he is a ceramic artist. Experiences of Russian artistic crafts of the Art Nouveau era at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, workshops of Talashkin and Abramtsev for him, a kind of primer, a natural way of action. It is from here, as it seems to me, that the fantastic idea of combining folk crafts with conceptualism is born - you cannot deliberately imagine this, this fantastic constellation was born simply from the experience of life.
All this is a necessary preface. The most important question for me is what turned out to be the content of these conceptual folk crafts. Nikolai Polissky built a ziggurat, an aqueduct, a medieval castle, a column like Trajan's column, a columnar street like Palmyra, a triumphal arch like the Parisian one, towers like Shukhov's and Ostankinskaya ones. They do not literally look like their prototypes, but as if rumor orally conveyed to the peasants of Nikola-Lenivets a rumor about these structures, and they built them the way they imagined them from the stories. These are archetypal plots of architecture, formulas of architectural eras.
The same plots in one form or another turned out to be the main ones for the "paper architecture" of the 80s. Ancient ruins, medieval castles and majestic towers can be found in the fantasies of Mikhail Filippov, Alexander Brodsky, Ilya Utkin, Mikhail Belov and other wallet-makers. I am far from suggesting that Nikolai Polissky is under the influence of these masters, that would be ridiculous. But how can one explain the appeal to the same topics?
Here it is necessary to say a few words about the specifics of paper design in the 80s. These were projects submitted to conceptual architecture competitions in Japan. Young Russian architects won these competitions in large numbers, in fact every year from 1981 to 1989 they received several prizes.
On the one hand, it was a continuation of the traditional line of Soviet conceptual design, primarily avant-garde, and partly the 60s. Conceptual design is a kind of myth of the Russian architectural school. Due to the fact that most of the projects of the Russian architectural avant-garde remained unrealized, but influenced world modernism, in Russia it is traditionally believed that conceptually our school is extremely strong. On the inertia of this myth and on its continuation, paper architecture was built. However, it was very different from previous eras.
Avant-garde conceptual design was essentially tied to social utopia. In today's Russia, which has rejected communism, this aspect of the architectural avant-garde is preferred not to be noticed, considering constructivism as a formal non-ideological experiment. But such a view significantly impoverishes avant-garde architecture. The very characteristics of the form that the avant-garde artists were looking for - novelty, asceticism, explosive, alarmist nature of architecture - all this was generated by the revolution. Russian conceptual design of the avant-garde was directly related to social utopianism, and it is to this material that the term "architectural utopia" is applied in the strict sense.
In contrast, the 80s wallet architects. due to the specifics of relations between the late Soviet intelligentsia and the Soviet regime, they experienced a severe disgust not only for the communist idea, but in general for any social issue. In paper projects of the 80s, you can find many different ideas, formal scenarios, but social pathos is almost never found in them. These are not utopias, these are architectural fantasies.
Generally speaking, fantasy is a free business, but it has been noticed that different eras fantasize in different directions. If we talk about late Soviet times, then for some reason it so happened that the dominant direction of fantasizing turned out to be the search for archetypes and symbols, to a greater extent in the past than in the future. The culture was interested in myths, ancient texts, forgotten meanings, secret signs. In part, perhaps, this can be considered as a kind of postmodernism, although in the very approach to these matters some fundamentalism was inappropriate for postmodernism. Irony was not peculiar to this culture. This desire to reach some fundamental foundations of culture was equally characterized by examples of high humanities (works by Sergei Averintsev, Vladimir Toporov), elite (Andrei Tarkovsky) and mass (Mark Zakharov) cinema, late painting of non-conformism (Dmitry Plavinsky) and theatrical scenery (Boris Messerer) - it captured the most diverse areas of culture.
It seems to me that Nikolai Polissky's installations grow out of this very culture. He builds not Shukhov's tower, but the archetype of this tower, not the castle, but the archetype of the castle. The very characteristics of his objects - mystery, symbolism, timelessness, abstractness - make these things quite consonant with the spirit of the bygone era of the 70-80s.
This is what explains, in my opinion, those similarities with the paper architecture of the 80s, which I mentioned above. And here the actual architectural history begins. After the end of the USSR, the nature of Russian architectural life changed dramatically. The country is experiencing ten years of a construction boom, architects are inundated with orders, they are no longer interested in anything other than buildings. Russian conceptual design stopped, in fact, wallets were the last generation of Russian architects who would be interested in architecture as an idea, not as a practice, and first of all - business practice.
I would say that thanks to Nikolai Polissky, Russian conceptual design has not died. The peculiarity of this conceptual design, to use the expression of Aron Betsky, “architecture apart from buildings”, is not only that here we discover some new ideas, which subsequently inspire real architecture. More often than not, this does not happen. However, conceptual design clearly shows how the school lives, what is the structure of its desires. And from this point of view, the works of Nikolai Polissky are incredibly remarkable.
Let's assume that we are primarily concerned with conceptual design. What about a school that has such concepts?
First, she dreams of unique, fantastic, incredible objects. Russian conceptual design is still, as in the "paper" times, not interested in social programs, new models of settlement, the search for new forms of life. She dreams of erecting objects whose significance would be correlated with Roman aqueducts, Middle Eastern ziggurats and crusader castles. She dreams of amusement buildings. This is a rather rare type of architectural fantasy, when the reflection of architecture is closed on it, on formal searches. They do not dream of a new life. They dream of fantastically beautiful architecture that would take your breath away.
Secondly, I would say that the main problematic of the school is some apprehension, doubts about the relevance of their dreams. If we talk about the works of Nikolai Polissky in architectural terms, it turns out that the main content of these works is concern for the fit of the object into the landscape. I think that this is what allows us to speak of these works as architecture. In general, classical land art is not at all concerned with this issue, on the contrary, it constantly brings into the landscape something that cannot be there, and never was - cellophane packaging, metal grass, sand and pebbles from another hemisphere. Polissky rushes about with his fields as with his own children, long and diligently inventing forms that would ideally fit them, which would grow out of them. For him, planting metal grass is like putting on a barbed wire wig for a child. My dream is to build a tower so as not to hurt the ground.
Finally, the third feature that I would like to draw your attention to. Again, if we talk about Polissky's creations as architecture, then one cannot but pay attention to the fact that all these structures are in fact ruins. 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 aesthetics of Nikolai Polissky is closest to the architecture of Mikhail Filippov (see vol. 1, p. 52). The decisive argument in favor of the appropriateness of architecture is time - the building is done as if it already existed. The basis of the legitimacy of architecture in this school is historical rootedness, and history is easily introduced into nature, so that virgin fields suddenly receive a historical dimension for millennia - from the time when ziggurats and aqueducts were erected here. I would say that if today's Western architecture clarifies its relationship primarily with nature, then Russian - with history.
The most interesting thing is that virtually any significant work of Russian architecture is self-determined in these coordinates. An incredible attraction that is appropriate and historically rooted - this is the ideal formula for today's Russian architecture. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Norman Foster's Russia Tower equally embody this formula. We can say that Russian and Western architects in Russia today are competing with each other over who will embody this concept.
Every architect knows the feeling when you go out to the site, and suddenly you feel that the earth already knows roughly what should be built on it, what it dreams of. These are some kind of proto-images, which are not yet there, but they seem to be, they are hiding in yards, alleys, gateways or in the folds of the landscape, in the grass, on the edges of some foggy clots of appearance that must be seen, which must be listened to … The historian is forced to admit that in each epoch, for some reason, different prototypes grow, and if Corbusier, probably, everywhere seemed to be some kind of cars for housing, then Diller and Scofidio were already directly drops of fog. Some - and very few - of these prototypes are destined to germinate and be realized, the majority - to die without a trace, and some architects very keenly feel the tragedy of this death (see Nikolai Lyzlov. Vol. 1, p. 41). Nikolai Polissky learned to grasp these images.
It materializes what the earth dreams of today and here. This is not architecture yet, but nevertheless it is some rather definite statement about what it should be. It should be such that it will take your breath away. It should fit perfectly into the landscape. And it should look as if it has always stood here and has even collapsed a little.
The author of this text met Nikolai Polissky in 1998, when a group of Mitkov artists staged, together with Sergei Tkachenko (see the volume "Russian Architects", p. 51) an action called "Manilovsky Project". The bottom line was to declare the entire urban planning program of Moscow at that time as the fulfillment of the dreams of the landowner Manilov from Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls, and these are such fantasies in their purest form, not constrained by any pragmatism and any fantasy responsibility. “He thought about the prosperity of a friendly life, about how good it would be to live with a friend on the bank of some river, then a bridge was built across this river, then a huge house with such a high belvedere that one could even see Moscow from there and there to drink tea in the open air in the evening and talk about some pleasant subjects. " It was a rare moment of the "friendly life" of architects and artists - after that Sergei Tkachenko became director of the Institute for the General Plan of Moscow, that is, he actually began to form the Moscow urban planning policy, and Nikolai Polissky went to the village of Nikola-Lenivets to implement his unique artistic project. But the historian is pleased to find that they set off from the same point, and he even had the good fortune to be present.
Since 2006, the Arch-Stoyanie architectural festival has been held in the village of Nikola-Lenivets. For the third year in a row, leading Russian architects visit Nikolai Polissky and try to create installations that are in tune with what he is doing. This is not to say that they are already succeeding, while their objects are strongly inferior to him in artistic quality. But they try very hard, and this in itself is unexpected and entertaining. Polissky plays the role of the artistic guru of today's Russian architecture.
This school is still incredibly distinctive. She has her own conceptual design, but it now exists in a somewhat unexpected area. I think Piranesi would be terribly surprised if he found out that the genre of architectural fantasy he discovered has turned into a folk craft in Russia.
