The confrontation between man and civilization, declared as the theme of the festival, began 10 kilometers before Nikola, where an impenetrable traffic jam formed from cars, half Kaluga, half Moscow. For 5 km before "Archstoyanie" militia blocked the passage altogether, so streams rushed into the village on foot, through the mountains of the wonderful Ugrian reserve.
Once settling in the solitude of an almost deceased village, Nikolai Polissky began to make his own man-made reserve in the vicinity of nature and with a dozen local residents who had contracted to join him in an artistic artel. Could he have thought of the hundreds and thousands of pilgrims who find themselves here in anticipation of the spectacle? If it goes on like this, then the landscape, charming in its silence and pristine nature, will rather resemble the Moscow Khodynka on the days of festivities.
What is so attractive about the arch-stanzas' inventions? For example, Moscow took a walk on Shrovetide, the sweep of another European carnival. But Nicholas is different. Here you will not surprise anyone with folk ensembles, merrymaking and pancakes. In the center of the festival there is always some kind of event, conceptual, interesting, spectacular. Already that winter, something must be burning here, paying tribute to the farewell of winter. Last winter they burned a "rocket" twisted from a vine; last year a cast-iron Firebird - "gravicappa" was blazing in the middle of the field, belching from its beak and wings pillars of fire and clouds of sparks.
This time they burned “Fire Baba”, made by Konstantin Larin and the DOMUS magazine, a three-meter doll, planted on a roller coaster, like on a samovar. A bright red woman with curvaceous forms replaced the traditional straw effigy of winter. Children crawled under the hem of her and rolled down, until a smoke suddenly went out from under her skirt, and the whole huge figure quickly began to fire. In the context of the crisis, it turned out cleverly: the struggle of natural and social elements, where fire senselessly devours thousands spent on the object. They were voluntarily given over to burning, performing some kind of cleansing act. After cataclysms, be it last year's Noah's flood, or a fire, or an economic default built into this line, a new life cycle comes. The people rejoice, and the crisis is won over by the element of unbridled dashing fun, which has long been generous with spectacles.
Vasily Shchetinin built his Gilded Calf next to the Fire Baba, and for some reason wanted to burn it as a symbol of all-devouring consumption and its flesh-of-flesh - crisis. But conceptually, this would not be entirely correct, because this bull, according to the author's idea, in spite of the golden calf on Wall Street in New York is not at all aggressive. He is not a gold ingot of universal worship, but rather a protector - not without reason his torso, knocked out of beams and planks, resembles the skeleton of a ship. Shchetinin's Taurus is also an ark on which one can survive, get out of the crisis, hiding in its impromptu "hold", where an exhibition of photographs from the summer "Archstoyanie" unfolded. He is also a tribune, like Soviet propaganda structures, from which you can look into the future, and also have fun dancing, as folk ensembles did.
The third oilseed action was the launch of the inflatable "Noah's Wife" into the sky by architects from the "Rozhdestvenka" bureau. According to the plan, the flight was supposed to end with the flying woman breaking up into separate figures of people and animals, symbolizing, probably, the renewal of human and animal species after the flood and, again, the beginning of a new cycle. In the end, however, they limited themselves to the flight of one single figure, more like a mermaid.
What is surprising in all this is the elusive fragility and variability of land art objects, which, in general, is its essence. Most of the festival objects live only once, some fly away irrevocably in a few minutes, others are burned, others decay, rot, covered with moss, integrating into natural cycles with their eternal circulation. The summer arks, pulled out to the field as regular exhibits, are now frozen and turned from rafts into ice huts. The giant Firebird has cooled down and stands, rusted, like an artifact of an ancient civilization of some technogenic pagans. The Babylonian "cooling tower" has grown again, towering over the open woodland with a giant bell, and in "Nikolin's Ukha" now they do not listen attentively to the silence, but loudly and merrily flop into the snowdrifts, soon, probably, the hill will roll out under it.
Archstoyanskiye possession is an arbitrarily changing open-air museum, in which objects undergo constant transformation, the flow of matter from one state to another. Nikolai Polissky, meanwhile, is not going to make something eternal, he takes the cyclical nature of destruction and rebirth as the basic law of life, including art. By the way, this time he did not exhibit anything, but his work, apparently, is in full swing - in the barn near the church, blanks of the next objects are piled.
When everything in Nicholas flows sedately, in its own way, as befits the Russian outback, such human invasions, as it was on Shrovetide, with the accompanying entertainment, such as performances of show groups or riding a helicopter, seem unlikely. Here you want to enjoy the charming views with rare birches, climb into the "Ear", listen to the forest and the river, or hide in the "Blindage", not to be frightened by the sounds of nature. Land art is art that grows into the environment and presupposes a spectator-contemplator. Not surprisingly, when it becomes the property of the cheery crowd, something is lost. Let's hope that the reserve will painlessly survive the festival shock, and when hundreds of cars are gone, the idyll of nature, artists and their works will be restored there.
