The artist and mystic Oleg Kulik, who is still more associated with the image of the "dog-man" among the general public, took the post of curator only this year and he led the complex process of preparing and holding the festival together with the chief architect of the project, Vasily Shchetinin. In the same year, for the first time, its usual leader and inspirer Nikolai Polissky did not participate in Archstoyania. It is no secret that in recent years the artist who came up with this magnificent landscape park and its best objects has become increasingly distant from the festival, at the origins of which he once stood. More and more objects appeared on the fields of Nikolo-Lenivets, but no ideology uniting them was born, comparable to the intellectual "fuse" of the first festivals. Kulik was invited to the project precisely for an ideological update - and he, I must say, coped with his task.
Kulik decided to return the "published" festival in order to the bosom of genuine land-art, i.e. symbiosis of art and nature, affecting the consciousness and subconsciousness of man and returning him to the "mystery of the original creation." As the main metaphor and symbol of this return, Oleg Kulik chose a labyrinth and in his curatorial video messages interpreted it as something leading from the plane of the landscape to the plane of the spirit. "The labyrinth is a great walk, in it you can lose your usual self and reassemble yourself in a new quality." The site of a transformative walk was the Versailles area - fields and birch groves on the right side of the park entrance, transformed last year by the Atelier 710 group into a “regular park” with straight alleys and bosquets. According to the curator's idea, the objects of the Labyrinth had to be searched for, correlating with the map, but in the 40-degree heat there were not so many hunters to study the ingenious scheme, so the main reference point for the guests was the "Thread of Ariadne" by the "Themis" group, which surrounded the grove and indicated the direction movement.
Following the trodden paths through the windbreak, one could open the "9 keys of the labyrinth" one after the other, that is, see and evaluate the "statements" of all thirty-odd participants of the "Archstoyanie" -2010. By the way, among the latter this year were both the leaders of modern architecture (for example, "Project Meganom" and Eugene Ass), and the heroes of Russian contemporary art Anatoly Osmolovsky, "Blue Noses" and others. However, it should be admitted that the popularity of objects among the public was determined not by the height of the conceptual thought embedded in them, but by the extent to which they could provide visitors with protection from the heat. So, the most "populated" were water attractions: "Temple of Water" by Marina Zvyagintseva - a rotunda fountain made of pipes and baths, and "Water" "Project Meganom", which had its own pond. The audience also highly appreciated those objects in which one could hide from the scorching sun - for example, under the shade of the forest in the "Room" with the old piano of Arseny Zhilyaev or in a bar made of hay.
And, by the way, there was not a single labyrinth in the traditional sense of the word in Versailles. And if one of the participants tried to create something confusing and complex (for example, Alexander Sokolov and his "Invasion"), then someone, on the contrary, went from the opposite. For example, Evgeny Ass mowed a straight and even strip in the field in memory of Leo Tolstoy's departure from Yasnaya Polyana.
Away from everyone, namely in the old cowshed on the way to the St. Nicholas Church, the curator himself (together with Denis Kryuchkov and longtime colleague Hermes Zaygott) placed his object called "Vespers of the Virgin". But the super-idea of this artistic message, unfortunately, remained unclear, because the generator that fed the plasma in the middle of the barn ran out of fuel too quickly.
And yet there is no doubt that it is thanks to Kulik that Archstoyanie has changed. At first it was a nice meeting place for a narrow group of architects, then it became a place for Kaluga residents and Muscovites, and today both of these hypostases in it have finally harmoniously combined. And although Archstoyanie still remains the patrimony (and probably always will be) of Nikolai Polissky, since it is his facilities that are the main “beacons” of the giant landscape park, now it has every reason to claim the status of the Kaluga “woodstock”, in where everyone can find space for both mass entertainment and solitary meditation.
