Mudam Luxembourg. Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.
Curators: Clement Minighetti, Marie-Noelle Farcy (Mudam), Olga Makhroff
Co-authors of the project:
Alexey Gusev,
Yury Klimkin,
Sergey Noskov,
Evgeny Zelensky,
Alexey Bukovsky,
Oleg Bezuglov,
Vyacheslav Kiselyov,
Vladimir Streban,
Dmitry Mozgunov,
Alexey Godovikov,
Viktor Matkovsky,
Alexey Kostrzhevskiy
Nikolay Polissky is the only land-artist in modern Russian Art. Starting 2000th he was creating most his works in the village Nikola Lenivets, the Kaluga Region, four hours drive from Moscow, from expedient materials and in co-authorship with the local villagers. His art may be called Utopian, both in social and art sense. And moreover, this Utopia is materialized Utopia. In social determination, Polissky succeeded in depicting and reviving a semi-abandoned village, with help of Art turning it into a real cultural center (an international festival of landscape architecture “ArchStoyanie” has been passing here since 2003) and making its inhabitants real participants of a creative process. As to the artistic project of the artist, it is some kind of growing symbolic forms of world architecture in the Russian soil, from ancient times to modernism: the Roman snow aqueduct, Babylonian ziggurat of sheaves, branchwood constructed resemblances of Vladimir Shukhov’s Radiotower or the sky-scraper Defence Arch. Made of local materials and in technique referring to traditional village craftworks or funs, they discover universalism and naturalness of not only archetypical constructions, common to all cultures, but also of some natural phenomena like bird nests or beaver dams.
«Large Hadron Collider» is a work from a new project, invented by Nikolay Polissky. Now the unpuddled mirror of people's conscience must reflect not classic inheritance of the World Architecture, but the latest scientific achievements. Strictly speaking, there was a work of this kind by Polissky – “Baykonur”, 2005: a huge installation consisting of models of rockets and launching systems entwined of twig. First exhibited in the yard of the Tretyakov’s gallery during the First Moscow Biennale of Modern Art, this installation was then transferred to Nikola Lenivets, where later it was burnt in the course of traditional Shrovetide fest. It was already there when science could have been read through prism of ritual and magic. Flame made the interlink between space rockets and their twigged copies. And the outflow to extraterrestrial space turned into burning bringing to memory funeral pyres that provide the dead to pass to the afterworld.
The «Hadron Collider» by Polissky and his co-authors, first of all interests with that half-mystical aureole mantling modern science. Contemporary scientists for Polissky are kind of oracles, privy to secrets of universe hidden for ordinary people, and maybe even capable to influence forces ruling the world. And that is not that far from truth: few of us can really explain how the Large Hadron Collider is constructed and what purposes it serves. Scientific world view, same as magical or religious world view may only be taken for granted. The « Large Hadron Collider» by Polissky and co-authors is a simulated implementation of that very machine, from which God may emerge.
Irina Kulik
Drawings
Creating the installation in Russia. Nikola-Lenivets
Authors
