The city of good intentions
Alisa Savitskaya

Nizhny Novgorod is a big city in Russia located at the confluence of the Oka and Volga River. Founded in 1221, the city is composed of several larger industrial districts and the historical centre today. The writer Maxim Gorky was born in Nizhny Novgorod and also lived here; in this city, the engineer Vladimir Shukhov presented his one-of-a-kind metal constructions for the first time at the 16th All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896; some of the very big Soviet factories were located here; this was the place of exile for the inventor of the hydrogen bomb and famous dissident Andrei Sakharov; here, extremely courageous and innovative reforms were implemented under the direction of the politician Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2015, over the first decade of new Russia. After the decay of the architectural and historical heritage had to be noticed in the nineteen nineties, the gradual annihilation of entire streets and quarters that gave way to new residential buildings followed. Today, life in the city centre of Nizhny Novgorod can be understood as a complex drama – wonderful natural spaces, decaying old buildings, and a new city of nepotistic capitalism rising from the construction pits.

These painful transformations of the urban space also did not leave the art scene untouched: In the 2010s, local artists started to make the city accessible for themselves, and went beyond the scope of street art subculture with regard to both content and the media used. Monumental images measuring several metres with allegorical subjects appeared on old houses in their last days, and also objects that were integrated into the facades. Nizhny Novgorod was transformed into an art laboratory in the open air over only a few years so that a completed artwork as well as surfaces for one’s own artistic statements can be found in almost every courtyard. This was exactly the situation into which the artist Bernhard Wolf plunged in the summer of 2014.

Wolf has had close ties with Russia for a long time; he is an expert of the Russian art scene, he can be considered a full member of the circle around the iconic artist Aleksandr Petljura, and has visited post-Soviet Russia many times. His knowledge of both the Russian language and culture as well as the specific organisation of Russian life allowed him to not only be a tourist but a real explorer. Yet Wolf had only been present in the art scene of Russia’s capital before he visited Nizhny Novgorod in 2014, and had not at all been in touch with provincial Russia.

Bernhard Wolf’s interaction with Nizhny Novgorod unfolded on two levels: On the one hand, he collaborated with the local artists Artjom Filatov and Vladimir Chernyshov, who helped him explore the urban space and the inner life, which is invisible from the outside. The artistic interventions he realised with support provided by Chernyshov and Filatov were illegal in the strict sense of the law. Two large-format works, created on old wooden houses from the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries, were only agreed upon with the residents but not with the municipal administration. The first one of these two works, “Rock”, was conceived in Nizhny Novgorod, and is obviously related to a specific characteristic of this city. The second work, the portrait of a little Eskimo boy, was selected by the artist from subjects he had previously sketched in his conversations with the residents of a street that had previously been opened up for artistic purposes by representatives of a new wave of Nizhny Novgorod art (Andrei Drushajev, Vladimir Chernyshov, the group “Toj“). This work by Bernhard Wolf inscribed itself harmoniously into the local context, and today, not only this work is being shown in the frame of excursions dealing with street art in Nizhny Novgorod but also a miniaturized copy that has been applied to the wall of the same house by an unknown child’s hand.

Yet, the project with the biggest dimension “Earth”, was carried out with institutional support by the Nizhny Novgorod Arsenal, one of the leading centres of contemporary art in Russia. The lettering “I come from Earth and have good intentions” of a length of several metres was installed under the pylon of a cableway on the beach of the city. It has been one of the city’s main attractions since 2012; the small cabins suspended from cables move down from the higher riverbank, they “fly” over the meadows of a river bay and return at the starting point again after 3.6 kilometres. At the same time, the construction of the cableway was driven by the need to link Nizhny Novgorod to its satellite city Bor for the benefit of commuters. These commuters from the working-class town and the residents of the happy megapolis, who move to and fro between the two river banks either because they really need to or just for fun, also were this project’s addressees. During 2014, the lettering existed in an original version, which addressed extraterrestrial civilisations, and also in the form of photo documentation which was shown in the frame of “Desiring the Real”, an exhibition of Austrian art in the Nizhny Novgorod Arsenal, and subsequently in the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow. Yet in the spring of 2015, the local population began to edit this artwork and to replace individual words little by little (“I come from Bor and have no good intentions”, “I come from Bor and have miserood (a construct composed of ‘miserable’ and ‘good’) intentions”. At the time when I wrote these lines, the residents of Bor had the last word and transformed Bernhard Wolf’s work into the declaration “I come from Bor and have good intentions.” The only artistic statement that was not exposed to corrections and amendments from the part of the local population was the above-mentioned work “Rock”. This work is contextually related to the litero-centric tradition of Moscow Conceptualism, which was established by Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov and Eric Bulatov. Their works are based on the relationship of texts and visual representation. In Wolf’s work, the word “rock” stands in semantic opposition to a wave it illustrates. Through this, the artist carries the conflict-laden relationship between an image and a word to the extremes.

“Rock” could be found on the side facade of a half-abandoned wooden house close to one of the central squares of the city. This square is in its turn the site of a Maxim Gorky monument created by the well-known Soviet sculptor Vera Mukhina. The bronze figure of a height of seven metres of the “singer of the revolution” stands on top of a granite rock that reminds of the famous “Song of the Stormy Petrel” (1901), a harbinger of tragic transformations: “[…] Now the wind firmly embraces flocks of waves and sends them crashing on the cliffs in wild fury, smashing into dust and seaspray all these mountains of emerald.”

Alisa Savitskaya, Curator, Head of the Exhibition Department of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), Nizhny Novgorod, Russia