The Portrait You Can’t Make
The exhibition «Still Life. Portrait. Landscape. After Genre» concludes with the smallest section, Portrait. Five self-portraits by Kasimir Malevich are displayed in a small room alongside Andrei Monastyrsky’s work, «Finger» (1978). This piece juxtaposes the transition from an image of the artist to the possibility of pointing to oneself. However, at GES-2, this transition is not easily achieved because a sign hangs near the object: «Please do not touch this work. It is a historical exhibit.» This prohibition changes not just the conditions of viewing, but the artwork itself. The piece was created within the context of 1970s Moscow Conceptualism, when Monastyrsky engaged with the conditions of perception rather than the creation of images. The setup is extremely simple: the viewer inserts a hand into a black box, pulls out a finger through an opening, and sees what is pointing to themselves. The inscription clarifies: «pointing to oneself as an object external to oneself.» There is no ready-made, literal portrait here. For a moment, the person sees their own body as a foreign object. Monastyrsky referred to this as a «philosophical selfie, ” but he meant not the creation of an image, but the separation of the observing „I“ and the body it looks at—in this case, the finger. The artwork arises from the viewer’s action.
Five self-portraits by Malevich showcase an opposing strategy, where the artist successively constructs an image of himself, spanning from early works to the solemn figure of the master in a beret in 1933. The Black Object at Monastery Square appears almost as a negation of the pictorial portrait. Instead of a unique face, there is any viewer—and instead of an image, there is a gesture. However, the exhibition text primarily connects «Finger» with modern selfie culture and self-admiration. This reading makes the work timely, but shifts the focus from self-observation to self-presentation.
The prohibition against touching the object introduces a contradiction that I did not find in the curator’s text. The visitor can only read the instructions and imagine the action they are theoretically supposed to perform. The work, conceived as an experience, is transformed into a historical artifact. The inaccessibility for interaction turns the piece «Finger» into an artifact just like Malevich’s painting. The preservation of the object is undoubtedly important, but in this case, protecting the item deprives the viewer of the possibility of realizing its meaning. It seems to me that this is where two discourses diverge: the curators present «Finger» as a precursor to the selfie, while the method of exhibition inadvertently raises a different question—can a work based on viewer participation remain itself when participation is forbidden? I believe not.
