A Portrait That Cannot Be Made
The exhibition «Still Life. Portrait. Landscape. Post-Genre» concludes with its smallest section, Portrait. Five self-portraits by Kazimir Malevich are displayed in a small room alongside Andrei Monastyrsky’s piece «Finger» (1978). This work juxtaposes the transition from depicting the artist to the possibility of self-designation. However, at GES-2, this transition is not easily achieved because a sign next to the object reads, «Please do not touch the work. This is a historical exhibit.» This prohibition changes not just the conditions of display, but the artwork itself.The work was created within the context of Moscow Conceptualism in the 1970s, a period when Monastyrsky addressed the conditions of perception rather than the creation of images. The setup is extremely simple: the viewer inserts their hand into a black box, extends a finger through an opening, and sees what is pointing to themselves. The caption clarifies this: «the pointing at 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 an external object. Monastyrsky called this a «philosophical selfie, ” but he meant not the creation of an image, but the separation of the observing „self“ and the body it is looking at—in this case, the finger. The piece emerges in the viewer’s action.
Five self-portraits by Malevich demonstrate opposing strategies, as the artist sequentially creates an image of himself, moving from early works to the solemn figure of the master in a beret in 1933. The «Monastery Object» nearby appears almost as a negation of the pictorial portrait. Instead of a unique face, there is any viewer—and instead of an image, a gesture. However, the exhibit text links «Finger» primarily to contemporary selfie culture and self-adoration. 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 curatorial text. The visitor can only read the instructions and imagine the action they are theoretically supposed to perform. A piece conceived as an experience is thus transformed into a historical artifact. Making it inaccessible for interaction turns the work «Finger» into an artifact akin to Malevich’s painting. While the preservation of the object is undoubtedly important, in this case, guarding the item deprives the viewer of the ability to realize its meaning. It seems to me that this is where two discourses diverge: the curators present «Finger» as a precursor to the selfie, whereas the method of exhibition inadvertently raises another question—can a work based on viewer participation remain itself when participation is forbidden? I don’t think so.
