This article explores the verbal and visual works of Dmitrii Prigov (1940 – 2007), the leading Russian postmodernist poet and initiator of Moscow Conceptualism, by focusing on the semantics of seeing in his verbal works and its visual equivalent, the “big black eye.” Like a collector or a graphomaniac with protean masks in the ruins of words, Prigov parodies not only Soviet symbols, but also reveals a radical anti-textualism and deconstructs all authoritative discourses. However, the big black eye, the leitmotif of Prigov’s installations, visualizes an “imaginary nonentity,” allowing the spectator to challenge the invisible gaze of the Absolute, to demythologize its panoptic authority, and simultaneously to experience the presence of a new transcendental dimension. Prigov’s works are not based on representation; they are performed, installed, and experienced in the here-and-now, in their own artistic space—at the point of metamorphosis, engraved with traces of the "transcendental.” It is in this spectacle of presence that the sublime manifests itself.