The title of the exhibition “The Sticky Fingers’ Effect” comes from the world of nanotechnology. On the nanometre scale no instrument (for example, tweezers, which are used to capture an object of molecular size) can be separated from the object itself. Having touched the object once, the instrument clings to it like a husband to his wife, and in the case of divorce it is not at all clear what kind of atomic property would go to each respectively. Even a chemist who had at his disposal a whole arsenal of redhot tongs and fiery solvents would not be able to part this inseparable pair. In broader terms, the “Sticky Fingers’ Effect” is a metaphor for the inseparability of the instrument from the object.

This stickiness of fingers is the main characteristic of history. The historian’s viewpoint is the instrument that gives access to the past from the future. However, the point from which he is observing is also within time, therefore his viewpoint is simultaneously the instrument that describes and the object being described.

Anyone looking back becomes somewhat of a historian. Ivan observes him using the artist’s brush. In this series of paintings, the figure is clearly outlined against the background. A particular view or scene serves as the background, while the figure is shown large and placed in the foreground so that the image always belongs to the space of the installation itself. The figure is blurred: on the clear and sharp background the effect of running paint is created using a number of complex techniques and, as a result, an impression is achieved that the individual cannot be discerned on the backdrop of history. The person is merely stuck onto the background, his viewpoint becomes part no longer of his own personal history, but of universal history. The merging of directions: “forwards into the past” and then “backwards into the future” – is none other than the carrying belt of Time.

An inclined plane, the carrying belt of an escalator is being rewound, but this is happening in a part of the construction that we cannot see. The city dwellers going down into the Metro do not think about this – the escalator carries them forwards and the steadiness of its movement, like the regularity of their daily trips, is familiar and boring. But suddenly a fly creeps across the belt: its paths intersect with the general vector of motion. The passenger cannot stop staring at the fly:

...But, as a historian,
for whom death is more boring than torment, I don’t hurry, fly.

Such is the surprise, described by Brodsky, at the amusing development of history. Even on the inclined plane, even knowing how the whole journey will end, the fly does not cry, but circles tirelessly in a web of paths not directed towards a single future. The fly is just as much a fidget as a child’s ball, although the ball is bigger and more serious:

Our Tanya is sobbing loudly:
She has dropped her ball into the sea.
-Be calm, Tanya, don’t cry:
Your ball will not drown in the sea.

In Agniya Barto’s quatrain, familiar to us from our childhood, Tanya sobs. It seems to the historian that the ball is rolling, accelerating, across the belt of the escalator, as if down a slope of Vesuvius, and eventually falls into the sea. Warm, like the head of a child, and then hot from contact with the passionate lava, the ball leaves a round imprint on the seabed. Then it bounces off and lands on the neck of another girl, that is, – as seen by the historian – into another crater. This crater turns out to be the cave of an oracle, prophesying for eternity:

Now the last age by Cumae’s Sibyl sung
Has come and gone, and the majestic roll
Of circling centuries begins anew…

That is what the Roman poet Virgil wrote in the Fourth Eclogue, which is often quoted by Christians. Like an inspired prophet, he looks to the past, while in the future discerning human heads on the ivy-covered slope of Mount Vesuvius. Virgil describes the cyclicity of Time and the forthcoming return of the Golden Age, which Christians, under the sign of the Cross, were to reinterpret in their own way.

In post-Christian civilisation the oracle’s prophesy seems like child’s play, however, Sibyl was to find a place inside our house-temple: holding onto a column or a pole, she is completely stuck to Time. Whether it be a cross or a pole, before us is a material instrument that links the past to the future. How many times has it seemed to the passengers descending into the Metro that the flow of Time would not return to the point from which the movement started, however, the oracle, her purple skirt rustling, does namely this: she returns to the escalator belt its due full circle.

“Do not run on the escalator!” – resounds the voice of a weary female Metro worker. This is the voice of the Cumae’s Sibyl, urging every passenger to think about his life. That is how individual existence steps onto the belt of Time, that is how the fingers of the average man leave sticky prints on it.