Tanya Brodsky: How to Start Living

Tanya Brodsky, Installation view, *How to Start Living*. Image courtesy the artist, photography by Josh Schaedel.

Tanya Brodsky, How to Start Living at Test Site Projects, Las Vegas. Through July 17, 2022

By D.K. Sole

The aluminum plates sit off the walls on their variable legs, tiny tables tipped on their sides and suspended on metal chains like dogtags, all tethered to the floor with electrical cords, tied up above and below. The black lines etched on them ask me to come closer to see the pictures they’re describing – it’s not easy to make out thin lines on the wavy surface of a gleaming object in a semi-lit room – but the burning pink glows behind them warns me away. When I’m far away it’s difficult to see; when I am close it is uncomfortable to look. I am unusually aware of the difference between the physicality of looking at something and the imaginative process of understanding it.

How to Start Living is full of movements that encounter a “but.” There is text to be read but the text shifts because of a fan blowing the curtains it’s printed on, there are pictures to be looked at but the way they have materialized makes the act unstable and hard. The text might have been kept taut, the pictures might have been drawn clearly on white paper, but no. To “start living” (as the title says) we have to move into this difficulty that will never stop being difficult, a field of behavior that will never coalesce into a direction.

“Spread crystals onto the emberbed,” say the curtains. Where do I get these crystals? “Note: the temperature and airflow directions may be adjusted during Sleep control.” What computer manages this Sleep control? The curtains offer me the specter of a purpose with the overtones of an Ikea pamphlet, but the only context I’ve been given is the title of the show. If I want “to start living” then I should do these impossible, directionless things. If I can’t? Then technically I might be alive but I can’t start my life in the real, proper, effective sense suggested by the artist’s words. Start really living! Whatever that is. Help. Beyond the instructions, through the curtain cloth, outside the window, I can see “life,” the street, the sky, screened off from me. But if life can be started by following these directions then life depends on machines and other commercial products, not on the sky. Whatever is provided by the emberbed and the Sleep control will be “living.”

The etched drawings on the aluminum are extensions of the instructions on the curtains, all depicting hands in the act of doing something: pointing to computerized numbers or preparing to receive a mechanical clip that looked like a blood pressure monitor. It’s worth noting that none of the hands are building or designing the machines, only using them and showing me how to use them.

Tanya Brodsky, *Figure 1*, Etching on hand polished cast aluminum, LED grow light cob chip, ball chain, 5 x 7 inches, 2022. Image courtesy the artist, photography by Josh Schaedel.

The press release underscores this atmosphere of directionless aims with a list of other “hows” that range from tasks you might sincerely need instructions for (“How to etch a circuit board”) to actions without nouns: “How to get. How to do.” The fact that the artist-author doesn’t discriminate between these two types of direction is significant. Even if we had our noun (let’s say it’s the Sleep control machinery) it wouldn’t make any difference. I haven’t seen Brodsky’s other work because she normally shows in L.A., but after looking at her site I imagine I can see elements of How to Start Living in her past exhibitions. The sculptural bars and gates in her Mixed Feelings (2017) and 1601 Park (2018) are cousins to the curtains, objects brought in to create an imprisoning space that traps you while it lets you look outside. But even the ambitions of these gates and curtains are ultimately just desperate longings. They have the desire to trap without the means. The gallery door is right there. I can walk into the street.

The atmosphere of the exhibition goes with me though: there is no clear way to start living. And an implied question: what is living? Start what? Do we know? I like it. A realistic and invigorating pessimism.

Tanya Brodsky, How to Start Living
Test Site Projects, 1551 S Commerce St, Las Vegas, NV 89102
June 11 – July 17, 2022

Published by Wendy Kveck on June 29, 2022