Darkness Visible: Writing’s Permanent Impermanence. Tim Youd’s “100 Novels” Project
A typewriter. Inside the carriage, two sheets of paper, a top layer and its backing sheet. The top one is soaked in ink and heavily indented. The surface is brittle and flaky, and parts are starting to peel off, like bits of dead bark making way for the new growth underneath — illegible stripes of type crammed on top of each other. The top sheet has the look and feel of one of those pieces of carbon paper that were widely used to create copies before the advent of word-processing. An apt analogy, since what is going on here also involves copying, or rather “retyping,” to be more specific: the retyping of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, part of a larger series of retypings of classical works of literature entitled The 100 Novels Project, by LA-based performance and visual artist Tim Youd.
Youd began his project almost ten years ago with Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Since then, he has retyped more than 50 novels and works of poetry always following the same ritual. First, he finds a location (or locations) with a special connection to the author. Then, he proceeds to retype the work on the same make and model of typewriter used for its composition. Each performance is open to the public, which adds a voyeuristic and communal element to a normally private activity. And the final product? Youd is not trying to reproduce the work verbatim — that would mean simply copying and that is not what he is after. Retyping is not the end but a gateway into the personal and abstract process of reading, as well as a means to explore the relationship between writing and visual art. This is why he types the whole text onto two sheets of paper taped together and run repeatedly through the machine. When the work is finished, the two sheets, or what is left of them, are separated and placed side by side to create a diptych that is both the material remnant of the physical process of typing and a two-dimensional visual analogue of the abstract experience of reading, one that bears an uncanny resemblance to the two pages of an open book.
The idea of retyping famous works of literature in the places where they were composed and on the same make and model of typewriter used by the authors came to Youd while visiting Hemingway’s house in Florida several years ago. At that point, he was particularly interested in exploring what he calls the “fetishization” of the book and the author in Western culture and its related practice of “literary pilgrimage.” (1) Over the years, however, (he is in the middle of a ten-year project) his focus has shifted to the act of reading itself and, in particular, to the intense immersive experience that retyping can afford. Youd’s desire to immerse himself in the text — to absorb the text and at the same time be absorbed by it — has led him to become “a more engaged reader,” a “devoted reader”, to the point that what began as a playful examination of the cult of the author in contemporary Western culture has itself begun to take a religious tint: Youd talks about retyping as a “devotional” act and describes the diptych, slightly tongue-in-cheek, as the “relic” of the performance.
In a literal sense, however, the diptych is the “relic,” the reliquiae or remains of the physical act of typing, what is left over after the meaning has been absorbed by the reader. The very existence of a material residue suggests that Youd makes a distinction between the literary “work” and the “text”. The work is the product of a particular authorial experience and intention, and cannot be repeated, whereas the text can be copied, manipulated and recreated. In other words, the work is the content, while the text is its external machinery: the paper, the ink, the signs on the page. Youd’s idea of a “devoted” reader is someone who “stays with the words”, someone who focuses on the meaning. But “staying with the words” also implies a certain concern with the physical, material aspects of the text. It is this concern with the physical text that makes Youd’s performance diptychs more than just debris, the unwanted residue of his performance. They are also evidence of a time before the digitalization of writing, when we felt that (perhaps wrongly) the meeting of ink and paper signified a kind of sacred contract between the writer and the text. Now we fear that our words will be forever lost in the digital void (probably another misconception). Perhaps inadvertently, Youd’s diptychs ambiguously evoke both the permanence and ephemerality of the written word.
Cheever’s diptych above, for example, with its solid square of ink and faint, illegible markings, suggests both the density of the text and its impermanence, while Burroughs’ (below) calls attention to the violence implicit in the act of typing itself: the top layer has almost been obliterated so the whole novel is now compressed onto a rectangular ink stain
with the texture of burnt bark — darkness visible. Or a void around which the remnants of words, now illegible, trail off the edges, while on the other side, red ink pools like blood on the floor in a murder scene — death and writing as inextricably bound up.
When we read, we try to focus on the meaning of the words, ignoring their actual, physical existence on the page. Youd’s retyping performance recovers the forgotten materiality of the word and presents it back to us in all its dilapidated glory. Stripes of type crammed on top of each other, illegible patches of letters and ink stains, holes and tears revealing a gaping void, keystrokes imprinted on the paper — indecipherable texts preserved in pieces of old parchment or papyrus, like ancient scrolls.
These torn and battered surfaces somehow make us feel closer to the writer and the act of composition, as Youd must feel as he allows himself to be carried away by the experience of inhabiting the writer’s space and making use of their instruments. “Reading,” Maurice Blanchot reminds us in The Space of Literature, “draws whoever reads the work into the remembrance of that profound genesis. Not that the reader necessarily perceives afresh the manner in which the work was produced — not that he is in attendance at the real experience of its creation. But he partakes of the work as the unfolding of something in the making” (2). Art happens. The reader or viewer is not a totally passive receiver of the work but becomes implicated in it by virtue of being drawn into its sphere. As Gerard Genette puts it, “The work of art is always already the work that art does,” on the artist and on the viewer. Youd’s diptychs “do the work” of reminding us of writing’s necessarily permanent impermanence.
(1) https://camstl.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Tim-Youd-Gallery-Guide-draft-v2-1.pdf
(2)https://monoskop.org/images/9/94/Blanchot_Maurice_The_Space_of_Literature.pdf
Tim Youd is a contemporary performance artist based in Los Angeles (CA). He’s been working on his “One Hundred Novels” retyping project for almost ten years, travelling to the locations where the novels where originally written, and using the same make and model of typewriter employed by the author. To date, he has completed over sixty novels and poetry collections in locations across the United States and Europe. Articles and reviews of his performances and related exhibitions can be found online. Here’s a selection:
His work can also be followed on Facebook and Instagram.
