Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to announce that beginning Sunday, April 13, and continuing nightly through Thursday, May 1, Los Angeles-based performance and visual artist Tim Youd will be retyping the great Stanley Elkin’s novel The Dick Gibson Show (1971), followed by his short story collection Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966). This will take place on KWUR, Washington University in St. Louis' campus radio station. Entitled Up All Night with Tim Youd, the show will air from Midnight to 5:00 AM on Sundays through Thursdays, 11:00 PM to 5:00 PM on Fridays, and 10:00 PM to 5:00 AM on Saturdays. This performance is part of Youd’s long-running 100 Novels Project. The retyping of The Dick Gibson Show will be the 84th novel he has retyped and is being done in conjunction with WashU Libraries, which is currently hosting the exhibition Stanley and Joan Elkin’s Artistic Kingdom at Olin Library. Elkin (1930-1995) taught at WashU in the English Department for decades.
The Dick Gibson Show tells the story of an all-night radio talk show host. That fact and the current Elkin exhibition at the Thomas Gallery in John M. Olin Library informed Youd’s idea to retype the novel in the overnight hours on KWUR. Each evening, at the top of the show, and in tribute to the conceit of the novel, Youd will conduct one or two interviews of his own with various artists, writers, curators, critics, librarians, typewriter historians, typewriter repairmen, and astrologers (see below for the current list of guests). Each night following the interviews, Youd will play a short archival clip of Elkin himself reading from his novels. Then, Youd will begin the evening’s retyping, and the sound of the typewriter alone will fill the airwaves until sign-off at 5:00 AM. The broadcast can be streamed online at www.kwur.wustl.edu.
This marks Youd’s third project with WashU. In 2018, Youd had a solo exhibition of his 100 Novels Project at the CAM St. Louis. As part of that exhibition, he performed four separate retypings, including Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser in the faculty room at Duncker Hall at WashU. Joan Elkin’s paintings of Stanley and others from the English department of the time hang on the walls of that room.
Subsequently, during the initial stages of the Covid-19 quarantine, and as an extension of the original CAM St. Louis show, Youd retyped William Gass’s The Tunnel from his garage in Los Angeles. Gass (1924-2017) is, of course, another of WashU’s illustrious writers and former faculty, and his papers are also part of the Modern Literature Collection at WashU Libraries.
In 2021-2022, Youd retyped two of William Gaddis’s novels, The Recognitions and JR, in partnership with the New York Review of Books, which had then re-released those two novels. The Modern Literature Collection at WashU Libraries also holds Gaddis’s (1922-1998) papers. The resulting diptychs from Youd’s retypings were then displayed at Olin Library as part of the William Gaddis Centenary Conference in 2022.
