In his Hollywood studio, Tim Youd is standing next to a giant sculpture of an Underwood typewriter. His passion for classic manual typewriters is immediately noticeable: they can be found on surfaces everywhere, and there are supplies for them packed to the rafters. There are sculptures of them, made by piecing together layer upon layer of cardboard. He blind-draws typewriters over each other—with a tabulate accounting for the number days each piece took. Other hints are more subtle: drawings based on typewriter ribbons, abstract works made by typing and retyping words on paper. And, on a table nearby sits a small stack of postcards: invitations to his exhibition, Drawings of a Painting at LA’s there-there. “They are hand-typed,” he tells us. “I usually type either one or two sets. Plus a set for the curator.”
Youd’s love of typewriters and literature permeates his work, and he recalls when the “obsession” began: he was sitting in his studio, reading a book. As he stared at the black rectangle of text inside a larger white rectangle on the page, he thought it could be “interesting to compress it and put all of the words of that book on to one page. It was a palpable urge to crush the book. So that the weight of all of the words and the blackness of all of the words—in that rectangle surrounded by the larger white rectangle—would be there.” This thought led to Youd’s worldwide, multi-year performance art project, for which he is retyping (and, therefore, reading carefully) 100 of his favorite 20th century novels. Each book is retyped on the same make and model of typewriter on which it was originally written. (Youd is up to the 62nd book in this project: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.)
