“Take one look at a photograph of Patricia Highsmith at her Olympia SM3, and tell me she isn’t the fiercest typist you’ll ever see,” says Tim Youd by email to Interview. Beginning today and running through August 18, the Los Angeles-based artist will be behind the same kind of typewriter Highsmith used—an Olympia SM3—retyping every word of her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley as part of his performance art piece, Ecstatic Reading.
Held at Cristin Tierney Gallery, the performance is the latest installment of a decade-long project, 100 Novels, in which Youd retypes works at locations germane to each title. The idea first came to him as an epiphany. “I was reading a book in my studio and had this moment where I understood that, on a formal level, what I’d been looking at all those years was a rectangle of black text inside the larger white rectangle of the page,” Youd recalls. “I had this urge to compress the book—a physical, palpable urge—so that all the words in the entire novel would be present on that one page.”
