Starting Friday (October 2) visitors to the New Orleans Museum of Art may hear a clacking noise echoing through the big marble atrium. The gray haired among them will recognize the sound as an old-fashioned typewriter resonating in a second floor gallery. If they follow the clacking upstairs, they’ll find literarily inclined Los Angeles performance artist Tim Youd at work on his latest project, the retyping of John Kennedy Toole’s classic “A Confederacy of Dunces.”
Sitting at a bleak wooden table like a sort of Medieval monk, Youd will manually copy the whole book from beginning to end. But he’ll not just retype the book, he’ll retype it on a single sheet of paper, running it through the typewriter again and again, retyping each line until the page is saturated with ink and tattered like a flag after a hurricane. Past examples of Youd’s retyped books will line the gallery walls.
