Tim Youd: An Art of Sound and Word

Most of us have forgotten the unique rhythmic noise of words being typed on a page with a typewriter. What we know these days is soft and sometimes silent, whether composed with our fingers or our thumbs. Tim Youd has not forgotten that original sound. In fact he's resurrected the wonderful clickety-clack...pause...clack-click staccato of various typewriters through his re-writing exercise in performance art, accompanied by his voice, the spoken sounds of the words he is typing. Currently at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, Youd is performance-typing Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff -- just around the corner from Edwards Air Force base, where most of the action in the book took place. (This site-specificity is what Mat Gleason, a champion of his work, calls "regional conceptualism.")