Endurance is a staple of performance art.
In 1971, Chris Burden locked himself inside a small school locker at UC Irvine for five days. Three years later, Linda Mary Montano performed “Three Day Blindfold,” groping her way around San Francisco with her eyes shrouded by a blindfold.
That same year, for eight hours a day over three days, German artist Joseph Beuys was locked inside a New York gallery with a wild coyote. Marina Abramovic and Ulay Laysiepen spent 90 days in 1988 walking the length of the Great Wall of China from opposite ends until, finally meeting in the middle, they said their goodbyes and ended their 12-year collaboration.
While perhaps not quite as grueling as these predecessors, Tim Youd for the past week has been sitting at a typewriter set up in the bed of a rented pickup truck in the parking lot of the U.S. Post Office Terminal Annex in downtown Los Angeles. Daily from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m., he is retyping poet and novelist Charles Bukowski’s first book, word for word and page by page, on the same model of Underwood typewriter that the late author used.
