Places I Clip My Nails

First off let me just say filmmaker/artist Carey Baldwin's couple-month-old tumblr Places I Clip My Nails is brilliant and speaks for itself.

Now back to the essay already in progress:

[The other night after work while taking a break from watching a VHS I wrote in my notebook]

Here’s a thesis: an artist is a flesh and blood conduit of time, place, and circumstance.

[I was excited: this was how I would start my critical appreciation of Carey Baldwin’s Places I Clip My Nails and I would explain Baldwin’s fulfillment and explication of this thesis.  I composed a little more in my head and did not write the essay, instead finishing the movie, or Sopranos episode or the Beatles’ Anthology, or whatever it was I was watching.

I then decided, further mentally composing, the next day, after work, taking a break from watching a VHS, that I should explain this thesis by qualifying my “critical appreciation” to include myself, that I am likewise an artist, that I am a flesh and blood conduit of time (specifically: after deciding I would write an essay, during a VHS viewing, before writing the essay), place (my living room in New Monterey, periodically at a library that gives me internet access to all places touched by the www), and circumstance (wanting to write this essay to explicate and further certain ideas about life, art, narrative, and the internet). 

I wrote in a different notebook, the one that happened to be right next to me:]

And an artist insists on context, qualification of objectivity, i.e. subjectivity, the natural involuntary forces that push things forward, change us, make us grow, unwittingly.

[I am not a journalist nor am I interested in pretending to be one and creating Baldwin’s story out of a mix of assumptions, perceptions, abstractions, etc.  Instead, I would start with a thesis that would apply to us both, Baldwin in the pursuit of expressing the narrative of life (action/experience=clipping of nails/growth of nails=voluntary/involuntary) in relation to the time, place, and circumstance in which that narrative (physical movement, the movement of time) passes; myself in the pursuit of expressing the narrative of life (action/experience=writing/thinking). 

What interests me are theoretical abstractions that may be tied to very specific things, in turn abstracted, and again applied to something else, in this case a single thesis that may tie writing, nail-clipping, autobiographical tumblr posting, art, and maybe the universe and everything.  Isn't there a famous quote about the universe existing in a fingernail?  Anything else sounds to me like a small-town paper cute profile on local artist youth.]

Furthermore, an artist uses hands to do something to transmit this moment, the passage of time surrounding the moment, and the humanity and geography of its context.

[The problem, however, is that context is infinite.  Here’s a short list of things at play in the piece: the journals of Marcel Duchamp, the history and social politics of hygiene, the manufacture of trimmers, the use of the body in conceptual art, TSA carry-on policy, the psychology of nail-biters, the stoner-staring-at-hand-in-amazement-at-human-evolution stereotype, the geography of Los Angeles, Baldwin's travel plans, his career plans,  his ethos, his work situation, life and death in the abstract and the particular, etc.

Today, I went to write this essay/manifesto.  I had a “to google” list for the library: “tumblr (as) narrative” and “tumblr (as) conceptual photo series.”   I first went to check my email and found two from Carey, the first a promise to reply to the questions I sent a month ago, and the second, a series of thoughtful responses.

ok so i answered all but the first because the only thing i could think to say about hand turkeys is that in 2008 i wrote a letter to barack obama on a hand turkey that i made but i forgot to send it to him. feel free to use proper capitalization if you end up using anything.

They banged a gong at the library at about this point, 5:45, 15 minutes until the closing of the library, and I packed up my area and returned my library-loaned laptop to the circulation desk, not before saving my document to a flash drive.  Today, right now, before work, I inserted my flash drive into my ancient disconnected desktop computer and continued typing, naked after a shower, laying in bed:]

And finally, an artist's integrity depends on critiquing and understanding all influence on this transmission, and otherwise avoiding all influence (commercial, political, social, etc.) that may compromise the truth of the situation

Carey Baldwin exemplifies these theses in a minimalist tumblr project that resembles 1960s California conceptual art more than what one expects to find posted to facebook.

[I don't use the internet enough to know really if that is true, and right now, in lieu of the internet, I must rely on Carey's thoughts on instagram/tumblr/posting on the internet, that I copied and pasted into the document yesterday when I had the internet]

looking at a photo is always interesting to me, even if it's not my taste aesthetically. it's fun to see what kinds of things people obsess over; people's pets and breakfasts are pretty common material but i follow one friend who takes a screen shot of his phone every day at 3:33 and another friend who posts a new photo of the same location under the freeway nearly every day.

(Ed Ruscha's photographic catalogue of every building on the Sunset Strip comes to mind.  Also, California now is not only the center of movie culture, it is the center of internet culture (though, by design, the internet does not have a center, there are real people really in California that design and innovate what instagramly becomes used by people around the world.  Facebook, for example, became relevant when it moved to California.)]

Technology and the internet have allowed individuals a certain autonomy, instantly self-publishing and potentially, in a second, reaching as many people as the Hunger Games in its opening weekend.  Clipping one's nails in Hollywood—not in one's apartment, but on location, if you like—and cataloguing it is a stark contrast to the dream factory notion of creating fantasy and escape.  

[2. Your first post is at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. What is your relationship to the iconography of Hollywood as someone who lives in LA? Are you interested in the difference between flesh and blood mortal people and their superficial celebrity personas? Is there something inherently morbid in cutting your nails? Do rich people cut their nails?

i think about celebrities about as much as your average person living in la. i get a little excited when i see one, especially a good one, but i try to remember that they're just another human who acts. during the summers, they play movies every weekend at the hollywood forever cemetery. so you go there and wait in line with your ticket, walk in past all the headstones to the back of the grounds, sit on the grass, and watch a movie. the only one i've seen there was bringing up baby - one of my personal favorites - starring cary grant and katharine hepburn. i guess the exciting thing about being a celebrity or hollywood icon is that every person and animal in that movie is dead now but they still get a round of applause, and some whistles and hoots while they're just another part of the earth. as for rich people cutting their nails - some do, some don't. just like us poors.]

It is real in subject matter, theory and execution.  It epitomizes the emancipation of conceptual art, the freedom that comes to a person who realizes commercial art—movies, essays, photography—is bullshit, illegitimate for every thing that makes it "legitimate."  Baldwin's hands are the subject of the piece and the creator's of the piece; it is a loop of involuntary (nail growth) and voluntary (nail-clipping) action.  The cerebral elements—where he is, why he stopped there, how the picture is taken—is beside the point, and the art theory belongs to the viewer; it is an invisible interaction between yourself and the out of frame artist we know is there, thinking about something, nail-clipping.

[I "finished" this essay a few days later, again at the library, leaving the remaining questions answered at the bottom. 

3. Did the project begin because you found yourself clipping your nails in interesting locations, or because you decided to go clip your nails in interesting places. For example, why trim your nails on the side of the road by an abandoned Christmas tree?

i found myself clipping my nails in public places: while i waited for my friends outside their apartments, in the cemetery during a break from a bike ride, etc. i joked with some friends that i ought to start a blog about it, then i just went ahead and did it. now i feel obliged to clip my nails in interesting places. for example, when i knew i was going to new york i timed my clipping so that they'd be the right length while i was there. once i got there, though, i didn't choose a particularly exciting place to do it - just did it when i noticed they'd gotten long and remembered to do it. i rarely clip my fingernails into a trash can or sink anymore, even when i'm home and realize they need a trim. that would bore my followers.

4. Is it just me or would bourgeois society consider it anti-social to publicly clip one's nails?

i think bourgeois society would consider it gross to publicly clip one's nails. in fact, i've gotten quite a few responses from people who are not so thrilled with the idea. my mom told me not to blog about my toenails. another friend cautioned me not to do it on the subway. for the record, i don't plan to clip my nails in any indoor public spaces. only in the grass, dirt, or concrete.

5. How do you feel about instagram and photographic aesthetics, tumblr, etc.

i think instagram is fun. it's my go-to thing to look at when i have a minute of downtime at work. i used to look at twitter every day but i got bored reading little inside jokes and insights that weren't particularly interesting to me. looking at a photo is always interesting to me, even if it's not my taste aesthetically. it's fun to see what kinds of things people obsess over; people's pets and breakfasts are pretty common material but i follow one friend who takes a screen shot of his phone every day at 3:33 and another friend who posts a new photo of the same location under the freeway nearly every day. i guess the people who follow me have probably noticed i post photos of my fingernails once every couple of weeks. i like instagram better than tumblr because it encourages people to create something unique out of their own experience rather than sit at their computer and reblog images they had nothing to do with creating - often with an unknown or uncredited source.

6. How does an artist decide when experience, place, and perception become the material for art?

i can only speak for myself on this one. some things just give me the itch, some things don't.

7. what do different perspectives on nail trimming have to do which gender assumptions?

here's what i have to say about gender assumption/presentation and nail clipping: girls file, boys clip. just kidding. as someone who was assigned female at birth but consider myself much more on the boy end of the spectrum, i find that i'm pretty aware of how i present my hands when i take a photo for my journal. someone once told me that feminine girls hold their hands straight out in front of them, fingers curled back when they look at their nails whereas boys and butch girls turn their palms toward in, making a loose fist, to scope out their sitch. i keep it varied.]