The following interview was conducted between Luther Blisset and Cary
Peppermint on the Staton Island Ferry, February 14, 2000 in NYC.
Peppermint brought along his mother for this interview. She quickly left
us in favor of a large can of Budweiser beer and the scenic vistas of
the island of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. -LB

+ + +

Blisset: Your works such as "The Mashed Potato Supper" and "Conductor
Number One: Getting In Touch With Chicken" were some of the first real-
time performances over the internet. Could you talk a bit about these
works and their relation to internet art, new media technologies and the
current state of affairs with net.art?

Peppermint: No, I cannot talk about trends in art. The works you mention
were executed with a conscious and sometimes unconscious disregard for
any medium or movement. They are intuitive undertakings many times based
on theory forgotten or experiences given over to the loose fabric of
memory; many mis-understandings. Would one wish to epitomize their
lifetime beneath a single statement?

Blisset: Well, could you maybe just tell us your motivations or the
energy surrounding some of these initial internet performances.

Peppermint: Sure, but only as best I understand them now at this
specific moment in time. "Conductor Number One" went something like
this: Humans are afraid of themselves. Human perception is regulated
and/or dulled by frames. Humans are always mediated. Mediation is a lie
told with the utmost conviction. "The Mashed Potato Supper" went
something like this: The real-time event supersedes in importance the
actual event. No extraneous chewing. Lets make friends with the spectral
images of others.

Let's be no one and no where right here, right now, no-where.

Blisset: So is it true you model your fashion and personal appearance
after REM's Michael Stipe?

Peppermint: Well in the early 1990's I began to cultivate an initial
understanding of Art which I now think of as "Restless Culture". At the
time I lived in Athens, Georgia and Stipe was a great reference for
fashion because he had the agency to travel much more than I via his pop
star status. He would in effect bring back the surface veneer of a world
then en route to global capitalism and I would happily try it on.

Blisset: How would you currently explain "Restless Culture"?

Peppermint: Someone the other day said to me, "Oh yea, I understand this
'Restless Culture'… It's sort of like you change so fast that market
can't keep up with you." And I thought, maybe… but where is one ever
located?

Then I thought there is really no place to be anyway and this may be an
understanding of art with a profound precision most minds refuse to
calculate. Then I thought of a good friend of mine Chilean artist,
Guillermo Cifuentes who claims to be in a state of permanent departure.
Then I thought restlessness is a real dissatisfaction with the way
things are, a sort of hyper-conscious; an understanding where an artist
breaks the seemingly continuous surface of beings by producing
intermittent exposures.

Then I thought about us discontinuous beings and how exposures function
as transgression.

Blisset: Capital or i.e., fashion is an over-exposure. A great light
blinding the real. Jem Cohen made a film after the Berlin wall came
down.

He called it "Buried In Light". I think it was about the disappearance
of culture beneath the hype of capital.

Peppermint: Yes. Uh-huh. Yes. Uh-huh.

Blisset: You are a fashionable human. You were educated within the
academy. You often times give off the radiance of a pop-star. How is it
you can critique with sincerity a system of which you are obviously so
willfully and somewhat gleefully integrated.

Peppermint: I am an artist not a holy man and desire is a complex
phenomenon steeped in the erotic. Eroticism is a great impetus to my
work.

Things prohibited result in things sacred. My job here is to suggest
points of departure, to cull obscurities and to possibly re-work the
sacred.

Sometimes I ride a bus. Sometimes I ride the subway. Sometimes I walk
down the street. The academy bought me time to understand myself outside
of capitalist production. Fashion affords me a point of entry or
admission into unsuspecting scenes singularly based on class status
where I can collect invaluable data and conduct research experiments
and/or performance exposures.

Blisset: Can there be such a thing at this date as sincerity in art?
Does irony play into your work? What about Humor? Is art simply
regulated to the role of entertainment as the Walker's "Art
Entertainment Network" might suggest?

Peppermint: Maybe sincerity in art is possible if you know exactly whose
or what kind of shoulders we are standing upon by this I mean historical
context. If we were to accept our contemporary western and sadly
dominant culture as a self-perpetuating spectacle, an accelerated system
of capital and exchange then we could approach a sort of "simulation
sincerity" amidst this mass proliferation of imagery by dressing as our
favorite tele-tubbie and then performing open heart surgery on someone
in need. Please understand, my work is not for entertainment. Certainly
aspects of my work are entertaining but these aspects function only as a
vehicle for something else… something that could be difficult to
handle or terribly frightening or maybe just quiet… so quiet you can
hear nothing at all. The sound of nothing where your being just moments
ago effortlessly resided until wildly illuminated by exposure, made
restless by art.