Cynthia Plaster Caster’s second act as a boob moulder
If you had to name the most famous groupie in the world, you’d probably land on Penny Lane, the Almost Famous character, played so artfully by Kate Hudson, who was a sight to behold, changing the parameters of her life for the sake of somebody else’s passion.
And, in the end, for the sake of love, lust, and all the in-betweens that happen beside plates of room service in those velvet-clad five-star hotels.
The problem with this is that Penny Lane is a fiction; sure, we all might want to be her, or be with her, but she’s an idealised rendering of the groupie cliché. She was primarily based on Pennie Lane Trumbull, who formed the groupie The Flying Garter Girls as a way into the open road in the 1970s. But arguably, it’s one of her contemporaries, Cynthia Plaster Caster, who has had the most lasting cultural impact from the age of the happy-go-lucky anything-is-possible groupie era.
The artist, whose real name is Cynthia Dorothy Albritton, nosedived into the free love and rock music subcultures in the late 1960s. Scratching at the door of the dilapidated tour buses, hoping for a ride, seemed too risky for Cynthia. Instead, she had an offer most of the egotistical maniacs couldn’t quite refuse: a penis mould.
What started as a ‘shtick to get laid’ in college, in response to a class assignment, landed her in the pants of Jimi Hendrix and some 70 other musicians and artists, including members of The Who and Led Zeppelin. However, a lifetime centred around the phallus was a dire prospect for Cynthia; there’s only so many penises you can see before they all merge into each other, a forevered reminder of the male ego in constant erection. In Cynthia’s own words, “a tit wing in my collection was long overdue since I liked a lot of female musicians”.
Wise woman. With plenty of impressive names under her cock-sleeve, Cynthia had to introduce herself to the breast realm in an equally impressive way. Thanks to her charm, Suzanne Gardner, the American musician and creative director best known as the co-founder, vocalist and guitarist of the rock band L7, consented to lend her chest for the trial run.
Building upon her well-established penis work, Cynthia learned the skill of casting a female chest from a nondescript girl named Journey from Chicago, who was self-taught. We know little else about this mythical character, but her educational generosity did wonders for Cynthia; as luck would have it, Gardner was in town soon after she picked up the new skill.
At that time, Cynthia was receiving her own documentary treatment. While working on the project, which she aptly referred to as Plaster Caster, The Cockumentary, the visual artist had a genius idea: Why not include her first-ever breast cast on film? Gardner was chill as ever, and the melding and meeting of minds (and bodies) was the perfect footage for a documentary outtake.
“It’s certainly a political act for a woman to be casting a man’s dick. And to be casting breasts, too,” Cynthia told The Los Angeles Beat, aware of both the pseudo-gimmicky perception of her art-form as well as the wider sociopolitical consequences of forever rendering a body in a static material likely to persist long after their body deteriorates. From 2000, Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O would receive the same treatment. Long live the Plaster Caster genius.
