Cynthia on Celluloid
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Despite her reluctance to have greater significance attached to her work (she told Salon last summer that all she was trying to “say” was “Look at this chorus line of gorgeous penises, left and right and swirling around. Aren’t they pretty?”), she’s also achieved the status of bona fide artist. In 1997 she was invited to lecture on portraiture at the School of the Art Institute, and last summer she mounted an exhibit of her collection at New York’s Thread Waxing Space gallery. And now she’s about to become a movie star: On Thursday, February 22, Plaster Caster, a feature-length documentary by local filmmaker Jessica Villines, will get its world premiere in two screenings at the Landmark Century Centre.
None of these contemporary rockers seem to have much in common with Plaster Caster’s more mythical subjects, like Jimi Hendrix or the MC5 or even the Lovin’ Spoonful. “Some people say that the collection has dwindled down to a bunch of indie-rock losers and that the collection started with Hendrix, but they forget that Hendrix was like an indie-rock guy back in 1968,” says Villines. Plaster Caster says she operates now the same way she always has: she chooses musicians whose work she respects and enjoys–and she refuses solicitations. “I’ve been getting a lot of E-mail from fledgling Chicago musicians that want me to come give them an audition,” she says. “I need to find a stock answer for that one. I don’t like it when people approach me.”
Plaster Caster says she’s thrilled with the film, and will attend both the local premiere and the New York screening. “I’m looking forward to just walking there on my own, the way I normally do to the health club that’s in the same building,” she says. Meanwhile, she’s been casting new subjects, most of whom are female, including the two women in the Doll Rods and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier. She also cast her first couple: Bobby Conn and violinist Julie Pomerleau. “I’ve got his hanging on the wall between her lovely two breasts,” she says, “kind of like a Groucho Marx mask.”
