NEW YORK — Cynthia Plaster Caster likes cock.
Correction. Cynthia Plaster Caster loves cock.
Yet, she’ll be the first to admit her infatuation and even shows off her obsession to anyone interested in looking.
This rock star groupie-turned-artist has a collection of 45 famous and/or infamous erections preserved in a mixture of plaster and water currently on display at the Thread Waxing Space in the heart of New York City’s SoHo district.
Thirty-nine life casts, as she calls them, glow underneath brightly lit domes that sit atop 5-foot-high pedestals. The air in the room during Caster’s June 29 opening was hot and sticky, with camera crews everywhere, filming a documentary titled “The Life Casts of Cynthia Plaster Caster: 1968-2000,” which will be entered in next year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Hardly a word was said — but fingers were pointing.
Though Caster claims she doesn’t favor rock stars, her collection is overwhelmingly full of them. With none other than the legendary musician Jimi Hendrix’s penis immortalized in the assortment, it becomes clear that she has successfully taken the groupie lifestyle past the point of obsession and turned it into an art form.
And Hendrix’s unit is quite impressive, indeed, not too big and not too small. As one happy onlooker explained to her young son, “Wow, Jimi Hendrix — he takes the cake.”Other members of the collection include Ronnie Barnett of The Muffs, Bert Flores of Pigface/Wreck and Ivan of Flying Karamazov Brothers.
Caster’s wish list is even more interesting. Last year it was Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker’s penis that she wanted but never got, but this year she has her hopes set on the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
“I haven’t gone about trying, and I’m not too optimistic [about getting it] though,” she said. “But you know, a groupie girl can dream.”
After all, dreaming has paid off for her in the past. That’s what got her into this line of work in the first place — dreaming of sex that is.
“I was an unbroken virgin at the same time the sexual revolution and the British invasion were happening,” she explained. “I was wondering whether it was true that sex could be used for more than just reproduction. I was also curious about what penises looked like, and what they could do for me.”
After finally deciding that she should actually have sex, Caster realized that she was too shy to seduce men. So, she turned to asking them for a more special memento.
“It was a schtick to get the attention away from all the other competition, you know, the groupie world — to get their pants down somehow,” she said. “Seriously, that is how and why it happened — and it worked!”
But to this day, Caster likes the virginal mystique the basic all-white plaster casts in her collection portray.
“It also gives them a kind of a feminine touch,” she said.
Speaking of which, Caster cast her first pair of breasts about two months ago.
It’s remarkable that she hasn’t yet received any feminine back-lashing for glorifying the male anatomy or using any means possible to get her subject to reach the size she needs him to do the casting.
“Everybody either laughs or walks away,” she said. “They don’t verbally assault me, to my face that is.”
What could be the most controversial aspect of her art — the lengths she sometimes goes to get her models up-to-par — doesn’t seem to be an issue at all with her audience.
In her maturity, Caster prefers to have her subject’s sexual partner act as the plater, an English slang term for a person who gives someone a blow-job. Caster uses it to refer to any kind of stimulation done by a person on her subjects.
Her friends, however, have often assumed this role and Caster admits that lately, she’s had to act as both plater and caster.
The dual role isn’t at all sexy. Because she can’t use a simple art mold that wraps around the penis for fear that it will destroy the hard-on, she must mix a vat of wet plaster that the subject can dip his penis into and out of, before he loses his erection.
She learned the hard way to always sufficiently lubricate her subject’s pubic hair. While trying to remove Hendrix’s cast penis — only the third one of her career — his pubic hair got stuck in the mold for 15 minutes. He was more than a good sport about it.
“Hendrix seemed to get off on the fact that he had this impression of his penis that was just the right size for him to fuck, so that’s what he did while we pulled one pube at a time,” Caster said.
Mixing the correct amount of algenate compound that makes the plaster can also be tricky. Often, it requires so much attention, that if there isn’t a plater around, her men just have to fend for themselves.
“One of my subjects gave himself a hand job,” Caster recalls, “though I don’t know what he was thinking about because he was looking at my mother’s picture and she was in her 70s.”
Oglers of his penis will never know what he was thinking, but one thing is for sure, Caster speaks of her collection like a proud mother.
The early originals, which she affectionately calls her “oldest babies,” are in a bronze form and kept in a bank vault in Chicago. She is quick to clarify that they are all her “sweet babies, though, and the youngest ones are still at home with their momma.”
In fact, she said, her apartment is “like, overflowing with cocks right now.”
Thanks to the documentary in the works, however, at least she no longer has to do clerical work; Caster was a typesetter for about 20 years before they phased out the job.
A generous monetary advance has been making ends meet, though she swears her art is committed purely out of love.
“You can’t pay me to cast your cock, if you had one,” she said. “I would never sell the originals, but limited editions are a consideration. I’m thinking about it.”