Links related to the show:
Swedish Newspaper DN, 10th Feb 2008
The Age article:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/rock-legends-stitched-up/2008/01/31/1201714153368.html
Pictures and etc reg the fantastic opening night!:
http://craft-victoria.blogspot.com/2008/02/super-group-fogelberg-page-and-guiney.html
AC/DC News:
Please read blog post regarding the show on AC/DC news: http://www.acdcnews.com/2008/01/bon-scotts-crotch.html
Australia Council:
http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/events/event_items/cecilia_fogelberg_-_super_groupie_-_craft_victoria
Music
Australian R n' R
Movies
Trevor Flinn's art video (the artist behind the Marshal Stack at the Super Groupie exhibition):
The Beasts - Tex Perkins - Spencer P Jones
Television
Ian Rilen and The Love Addicts
Angry Anderson
Books
Bon Scott AC/DC
Heroes
the wives
Super Groupie's Details
Status:
Single
Body type:
More to love!
Zodiac Sign:
Scorpio
Super Groupie is in your extended network view more
About me:
SUPER GROUPIE - Exhibition Essay by Simon Gregg
‘Oi! Oi! Oi!’ chants the teeming crowd, heads nodding in time, tattoo-covered fists punching the air, sweat flying upwards into a space impregnated with alcohol and body odour – not the usual day at the art gallery then. In Super Groupie, Cecilia Fogelberg transplants the soul of the Australian rock icon into a mesmeric series of soft sculptures – her ‘top 10’ – that capitulate the hedonism and moral corruption of the country’s bars, hotels and sticky-floored band venues into the high-art arena.
Earlier Cecilia Fogelberg exhibitions were like entering a dream; or a nightmare, depending on how long you spent in it. Mythological beasts, Gods, and demons abounded, glorified as hand-stitched and sewn soft toys. Emerging from fairy tales and nursery rhymes, the creatures came to us as depraved sex monsters, relishing in their ‘sinful’ embellishments of bodily mutations and genital exaggerations.
I'm the devil's advocate. We have our own worshippers who are called 'groupies.' Girls will give their bodies to musicians as you would give a sacrifice to a god.
Frank Zappa, quoted in Peters Brothers, What About Christian Rock, p. 17
In Super Groupie Fogelberg turns her formidable stitching needle toward the most depraved, most beastly and most mythological creature of all – the Oz Rocker. Since her arrival from Sweden in 1999 Fogelberg has become immersed in the local rock scene, and describes her current artistic concerns as ‘Australia, the rock, the cock, female active sexuality, the rock star’.
Super Groupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage. I think groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren't possessive about their conquests.
Germaine Greer, New York Times, 1971
In her title Super Groupie Fogelberg references Germaine Greer’s comments in New York, 1971. Fogelberg embraces Greer’s philosophical refrain by celebrating sexual hedonism and the ‘male gaze’, but turns this gaze back onto the Gods of rock. With the muso as muse, and still infected with the dreamy otherworldliness of mythology and the collective unconscious, her creatures are the canvas upon which the artist’s preoccupations are played out.
To the sound of grisly riffs and throbbing bass, Jungian symbolism is set on the rampage with the Animus (masculine image in the woman’s psyche) and the Anima (feminine image in a man’s psyche) smashing whisky bottles over each others’ heads.
Rock has always been the devil’s music . . . I believe rock and roll is dangerous . . . I feel we're only heralding something even darker than ourselves.
David Bowie, Rolling Stone, 12 Feb 1976
Fogelberg has canonised the archetypes of antipodean rock with the unique perspective of the outsider. She describes this unique Top 10 of Oz Rockers as a ‘personal journey’ – but this is no Glen A. Baker history of Rock ‘n’ Roll, but rather, an eclectic romp past the musical signposts of Fogelberg’s time in Australia. The resulting figurines – of some of the most uncouth rockers to emerge from this country – are rendered pathologically whimsical and helplessly adorable by virtue of their deification into plush toys.
They don't even know what it is to be a fan. You know, to truly love some silly little piece of music or some band so much that it hurts.
Rock groupie ‘Sapphire’, Almost Famous, 2000
Adorable they may be, but the rock icon’s enduring resonance stems from their simultaneous repulsion. This is how Fogelberg registers her devotion as a fan. Witness Tex Perkins: arms folded with his trademark smarmy look wrapped around his brick-like head; but Fogelberg reveals what the Rolling Stone photographer missed – Perkins’ penis distends from his groin like a third leg, curling hypnotically around the floor and ending in a hissing dragon head. Likewise her other subjects are willingly disfigured - Bon Scott, Nick Cave, Spencer P Jones, Angry Andersen, Ian Rilen, Mick Harvey, Conway Savage, Rowland S Howard, and Kim Volkman are all presented like collectors’ dolls fresh out of their packaging. But here they are the antithesis of the anatomically correct wax sculpture; in Fogelberg’s hands the awkward, lumpen figurines are invariably misshapen, revelling in the thrill of a tempered ineptitude.
Like teddy bears after a testosterone binge, these iconoclastic voodoo dolls conspire to subvert the medium – how could a needle and thread be capable of such vulgarity? But in cleverly manipulating the material, Fogelberg renders what might otherwise be vulgar as disarming, alluring and beautiful. Fogelberg admits to exploiting this two-sided aspect within her practice: her celebration of female sexuality through the male sex object, her dark humour, and the obvious rupture between cute soft toy and bestial rock pig. Notably free of the blood, sweat and semen they connote, these paeans to paganism nevertheless disturb through their ambiguity of meaning.
After being coerced into such an orgiastic infusion I doubt that any visitor to Cecelia Fogelberg’s latest journey into the collective unconscious will look at a rock icon the same way. Perhaps it’s time we all embraced the super groupie within: ‘Oi!’
Simon Gregg, December 2007
Simon Gregg is curator of City Museum at Old Treasury and erstwhile author of a forthcoming book on the Romantic sublime in contemporary Australian art.
