Manneken Pis Comes to Arizona

I often find animal bones while hiking in the high desert. The bones tell the story how a cow, a wild donkey, a horse, and elk or a deer had succumbed to the attacks of coyotes, and lately of wolves. I try to use these sun-bleached bones in my sculptures.

When I saw this pelvic bone, it was sitting upright in the sand. For some reason I immediately thought of the little statue in Brussels called Manneken Pis or the “peeing little boy.”

When I brought the pelvic bone home I decided to design my own interpretation of that Belgian boy from the 1600s…

But first a bit of background about the statue in Brussels.

According to Wikipedia, the real name of the statue is Menneken Pis. In fact, in the dialect of Brussels, een manneke means a small man, whereas een menneke means a little boy (it is the diminutive of men: boy). It is believed that the 61 cm statue was placed in the centre of Brussels in 1620/ Today it is at five minutes' walk from the Grand Place, at the junction of the Rue du Chêne/Eikstraat and the pedestrian Rue de l'Étuve/Stoofstraat.

There are many folkloric stories about this boy, and of course I have my favorite version which is, always according to Wikipedia:

“… in the 14th century, Brussels was under siege by a foreign power. The city had held its ground for some time, so the attackers conceived of a plan to place explosive charges at the city walls. A little boy named Julianske happened to be spying on them, as they were preparing. He urinated on the burning fuse and thus saved the city. There was, at the time (middle of the 15th century, perhaps as early as 1388), a similar statue made of stone. The statue was stolen several times.”

Ok, so this boy may have never existed. It may be a symbol of resistance and the triumph of innocence over evil.

To me, Menneken Pis is an attitude.

So, I decided to build an attitude out of a pike of bones.

The bovine pelvis gave me the chest and arms of the boy. I used a partial cranium of a deer as the head, which I covered with hare hide. Instead of facial featured I painted two Kokopelli giving the “boy’s face” a naughty look and added a buffalo molar to delineate his mouth… To accentuate the curvature of the back, hence the attitude displayed by the bovine pelvis, I used a deer’s partial vertebral column and pelvis.

And while the statue in Belgium stands 61 cm tall, mine barely tops 64 cm, making the size remarkably comparable.

This modern day masterpiece is supported by a tortured and distressed petrified brush branch from the desert.

So, my “statue” may not save a city from invaders but when placed at the entrance of my studio door, it makes some visitors leery about going in….

July 31, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018