I am very interested in boys. Let there be no doubt about that. But I do not meet them in train stations nor in the men's lavatories. I do not go to places where I expect to see boys. I do not ask boys to come home with me for pay. But when I see a good looking boy, or what I think is a good looking boy: thin and with good bones and muscles, an intelligent face with clear eyes and a full mouth, high cheekbones, a not too large nose, a flat stomach, a full butt and long legs, big feet and big hands, then there I am charged with a lot of excitement. It is this excitement that makes me work. I do not make love to boys. I make pictures and sculptures of them - my expression of loving.
I remember Kennedy quoted Faust in his Frankfurt address in the Pauls Kirche, who said to the passing moment "stay, thou art so fair". Faust wanted to do it all over again. He had missed it all he thought in that dull and academic life of his, and became devilishly young. Wouldn't we all? If we could?
The boy's laughter and his sparkle light up an otherwise rather dreary life. Women have seemed too dangerous to me. And in fact, 10 years with a lovely and charming wife were breathtaking and uplifting until she left with our three sons, and sent me spiraling downward, ending in a crippling fall. Reduced to being a good friend, the father role having been taken over by another, I suppose I keep looking for my sons. My oldest remarked one day, as he watched me sculpting, "Papa, you are Gepetto, trying to make a real boy". I guess I am. But he is a special kind of boy. First of all (don't laugh!), he doesn't talk back. He is made of cold and heavy bronze, about a quarter of an inch thick, life size, and very still. He is a very, very long moment in time.
Is that what I am trying to do, like Faust, to preserve that moment and to make it stay? Yes, I think that that is, what I am doing. Well then, why not just do the photographs? They, too, preserve the moment. Although photographs only give the illusion that they describe space, there is actually no space in them. You take a photograph between your fingers and there is nothing more than a fraction of a milimeter there. If you turn a photograph on its side, there is only a thin line of white. I have spent some 40 years taking photographs. I am more than frustrated with this process of reducing the real world to a rectangle, that only has one flat surface of chemicals on a flat piece of paper. I am convinced that I have become space-sick, meaning that my relationship with the world around me, which has space-depth, has become completely disturbed.
Then what do I do? I make the boy in bronze and put him in space. Who is that boy? Of course, he is me. At least there is enough of myself in that sculpture, that I can say he is part of me. The model boy, who I have admired and have taken into me, has become a part of me, has been reformed and put back into space to be admired.
But to my complete amazement I have discovered, that not all people admire my sculpture. In fact, many people are disturbed by it - not because my boys are not beautiful, but because they have a strong sexual component. My boys have sex, which is especially disturbing to a lot of people. Male sex in images has been out for the last couple of thousand of years. The boy's sex (lets call him what society wants to call him: the child): the male child's sex proposes a series of problems to society. They are not easily resolved. Many societies forbid boys sex or choose to ignore it or even to repress it.
And thus, I come to the point of controversy, that makes me continue to sculpt my bronze boys, even though this does not please everyone. It is no secret, that the repression of the boy's sexuality makes him a very aggressive creature, and therefore more useful to society. It is much easier to put tools in his hands and to send the aggressive young man to work, or to put weapons in his hands and send him to war. This is also a controversial idea many do not believe. But I choose to let myself be influenced by Sigmund Freud and Margret Mead, by Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, by Eric Fromm,Alexander Mitscherlich, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. They are all writers and thinkers who turned their attention to the boy in different novels, poems and essays. When I studied the English romantic poets back in college I was especially impressed by several lines of Wordsworth:
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, hath had elsewhere it's setting And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
and not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close.
Upon the growing Boy, but He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
he sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the East must travel,
STILL IS NATURE'S PRIEST, and by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the MAN perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day".
("Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early childhood")
Wordsworth was easiest for me to understand, and next to Keats, Byron and Shelly more down to earth. Indeed he was constantly writing about his relationship to nature, which was God. But the thoughts, that perhaps have stayed closest to me and upon which I may even have structured my life were,
"My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,
So was it when my life began
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is Father of the Man
And I could wish my days to be bound
each to each in natural piety".
THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN, I think that is an amazing Sentence.
In fact it is a very revolutionary thought for it makes the grown-up stale without the presence of the Child.
Does this have anything to do with my sculpture? I think so. I certainly have paid more attention to the Boy than most. It is also interesting for me to rediscover lines I read some 40 years ago and notice, that they have not only impressed me, but influenced my life. Not bad for the poet, Wordsworth - and very good for the student, McBride.
But there were some others besides Wordsworth that I came across in time (somehow it seems it was always JUST in time).
Almost all of the heroes Hermann Hesse describes are boys, who, having left the repression of their father's society, GO LOOKING for their own way to find new values in a new world. Of all his boys I like Siddhartha best. I did a very handsome book of photographs on Hesse's theme following his lines:
"Wonne sprang in seiner Mutterbrust, wenn sie ihn schreiten, wenn sie ihn niedersetzen und aufstehen sah, Siddhartha, den Starken, den Schoenen, den auf schlanken Beinen Schreitenden, den mit vollkommenem Anstand sie Begrüßenden.
Liebe rührte sich in den Herzen der jungen Brahmanentöchter, wenn Siddhartha durch die Gassen der Stadt ging, mit der leuchtenden Stirn, mit dem Konigsauge, mit den schmalen Hüften.
Mehr als sie alle aber liebte ihn Govinda, sein Freund, der Brahmanensohn. Er liebte Siddharthas Auge und holde Stimme, er liebte seinen Gang und den vollkommenden Anstand seiner Bewegungen, er liebte alles, was Siddhartha tat und sagte, und am meisten liebte er seinen Geist, seine hohe, feurigen Gedanken, seinen glühenden Willen, seine hohe Berufung...
So liebten den Siddhartha alle. Allen schuf er Freude, allen war er zur Lust".
I think, that it is safe to say, that Hesse loved him, too, and that Siddhartha was Hesses strongest single character.
What does this have to do with my sculpture? I would, if I could -and I try my best- to give this kind of stature to my bronze boys.
When Siddhartha leaves his father's house with his friend, Govinda, to find his own long way to himself, he asks permission to do so. This is no running away for Siddhartha, just exercising his own strong will. I have always loved this Siddhartha (better than Buddha, as Henry Miller said, and stronger medicine than the New Testament). If reading is taking in to the mind and storing what is on the printed page, then I have had Siddhartha stored in me for many years in my own small space.
But there have been others besides Siddhartha, that have had their attractions. Ever so thin is Tadzio's character. He doesn't grow. Does he even say anything? He does nothing but come nearer to Aschenbach's chair on the beach, understanding his role as the loved one. He presents his beauty and his youth in a painfully tantalizing way, so that the old and in fact dying man can do nothing more, than become increasingly dependent and isolated, preoccupied with greek abstractions. I often wonder what would have happened to Aschenbach, if he had gone up to the boy and introduced himself, or tossed him a beach ball.
Certainly, Thomas Mann confronted age with youth in a most pitiless way. Aschenbach's death in Venice served him right.
My Tadzios, I have asked to make sculpture with. It takes quite a bit of nerve to ask a boy or young man, if he will take off his clothes and stand or sit in a pose, that has been seen, experienced, thought about, drawn up or photographed, on-and-off for a day or so, until negative molds are made, or body castings. There is a great amount of interchange, and two-way self expression, and certainly just a little erotic back-and-forth, that is absolutely not sexy due to the plaster, the cold water, the brushes, the oil, and the general big mess, that occurs in the studio during the work. After the molds are made, the presence of the boy continues in the form of photographs and drawings until the piece is finished, often several years later. The friendship has continued over the years with everyone, I have worked with. I say, that, if you are worried about getting older, and death nears you, or you it, and you get scared, then one good approach is to go to the young and get some courage and some comfort. On the other hand, my boys are generally very serious, and often sad and unsatisfied. The paradox, that occurs in my work and my thought is, that I try to get the boy to take his boyness seriously, to be aware of his newness and take advantage of it in a changeable society. For, how can a renewal occur, when the child is simply taught to be like the parent. I realise, that it is a contradiction to ask the boy to take on the RESPONSIBILITY of being a boy, because, certainly, responsibility is an adult conception relating to a specific set of social laws. The advantage of being a boy is that it is fun. Do even I want to reduce his fun? I hope not. Back in the early 70's, St Martins Press published a book of mine, a book on sexual education for children, called "Show me". It was a frontal attack on repressive society and the repressive society finally figured this out, as it became even more restrictive in the 80's. Now in the 90's it is not only against the laws of the United States to sell the book, it is against the laws of the United States to HAVE it, because there are nude children in it, exploring their OWN sexuality. The new law says, now, that it is criminal to possess photographs of naked children (persons under 18!). Do the chief justices, who made the new law, actually realize, what they are doing to the children? They in-directly make the children ashamed about their possibly, creating an unrepairable mass neurosis. I followed the controversy with a vague interest and did not enter the controversy about the book. I live in Europe. The book was made for my American children living in Germany. The idea was to promote a more satisfactory sexual life for children and adolescents in an effort to REDUCE neurotic and AGGRESSIVE behavior.
America's dilemma touches me, as it touches all Europeans, but I, at that time, did not realize, how concrete the wall was, that I was ramming my head against. For society is DEPENDANT upon the aggressive male, as it exists today. And the male-child is programmed to take part as an aggressive adult, as soon as he GETS BIG ENOUGH. Have I been correctly informed, as I learned recently, that a person is considered by law in the United States to be a child, until he is 18 years old? If that is true, then he gets to be a man just in time to be of draft age and just in time to vote. Is this true, that the child is kept under control by parents and state only to become a man under control of church and state? Is that a coincidence?
Freud said: "Die allgemeinste Auskunft wäre, daß unsere Kultur überhaupt auf Kosten der Sexualität aufgebaut wird".
Wilhelm Reich said: "Die These, daß die Familie eine Institution ist, die erst durch sexuelle Unterdrückung der Menschen funktionsfähig wird, zeigt den Stellenwert dieser Arbeit im Rahmen der sexualwissenschaftlichen Reihe. Familienpolitik ist bisher unter den verschiedensten Gesichtspunkten untersucht und auch kritisiert worden, jedoch kaum unter dem Aspekt der Sexualunterdrückung. Hier sollen die Thesen erhärtet werden, daß bügerliche Familie und Sexualunterdrückung unlösbar miteinander verbunden sind, daß Sexualunterdrückung zur Herrschaftssicherung beitragt und daß damit Familienpolitik zu einem wesentlichen Teil zum Zwecke der Herrschaftssicherung in der Gesellschaft betrieben wird... Die sexualverneinende, autoritäre Erziehung in der bürgerlichen Familie erzeugt beim Individuum eine autoritäre Psychostruktur. Es ordnet sich in die autoritären Hierarchien der Gesellschaft ein und verhalt sich aktiv und passiv autoritär."
Reich bezweifelt (im Gegensatz zu Freud) die Existenz eines Destruktionstriebes und bezeichnet die auf Destruktion gerichteten aggressiven Strebungen des Menschen als Folge der Sexualverdrängung. Er schreibt, daß, die "Haßbereitschaft des Menschen und seine Schuldgefühle, zumindest in ihrer Intensität, vom Zustand der Libidoökonomie abhängen, daß sexuelle Unbefriedigtheit die Aggression steigert, Befriedigung die Aggression herabsetzt".
How often as a child was I told "stop playing with yourself" or that "If I ever catch you doing that (masturbating) again, I'll cut it off".
And I will never forget when we were wrestling with our underpants down and my mother came home, her emotional explosion, and our embarrassed covering up. When I was a little boy, about 9 or 10 or so, my younger brother and I had a whole chest full of building blocks. They were rectangular and conical, triangular and cubic. We built forts with them, and with an assortment of tin soldiers, we would wage war. We could go on killing each other for hours, and it was fun. There was one favorite game, and that was to build a big war ship, with all the blocks, and all the soldiers. There was a trick, though, to the game, and this was to build in a lever, at the foundation of our ship. When you tripped the lever, the whole ship went up in the air, and that was the most fun.
I am remind dotourchildren's hours, because I have been reading Eric Fromm's book, the "Anatomy of Human Destructiveness". Instincts motivate behaviour said Charles Darwin. And there followed William James and William McDougall, Sigmund Freud and Konrad Lorenz, and others who believed, that aggressive energy was held back until the pressure became too strong, after which any kind of mechanism could explode the aggressive power outwards.
Eric Fromm describes Freud's libidotheory, which follows the hydraulic scheme. The libido (sexual instinct) increases, tension rises, unpleasure increases, the sexual act DECREASES tension and unpleasure until the tension begins to rise again. Is it safe to say then, that a sexually liberated society would become less aggressive? If the quantity and quality of effort on the part of most national governments to repress the sexual life, especially upon young males, can be considered as a measure for the unsefulness of aggression, then the pressure built up must be enormous indeed. I don't see the environmental and behaviouristic approach to man's behavior as being diametrically opposed to the instinctivist school of thought, as Fromm does, but as a logical further step in the research of man's aggressive behavior and his increasing destructiveness.
Leaving out an enormous amount of information, not that it is not pertinent, but because I have very little space to write in, it is comforting to read in Fromm's "Anatomy of Human Destructiveness":
"Skinner has shown, that by the proper use of positive reinforcement, the behavior of animals and humans can be altered to an amazing degree, even in opposition to what some would loosely call "innate" tendencies". In relating about B. F. Skinner's experimentalist activities in the laboratory, Fromm notes that "serious problems arise, when we turn from the laboratory to serious living, to individual or social life. In this case, the paramount questions are; to WHA T are people being conditioned, and WHO determines these goals? The answer for me is quite obvious, that the people IN CHARGE determine this. The governments, the banks, the industrialists, the advertising agencies and the insurance companies determine this. The churches determines this, as do the parents.
The children and the young people do not determine this, even though they are directly involved. what has this all to do with my sculpture? I am convinced, that excessive aggressiveness among nations is augmented, in part, by conditioning the boys to be aggressive, in part, by repressing their sexual life.
My sculpture is made not only to show that the boys are beautiful and that they should be preserved and respected as such. But they are also sexual creatures, bursting with power, that certainly can be conditioned to further peaceful goals intended to preserve mankind upon the planet.
The penis is an important part of the body, but it cannot be shown. The penis (cock, tool, member, Schwanz, cazzo, are the names, I know it by now in English, German and Italian), is just as important as the mouth, eyes, ears, nose, openings into the inside of the body, that carries out functions necessary to eliminate water for boys and men, and, once erected, is the life-spender. Without it and the sperm ejaculated, no further generation would be produced, and mankind would become extinct.
I have never understood why, if it is so important to our lives, it is an object of embarrassment to our eyes. Objectively, it is no more beautiful or ugly than other parts of the body. There are even cases where a boy can have a really ugly face, but a very handsome cock. Most young boys are afraid of having their cocks seen, and are constantly hiding themselves. Older boys are not so afraid, because the have got used to this active and phenomenal part of their body, and its pleasure giving usefulness.
I have been more or less afraid of showing mine, thinking it might be too small. But after some comparing of size, I guess, it's as big as most. But the fact is, I would be afraid to show my penis to just anybody, for fear of being offending, or for fear of breaking the law. There are laws against exposing your cock and balls, except in private with your girlfriend, or in the men's dressing room in gymnasiums and swimmingpools.
Everywhere else, you just don't do it, without fear of some kind of punishment. It is against the law. Who made the law and why? This would take a book to explain, and perhaps I will write a book on that theme.
There already have been many written on the subject, most of them having to do with pornography. I do not do pornography (I don't think). But some people think so, and have called the photographs, that I have made to ILLUMINATE AND EDUCATE, obscene. In the United States, my books have been banned. Now, that I have turned to sculpture, will I have been making banned sculptures, too? I wait and see. Well, I have been hop-skipping-and-jumping through 2000 years of ideas, hitting a number of high points in the train of thought of dissimilar poets, philosopher psychologists and social scientist. My thought is hardly a train, but more accurately a zigzag toward one goal: that the naked your male human be accepted as creature of much beauty, so that special discussion might occur as to his real place in a peaceful oriented society.
My parents noticed, when I was young boy, that I was very good at drawing. My teachers in school were also impressed with my talent and suggested that I have addition training. At the age of 10, I went to the Saturday Morning Classes of the Art Institute of Chicago. Excited by my experience at the Art Institute, I made my own man in wet clay. I was very satisfied with my clay man and took him to my father t show. My beloved and otherwise joyful father seemed impressed, he took his fingers and plucked off the genitals of my man, saying "He doesn't need this". I was enraged, for I felt castrate myself, and made a big scene. My father's action was representative, of his society's attitude. To this day, in connection with the scene, I remain enraged.
-Will McBride
