Hope, Presence, Dignity, and Pain: Mel Ahlborn's Intercess and Wait
by Bobbi Dykema
Bobbi Dykema is an accomplished and award-winning academic and poet, with several peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, two poetry chapbooks, and more than 100 poems in print. She teaches humanities and world religions at Strayer University. She may be contacted at roberta.dykema@strayer.edu.
In 1464, the flagellant confraternity of San Benedetto dia Frustati in Perugia commissioned a gonfalone, or banner, from the artist Benedetto Bonfigli. Bubonic plague, which had devastated the capital city of Umbria in central Italy repeatedly over the previous century, had broken out again. On the banner, the merciful Virgin Mary, flanked by saints and martyrs, spreads her cloak over the heads of the kneeling faithful, who float above their walled city as personified Death mercilessly stalks his victims outside. Above the Virgin, Christ and two angels hurl arrows of pestilence, from which the faithful Perugians are protected by the Virgin’s cloak.
The banner was commissioned as a graphic means of begging the Virgin Mary for her intercession in protecting Perugia from plague. It was carried around the city in procession, followed by members of the confraternity displaying their penitence, in hopes of alleviating the plague, by flagellating themselves.1
Bonfigli’s plague banner is a vivid instantiation of medieval Europe’s cult of the VirginMary, whose intercessory prayer was and is considered highly efficacious, particularly by those seeking healing from serious illness and bodily infirmity. Artist Mel Ahlborn continues the tradition of intercessory images of the Virgin Mary in an exhibit entitled Modern Love: Intercess and Wait, which was on display during spring 2012 at San Francisco’s Gallery 1055.
The cult of the Virgin Mary was established amongst early Christians by the fifth century.2 As the Theotokos whose “yes” to bearing the Son of God bridged the chasm between earth and heaven, Mary is revered as Mediatrix of salvation. Prayers to Mary are particularly efficacious because they are relayed instantly to Christ, who can refuse his mother nothing—a belief dramatically depicted in an early fifteenth-century panel attributed to Lorenzo Monaco, in which the Virgin displays her breast to her adult divine Son, and simultaneously gestures toward a group of kneeling supplicants at her feet, saying, “Dearest son, because of the milk that I gave you, have mercy on them.”3 Mary is honored for her role in the salvation of humankind by being crowned Queen of Heaven, and her motherly concern extends to all of humanity. Born of immaculate conception via a chaste kiss shared by her elderly parents Joachim and Anna, Mary’s virginity and purity persisted before, during, and after the birth of Jesus. As Marina Warner puts it, “Mary’s peculiar qualities of bodily and spiritual integrity made her the supreme medium of healing.”4
Ahlborn’s Modern Love: Intercess and Wait continues Bonfigli’s tradition of supplication to the Virgin for specific serious illness. Each of the six Madonnas in the exhibit is connected with a particular life-threatening health concern of the present day. There is a Madonna of dementia and Alzheimer’s; a Madonna of genomic disorders; an ischemia Madonna; a breast cancer Madonna; a Madonna of stillbirth and miscarriage; and a Madonna of addiction. Each Madonna was created in conversation with a devotional image of the Italian Renaissance.
Mel Ahlborn. Alzheimers/Dementia Madonna and Child. 22.5 x 28.5 in. ©2010 Mel Ahlborn.
The Dementia Madonna and Child is inspired by the altarpiece of St. Zeno in Verona, by fifteenth-century artist Andrea Mantegna. Ahlborn’s version abstracts the central figures from the ornate background in the Mantegna, in which the Madonna sits enthroned before a frieze of Romanesque bas-relief. While in the Mantegna neither Virgin nor Child meets the viewer’s gaze, in Ahlborn’s Dementia Madonna, both mother and child not only look at something other than the viewer, each wears a slightly distracted or confused gaze familiar to those whose loved ones suffer from Alzheimer’s or dementia: it is a look which confesses that the person before them is not recognized, coupled with a sense of shame that they should be. She is a Virgin of Mercy not only through her spiritual maternity and compassion for humankind, but because she suffers along with those who suffer. Yet she tenderly strokes the Christ Child’s chubby toes, and he in turn rests his left hand trustingly on her shoulder, and with his right hand keeps his mother’s supporting arm close. This Madonna speaks of love and loss, of a language of touch that makes communication of love possible when words and memory fail.
Mel Ahlborn, Genomic Madonna, Oil on canvas, 117.5 x 96 cm. © 2011 Mel Ahlborn.
Ahlborn’s Genomic Madonna is striking for several reasons. Painted in conversation with Caravaggio’s Holy Family with St. John the Baptist, Ahlborn has again focused her attention on the two central figures—here the Madonna with Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist as a young child, his arms entwined about the Virgin’s neck. The family resemblance between Mary and John is much more striking in the Ahlborn than in the Caravaggio. Also, the gender identification of the subjects is somewhat blurred, and could be read as an adolescent or young adult male embracing a girl child in a familial, protective manner, or as two males, or two females. Mary’s expression speaks of the mixed emotions of tenderness and anxiety aroused in those who carry genomic disease markers when beholding members of the family’s next generation: the unvoiced question of whether this innocent new life has been bequeathed a heredity of sorrow and pain along with his or her parents’ tender, devoted love.
The Ischemia Madonna in Modern Love represents the greatest departure from its Italian predecessor, by Cesare da Sesto. Again, background elements and additional figures of cherubs and saints have been omitted with the sole exception of a pillar behind the Madonna’s left shoulder on which is carved a female figure in bas-relief, and to which Ahlborn has added the word “Ischemia.” The landscape elements in the da Sesto have been replaced by the Golden Gate Bridge. Even the colors of the Italian version have been changed; where da Sesto’s Madonna wore a lapis gown and red cloak, Ahlborn’s wears a pale blue skirt, red blouse, and green apron. What has been retained, however, is most significant: the infant Christ placing both hands tenderly over his mother’s heart. His gesture is evocative of both the love and tenderness of child and mother for one another, and the gesture of healing by touch of the adult Christ. Like the Genomic Madonna, Ahlborn’s Ischemia Madonna is not definitively gendered, and her features could easily be those of a man, reminding the viewer that heart disease is no respecter of gender.
As Margaret R. Miles has pointed out in a recent monograph on the subject, throughout the High Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, an exposed female breast in art signified food—and usually specifically the nurturing care of the Virgin Mary for her divine Child.5 Madonna Lactans became a common type of devotional image during this period. While neither Ahlborn’s Breast Cancer Madonna, nor its predecessor by Giovanni di Marco, depict a Virgin with breast exposed, the child Jesus reaches toward his Mother’s breast, clasping her mantle (which bears a strong resemblance to a modern nursing cover), indicating a relationship of nurturance and tender love. The Virgin’s mantle/nursing cover in Ahlborn’s version sports a tiny breast cancer ribbon, and her gown’s pale pink both echoes di Marco’s palette and bespeaks associations with the cause of breast cancer awareness. Like the Genomic Madonna in this series, Ahlborn’s Breast Cancer Madonna wears an expression of tenderness mixed with sorrowful concern; and like those carrying genomic diseases, the mother afflicted with breast cancer has experienced her own breasts both as life-giving nourishers of her infant, and as potential carriers of death.
The Stillbirth/Miscarriage Madonna in Modern Love is particularly notable for what it omits from its source painting, an Annunciation panel painted in the last quarter of the fifteenth century by an unknown Spanish artist known as the Master of the Retable of the Reyes Católicos. Ahlborn’s version gives particular emphasis to the Virgin’s rounded, pregnant belly, as well as to the red of her hair and of her bed canopy in the background, suggestive of the blood of miscarriage and stillbirth. But the Spanish original includes the detail of God the Father in the sky in the upper left background, above the angel Gabriel, breathing toward Mary on rays of golden light both a tiny Christ Child homunculus and the Spirit in the form of a dove. Their omission in Ahlborn’s Stillbirth and Miscarriage Madonna adds to the sense of tragedy, of a pregnancy that will conclude not in the live birth of a healthy child whose spirit is imparted by the Creator of humankind, but in sorrow and loss.
Mel Ahlborn. AIDS Madonna and Child. 22.5 x 28.5 in. © 2010 Mel Ahlborn.
David Linton has discussed how in many Renaissance depictions of the Annunciation, the Virgin Mary is found by the appearance of the angel Gabriel in the act of reading a book. Linton argues that the open book assigned to the Virgin corresponds semiotically to Gabriel’s phallic staff, as vulva, the female site of generation and reproduction.6 In both the original Spanish version and Ahlborn’s version, the Virgin is turning away from her book to attend to the angel’s marvelous pronouncements; the pages of the book flip together so that the reader loses her place. In Ahlborn’s Stillbirth and Miscarriage Madonna, whether the Virgin’s book is read simply as book or also semiotically as female genitalia, the sense of lost place is made especially poignant by the viewer’s foreknowledge of the outcome of her pregnancy.
Mel Ahlborn. Addiction Madonna and Child. Oil on canvas. 20.5” x 24.5” ©2011 Mel Ahlborn.
Ahlborn’s Addiction Madonna, like the Dementia and Alzheimer’s Madonna in this series, takes its cue from the facial expressions in the original by Andrea Mantegna. The eyes of both Virgin and Child in Ahlborn’s version are slightly unfocused, indicating the ravages of alcohol and drug abuse on the minds and bodies of both adult addicts and their children. The Christ Child bears the pallor of a child born addicted, and on closer investigation the adorable button on his garment is revealed to be an OxyContin pill.
In his book The Broken Cord, Michael Dorris chronicles the ongoing heartbreak of raising a child with profound fetal alcohol syndrome—the aggression, learning disabilities, and other challenges that parents and caregivers of such children face.7 The tender gestures by which Ahlborn’s Addiction Madonna and her Child hold one another must be held in tension with awareness of the bitter gift transmitted to such children before they ever draw breath—love and abuse, however unintended and unconscious—each in their measure.
The remainder of Modern Love: Intercess and Wait, i.e. the Wait portion, consists of a series of canvases painted in conversation with Stephen De Staebler’s Winged Figure (1993), a large bronze sculpture permanently housed at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley’s Flora Lamson Hewlett Library. While small in terms of actual size, Ahlborn’s Wait canvases are large in terms of power and conception. Where De Staebler’s figure has a dynamically back-thrust arm and wing, Ahlborn’s figures are armless; three have a single upthrust wing reminiscent of other of De Staebler’s figures, such as his bronze Pieta (1988), a commission for the Roofless Church in New Harmony, Indiana. Four other of Ahlborn’s Wait figures have a small stump of a wing, or the suggestion thereof; one is entirely wingless as well as armless.
Mel Ahlborn. Winged Figure: EarthMaker and Winged Figure. Oil on silk. 12” x 40” © 2011 Mel Ahlborn.
Six of the figures stand upright in a white space scarcely wider than its torso, bounded on either side by red. One figure stands on the border between white and red vertical spaces, looking upward in a gesture of supplication; the wingless and armless figure stands before a white background with its head bowed. In each canvas, the areas of white and red are not a single, solid color, but rather a complex dance of shadows, darkness, and light.
In an interview with Donald Kuspit, De Staebler noted his concern with religiously mediated suffering in his sculpture.8 De Staebler felt that one of the primary purposes of religion was to address suffering, thereby enabling the suffering individual, and her or his community, to transcend that suffering. De Staebler’s incomplete figures resonate with the memory of much surviving classical art, such as the armless Venus de Milo, or the headless Nike of Samothrace, both housed in the Louvre. Beyond this echo, however, De Staebler’s incomplete figures express the condition of bodily brokenness in such a way as to affirm the human condition in its very fragmentedness and limitedness.9 In the words of Doug Adams, “De Staebler’s works witness to an integrity and persistence of individual personality even in the face of . . . bodily deterioration or death.”10
Similarly, Ahlborn’s Wait figures bespeak the strength, dignity and courage of the human spirit in situations of pain, sorrow, and unknowing. Waiting becomes a major aspect of life for those suffering from the ailments addressed specifically by Ahlborn’s Madonnas: waiting to see a physician, waiting for medication to take effect, waiting for test results, waiting for sleep to come. The Wait figures with upthrust wing speak of waiting in hope of a good outcome, of healing and renewal of strength, believing in the promise of Isaiah 40:31: “They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” Others of Ahlborn’s figures wait with a sense of calm dignity; two of the figures with stumps of wings, who are blue rather than red, seem to wait with a sense of coolness or even numbness in the face of the dark uncertainties confronting them. The two largest of the canvases, whose figures stand in different relation to the red and white spaces, seem to wait in attitudes of prayer: facing upward in supplication or with head bowed in introspection and concern.
The faceless anonymity of Ahlborn’s Wait figures also calls to mind the twelve-inch articulated wooden mannequins found in many artists’ studios as a means for depicting the human body in motion or in a variety of poses. These figures also wait long hours, days, weeks, or months, for the opportunity to be useful, to be incorporated into the artist’s preparation, vision, and holy work. They are reminiscent of the well-known line from Milton’s poem “On His Blindness”: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”11 Those forced to wait by life-threatening health conditions, and those who love them and wait with them, find themselves cast outside the realm of human busyness and doing, into a liminal space in which their usefulness is confined to maintaining a state of alert readiness for whatever news might come, and being present to one another and to that which is, in their bodies and in their lives.
Finally, the sharply delineated red and white vertical spaces in Ahlborn’s Waitcanvases are highly evocative of the vertical black and white “zips” in Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross (1965-66), first exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Although they are entirely abstract, many commentators have noted in Newman’s Stations “residual references to the human form” in both their verticality and equivalence to human size.12 Unframed, Newman’s vertical “zips” evoke the “infinite reach of the cosmos,”13 and in their association by title with the Via Crucis of Christ’s Passion, this suggestion of infinity also connotes “continuous agony.”14 Thus, the figures in Ahlborn’s Wait series stand, hopeful, dignified, prayerful, or numb, in the interstices of not ordinary time, but of the agonized waiting of Lent, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Jane Dillenberger has said that “Newman’s series depicts the experience of death as it occurs within the field of consciousness.”15 Similarly, Ahlborn’s Wait figures bespeak the experience of conscious waiting that becomes the lot of those facing life-threatening illness.
While there is a plenitude of suffering, both personal and empathetic, in all of the paintings that comprise Modern Love: Intercess and Wait, it is not a suffering devoid of meaning or hope. Ahlborn’s Madonnas speak to the viewer of compassionate, empathetic and maternal presence with those who suffer; her Wait figures speak of hope, courage, and dignity in the face of potential or actual overwhelming loss. Although they are armless, it is in these figures’ very incompleteness that hope and comfort are to be found. As Stephen De Staebler said of his work for the Roofless Church in New Harmony, “When you are in the arms of God, who needs arms?”16 z
NOTES
1. Laura Fenley, Confraternal Mercy and Federico Barocci’s “Madonna del Populo”: An Iconographic Study, doctoral dissertation (Texas Christian University, 2007), 15-16.
2. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary(New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 291.
3. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/70010757; accessed 10 February 2012).
4. Warner, 293.
5. Margaret R. Miles, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350-1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 47.
6. David Linton, “Reading the Virgin Reader,” in The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 253-276.
7. Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord: A Family’s Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (New York: Harper Collins, 1989).
8. Donald Kuspit, Stephen De Staebler: The Figure (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1988), 15.
9. Doug Adams, Transcendence with the Human Body in Art: Segal, De Staebler, Johns, and Christo (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 53.
10. Adams, 63.
11. John Milton, in Sir Authur Thomas Quiller-Couch, ed., “On His Blindness,” The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1919); Bartleby.com, 1999. http://www.bartleby.com/101; accessed 7 Oct. 2013).
12. Adams, 62.
13. Jane Dillenberger, Secular Art with Sacred Themes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969), 109.
14. Dillenberger, 99.
15. Ibid.
16. Adams, 74.
Bobbi Dykema is an accomplished and award-winning academic and poet, with several peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, two poetry chapbooks, and more than 100 poems in print. She teaches humanities and world religions at Strayer University. She may be contacted at roberta.dykema@strayer.edu.
In 1464, the flagellant confraternity of San Benedetto dia Frustati in Perugia commissioned a gonfalone, or banner, from the artist Benedetto Bonfigli. Bubonic plague, which had devastated the capital city of Umbria in central Italy repeatedly over the previous century, had broken out again. On the banner, the merciful Virgin Mary, flanked by saints and martyrs, spreads her cloak over the heads of the kneeling faithful, who float above their walled city as personified Death mercilessly stalks his victims outside. Above the Virgin, Christ and two angels hurl arrows of pestilence, from which the faithful Perugians are protected by the Virgin’s cloak.
The banner was commissioned as a graphic means of begging the Virgin Mary for her intercession in protecting Perugia from plague. It was carried around the city in procession, followed by members of the confraternity displaying their penitence, in hopes of alleviating the plague, by flagellating themselves.1
Bonfigli’s plague banner is a vivid instantiation of medieval Europe’s cult of the VirginMary, whose intercessory prayer was and is considered highly efficacious, particularly by those seeking healing from serious illness and bodily infirmity. Artist Mel Ahlborn continues the tradition of intercessory images of the Virgin Mary in an exhibit entitled Modern Love: Intercess and Wait, which was on display during spring 2012 at San Francisco’s Gallery 1055.
The cult of the Virgin Mary was established amongst early Christians by the fifth century.2 As the Theotokos whose “yes” to bearing the Son of God bridged the chasm between earth and heaven, Mary is revered as Mediatrix of salvation. Prayers to Mary are particularly efficacious because they are relayed instantly to Christ, who can refuse his mother nothing—a belief dramatically depicted in an early fifteenth-century panel attributed to Lorenzo Monaco, in which the Virgin displays her breast to her adult divine Son, and simultaneously gestures toward a group of kneeling supplicants at her feet, saying, “Dearest son, because of the milk that I gave you, have mercy on them.”3 Mary is honored for her role in the salvation of humankind by being crowned Queen of Heaven, and her motherly concern extends to all of humanity. Born of immaculate conception via a chaste kiss shared by her elderly parents Joachim and Anna, Mary’s virginity and purity persisted before, during, and after the birth of Jesus. As Marina Warner puts it, “Mary’s peculiar qualities of bodily and spiritual integrity made her the supreme medium of healing.”4
Ahlborn’s Modern Love: Intercess and Wait continues Bonfigli’s tradition of supplication to the Virgin for specific serious illness. Each of the six Madonnas in the exhibit is connected with a particular life-threatening health concern of the present day. There is a Madonna of dementia and Alzheimer’s; a Madonna of genomic disorders; an ischemia Madonna; a breast cancer Madonna; a Madonna of stillbirth and miscarriage; and a Madonna of addiction. Each Madonna was created in conversation with a devotional image of the Italian Renaissance.
Mel Ahlborn. Alzheimers/Dementia Madonna and Child. 22.5 x 28.5 in. ©2010 Mel Ahlborn.
The Dementia Madonna and Child is inspired by the altarpiece of St. Zeno in Verona, by fifteenth-century artist Andrea Mantegna. Ahlborn’s version abstracts the central figures from the ornate background in the Mantegna, in which the Madonna sits enthroned before a frieze of Romanesque bas-relief. While in the Mantegna neither Virgin nor Child meets the viewer’s gaze, in Ahlborn’s Dementia Madonna, both mother and child not only look at something other than the viewer, each wears a slightly distracted or confused gaze familiar to those whose loved ones suffer from Alzheimer’s or dementia: it is a look which confesses that the person before them is not recognized, coupled with a sense of shame that they should be. She is a Virgin of Mercy not only through her spiritual maternity and compassion for humankind, but because she suffers along with those who suffer. Yet she tenderly strokes the Christ Child’s chubby toes, and he in turn rests his left hand trustingly on her shoulder, and with his right hand keeps his mother’s supporting arm close. This Madonna speaks of love and loss, of a language of touch that makes communication of love possible when words and memory fail.
Mel Ahlborn, Genomic Madonna, Oil on canvas, 117.5 x 96 cm. © 2011 Mel Ahlborn.
Ahlborn’s Genomic Madonna is striking for several reasons. Painted in conversation with Caravaggio’s Holy Family with St. John the Baptist, Ahlborn has again focused her attention on the two central figures—here the Madonna with Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist as a young child, his arms entwined about the Virgin’s neck. The family resemblance between Mary and John is much more striking in the Ahlborn than in the Caravaggio. Also, the gender identification of the subjects is somewhat blurred, and could be read as an adolescent or young adult male embracing a girl child in a familial, protective manner, or as two males, or two females. Mary’s expression speaks of the mixed emotions of tenderness and anxiety aroused in those who carry genomic disease markers when beholding members of the family’s next generation: the unvoiced question of whether this innocent new life has been bequeathed a heredity of sorrow and pain along with his or her parents’ tender, devoted love.
The Ischemia Madonna in Modern Love represents the greatest departure from its Italian predecessor, by Cesare da Sesto. Again, background elements and additional figures of cherubs and saints have been omitted with the sole exception of a pillar behind the Madonna’s left shoulder on which is carved a female figure in bas-relief, and to which Ahlborn has added the word “Ischemia.” The landscape elements in the da Sesto have been replaced by the Golden Gate Bridge. Even the colors of the Italian version have been changed; where da Sesto’s Madonna wore a lapis gown and red cloak, Ahlborn’s wears a pale blue skirt, red blouse, and green apron. What has been retained, however, is most significant: the infant Christ placing both hands tenderly over his mother’s heart. His gesture is evocative of both the love and tenderness of child and mother for one another, and the gesture of healing by touch of the adult Christ. Like the Genomic Madonna, Ahlborn’s Ischemia Madonna is not definitively gendered, and her features could easily be those of a man, reminding the viewer that heart disease is no respecter of gender.
As Margaret R. Miles has pointed out in a recent monograph on the subject, throughout the High Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, an exposed female breast in art signified food—and usually specifically the nurturing care of the Virgin Mary for her divine Child.5 Madonna Lactans became a common type of devotional image during this period. While neither Ahlborn’s Breast Cancer Madonna, nor its predecessor by Giovanni di Marco, depict a Virgin with breast exposed, the child Jesus reaches toward his Mother’s breast, clasping her mantle (which bears a strong resemblance to a modern nursing cover), indicating a relationship of nurturance and tender love. The Virgin’s mantle/nursing cover in Ahlborn’s version sports a tiny breast cancer ribbon, and her gown’s pale pink both echoes di Marco’s palette and bespeaks associations with the cause of breast cancer awareness. Like the Genomic Madonna in this series, Ahlborn’s Breast Cancer Madonna wears an expression of tenderness mixed with sorrowful concern; and like those carrying genomic diseases, the mother afflicted with breast cancer has experienced her own breasts both as life-giving nourishers of her infant, and as potential carriers of death.
The Stillbirth/Miscarriage Madonna in Modern Love is particularly notable for what it omits from its source painting, an Annunciation panel painted in the last quarter of the fifteenth century by an unknown Spanish artist known as the Master of the Retable of the Reyes Católicos. Ahlborn’s version gives particular emphasis to the Virgin’s rounded, pregnant belly, as well as to the red of her hair and of her bed canopy in the background, suggestive of the blood of miscarriage and stillbirth. But the Spanish original includes the detail of God the Father in the sky in the upper left background, above the angel Gabriel, breathing toward Mary on rays of golden light both a tiny Christ Child homunculus and the Spirit in the form of a dove. Their omission in Ahlborn’s Stillbirth and Miscarriage Madonna adds to the sense of tragedy, of a pregnancy that will conclude not in the live birth of a healthy child whose spirit is imparted by the Creator of humankind, but in sorrow and loss.
Mel Ahlborn. AIDS Madonna and Child. 22.5 x 28.5 in. © 2010 Mel Ahlborn.
David Linton has discussed how in many Renaissance depictions of the Annunciation, the Virgin Mary is found by the appearance of the angel Gabriel in the act of reading a book. Linton argues that the open book assigned to the Virgin corresponds semiotically to Gabriel’s phallic staff, as vulva, the female site of generation and reproduction.6 In both the original Spanish version and Ahlborn’s version, the Virgin is turning away from her book to attend to the angel’s marvelous pronouncements; the pages of the book flip together so that the reader loses her place. In Ahlborn’s Stillbirth and Miscarriage Madonna, whether the Virgin’s book is read simply as book or also semiotically as female genitalia, the sense of lost place is made especially poignant by the viewer’s foreknowledge of the outcome of her pregnancy.
Mel Ahlborn. Addiction Madonna and Child. Oil on canvas. 20.5” x 24.5” ©2011 Mel Ahlborn.
Ahlborn’s Addiction Madonna, like the Dementia and Alzheimer’s Madonna in this series, takes its cue from the facial expressions in the original by Andrea Mantegna. The eyes of both Virgin and Child in Ahlborn’s version are slightly unfocused, indicating the ravages of alcohol and drug abuse on the minds and bodies of both adult addicts and their children. The Christ Child bears the pallor of a child born addicted, and on closer investigation the adorable button on his garment is revealed to be an OxyContin pill.
In his book The Broken Cord, Michael Dorris chronicles the ongoing heartbreak of raising a child with profound fetal alcohol syndrome—the aggression, learning disabilities, and other challenges that parents and caregivers of such children face.7 The tender gestures by which Ahlborn’s Addiction Madonna and her Child hold one another must be held in tension with awareness of the bitter gift transmitted to such children before they ever draw breath—love and abuse, however unintended and unconscious—each in their measure.
The remainder of Modern Love: Intercess and Wait, i.e. the Wait portion, consists of a series of canvases painted in conversation with Stephen De Staebler’s Winged Figure (1993), a large bronze sculpture permanently housed at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley’s Flora Lamson Hewlett Library. While small in terms of actual size, Ahlborn’s Wait canvases are large in terms of power and conception. Where De Staebler’s figure has a dynamically back-thrust arm and wing, Ahlborn’s figures are armless; three have a single upthrust wing reminiscent of other of De Staebler’s figures, such as his bronze Pieta (1988), a commission for the Roofless Church in New Harmony, Indiana. Four other of Ahlborn’s Wait figures have a small stump of a wing, or the suggestion thereof; one is entirely wingless as well as armless.
Mel Ahlborn. Winged Figure: EarthMaker and Winged Figure. Oil on silk. 12” x 40” © 2011 Mel Ahlborn.
Six of the figures stand upright in a white space scarcely wider than its torso, bounded on either side by red. One figure stands on the border between white and red vertical spaces, looking upward in a gesture of supplication; the wingless and armless figure stands before a white background with its head bowed. In each canvas, the areas of white and red are not a single, solid color, but rather a complex dance of shadows, darkness, and light.
In an interview with Donald Kuspit, De Staebler noted his concern with religiously mediated suffering in his sculpture.8 De Staebler felt that one of the primary purposes of religion was to address suffering, thereby enabling the suffering individual, and her or his community, to transcend that suffering. De Staebler’s incomplete figures resonate with the memory of much surviving classical art, such as the armless Venus de Milo, or the headless Nike of Samothrace, both housed in the Louvre. Beyond this echo, however, De Staebler’s incomplete figures express the condition of bodily brokenness in such a way as to affirm the human condition in its very fragmentedness and limitedness.9 In the words of Doug Adams, “De Staebler’s works witness to an integrity and persistence of individual personality even in the face of . . . bodily deterioration or death.”10
Similarly, Ahlborn’s Wait figures bespeak the strength, dignity and courage of the human spirit in situations of pain, sorrow, and unknowing. Waiting becomes a major aspect of life for those suffering from the ailments addressed specifically by Ahlborn’s Madonnas: waiting to see a physician, waiting for medication to take effect, waiting for test results, waiting for sleep to come. The Wait figures with upthrust wing speak of waiting in hope of a good outcome, of healing and renewal of strength, believing in the promise of Isaiah 40:31: “They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” Others of Ahlborn’s figures wait with a sense of calm dignity; two of the figures with stumps of wings, who are blue rather than red, seem to wait with a sense of coolness or even numbness in the face of the dark uncertainties confronting them. The two largest of the canvases, whose figures stand in different relation to the red and white spaces, seem to wait in attitudes of prayer: facing upward in supplication or with head bowed in introspection and concern.
The faceless anonymity of Ahlborn’s Wait figures also calls to mind the twelve-inch articulated wooden mannequins found in many artists’ studios as a means for depicting the human body in motion or in a variety of poses. These figures also wait long hours, days, weeks, or months, for the opportunity to be useful, to be incorporated into the artist’s preparation, vision, and holy work. They are reminiscent of the well-known line from Milton’s poem “On His Blindness”: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”11 Those forced to wait by life-threatening health conditions, and those who love them and wait with them, find themselves cast outside the realm of human busyness and doing, into a liminal space in which their usefulness is confined to maintaining a state of alert readiness for whatever news might come, and being present to one another and to that which is, in their bodies and in their lives.
Finally, the sharply delineated red and white vertical spaces in Ahlborn’s Waitcanvases are highly evocative of the vertical black and white “zips” in Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross (1965-66), first exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Although they are entirely abstract, many commentators have noted in Newman’s Stations “residual references to the human form” in both their verticality and equivalence to human size.12 Unframed, Newman’s vertical “zips” evoke the “infinite reach of the cosmos,”13 and in their association by title with the Via Crucis of Christ’s Passion, this suggestion of infinity also connotes “continuous agony.”14 Thus, the figures in Ahlborn’s Wait series stand, hopeful, dignified, prayerful, or numb, in the interstices of not ordinary time, but of the agonized waiting of Lent, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Jane Dillenberger has said that “Newman’s series depicts the experience of death as it occurs within the field of consciousness.”15 Similarly, Ahlborn’s Wait figures bespeak the experience of conscious waiting that becomes the lot of those facing life-threatening illness.
While there is a plenitude of suffering, both personal and empathetic, in all of the paintings that comprise Modern Love: Intercess and Wait, it is not a suffering devoid of meaning or hope. Ahlborn’s Madonnas speak to the viewer of compassionate, empathetic and maternal presence with those who suffer; her Wait figures speak of hope, courage, and dignity in the face of potential or actual overwhelming loss. Although they are armless, it is in these figures’ very incompleteness that hope and comfort are to be found. As Stephen De Staebler said of his work for the Roofless Church in New Harmony, “When you are in the arms of God, who needs arms?”16 z
NOTES
1. Laura Fenley, Confraternal Mercy and Federico Barocci’s “Madonna del Populo”: An Iconographic Study, doctoral dissertation (Texas Christian University, 2007), 15-16.
2. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary(New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 291.
3. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/70010757; accessed 10 February 2012).
4. Warner, 293.
5. Margaret R. Miles, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350-1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 47.
6. David Linton, “Reading the Virgin Reader,” in The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 253-276.
7. Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord: A Family’s Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (New York: Harper Collins, 1989).
8. Donald Kuspit, Stephen De Staebler: The Figure (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1988), 15.
9. Doug Adams, Transcendence with the Human Body in Art: Segal, De Staebler, Johns, and Christo (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 53.
10. Adams, 63.
11. John Milton, in Sir Authur Thomas Quiller-Couch, ed., “On His Blindness,” The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1919); Bartleby.com, 1999. http://www.bartleby.com/101; accessed 7 Oct. 2013).
12. Adams, 62.
13. Jane Dillenberger, Secular Art with Sacred Themes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969), 109.
14. Dillenberger, 99.
15. Ibid.
16. Adams, 74.
