The Sickness Unto Death Pt. V: Head of a Man on a Rod

Aaron Dupuis
The Sickness Unto Death 
A Musically Guided Exploration of Artist's Struggle with Mortality
Curated by Aaron Dupuis
Alberto Giacometti, Head of a Man on a Rod, 1947
"I read somewhere that when you face eternity
 You face it alone
No matter what you thought
Or what you had or you had not
Unless you put yourself in God
But tell me God oh where did you go?"
"The Sickness Unto Death," Typhoon 

Alberto Giacometti's sculptures and portraits exhibit a twisted pride in the reduction of the human form to its most basic and fragile states. The Walking Man series, City Square, and Three Men Walking all feature thin, frail figures, lost in the void of empty space around them. The inclusion of several figures upon a single surface - City Square and Three Men Walking for instance - serves to increase the sense of loneliness rather than detract from it. These shades are lost and self-absorbed, worn down to skeletons by the slow steady passage of time. In the aftermath of WWII, Giacometti's works were a statement about the human condition, that is to say, that humans were broken, selfish, helpless things. Not one of these works, however, seems quite as lonely or hopeless or concerned with eternity as Head of a Man on a Rod. 

 A man's cry to the cruel, unfeeling heavens captured in cold, rough bronze, Head of a Man uses negative space to its fullest extent. The man's body has blown away, gone like so much dust in so many gusts of wind, leaving only a rod to support the head. Empty space surrounds the silhouette, engulfing the figure in nothingness. The man is crying into a vacuum, the vacuum. He hopes for a reply. A sign. For purpose. For hope. But he receives nothing in return. Instead his head hovers there for eternity, gazing into the abyss, praying at the top of his lungs that something stares back.

  • 7:00 AM

The Sickness Unto Death Pt. IV: The Dog

Aaron Dupuis
The Sickness Unto Death 
A Musically Guided Exploration of Artist's Struggle with Mortality
Curated by Aaron Dupuis

Francisco Goya, The Dog, 1819-23

"Now I've only got one organ left in this old bag of bones
It is failing me
And I try to tell people that I'm dying 
Only they don't believe me
They say we're all dying
That we're all dying
But if you are dying, why aren't you scared?
Why aren't you scared, like I'm scared?"
"The Sickness Unto Death," Typhoon


In 1819 Francisco Goya holed himself up in the the "Quinta del Sordo" - "The Villa of the Deaf Man" - near Madrid, Spain. In the preceding years he had been racked by illness and mental decline, just as his country had been racked by war. During his stay at the Villa, Goya completed a series of fourteen paintings commonly referred to as The Black Paintings. These dark and brooding pieces were painted directly onto the walls of his home, like hieroglyphics in an Egyptian tomb. But while the Egyptians used their art to capture the promise of a happy afterlife, the murals of Goya's mausoleum speak of the inescapable horror of the void beyond life.

Among these Black Paintings, The Dog stands out, not as the most macabre work, but rather, the most hopeless and tragic. The titular canine gazes up at the sky, into the heavens, as he is tossed about in a sea of darkness. For now his head pokes up above the surface, but soon the swelling wave on the right side will break over him, tossing him down, down, down, into its black empty depths. The helpless creature has no chance to live, only to survive. To paddle and paddle until its strength gives out, or the darkness consumes it once and for all.

Goya must have felt that he was the dog. Lost, alone, and afraid. The Black Paintings were never truly intended for public exhibition. Goya had chosen to paint on the walls of his home for his own sake, never mentioning the paintings in writing or in conversation with his contemporaries. The paintings acted as a sort of therapy in this, the final dark chapter of his life. The dog's plight is his own. But while it will forever be frozen in time, just on the cusp of drowning, Goya's story would have to end, and no series of paintings, no matter how moving was going to change that.

  • 8:40 PM

The Sickness Unto Death Pt. I: At Eternity's Gate

Aaron Dupuis
The Sickness Unto Death 
A Musically Guided Exploration of Artist's Struggle with Mortality
Curated by Aaron Dupuis

Vincent van Gogh, Worn Out: At Eternity's Gate, 1890

"Old man in your rocking chair
You wake up, you've been living alone

After all these years
Surrounded by these shards of mirrors
How'd it get so quiet here
You wonder where did everyone go?"
"The Sickness Unto Death," Typhoon


A couple weeks back, as I  was driving beneath the emerald canopy of Blue Ridge Boulevard and tossing project ideas about in my head, "The Sickness Unto Death" by the Portland0based indie group Typhoon began to spill from my speakers. It had been some time since I'd heard the song, but just as the cold makes the old cut on my finger ache, it brought back the ache of buried memories. Teenage heartbreaks. Long drives in the dead of night. Relatives that I'd lost. But most of all, as is always the case, it brought back the fear that lurks in the back of my head, of many heads around the world. The fear that reduced me to tears time and time again as a child. The fear of forever. Of experiencing forever, whether I continued to exist or not.

And it was from this well of fear - beautiful, terrible fear - that I drew the inspiration for my gallery. I present to you The Sickness Unto Death. Through a synthesis of contemporary lyrics, personal experience, and the paintings of the masters, I will explore the efforts of the Artist to reconcile himself with human mortality. In doing so, I hope to capture the beauty of life and expression, rather than the triumph of death. Though the lyrics themselves will not play a great part in the body of the text, I felt it necessary to include them, not only to give the gallery a proper narrative structure, but also to illustrate the timelessness of the Artist's struggle with death. That being said, I would encourage readers to give the song a listen. It's a favorite of mine.

And so it goes:

Van Gogh first took down the image of the old man in the chair in 1882, using an aged war veteran he encountered in an alehouse as his model. He wrote extensively about the drawing, which he called Worn Out, and its eventual transformation into a lithograph. The writings in question detailed his thoughts about the emotional power of the human form, and the greater implications that it seemed to hold. "It seems to me that one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of 'something on high' in which Millet believed, namely in the existence of a God and an eternity," he wrote, "is the unutterably moving quality that there can be in the expression of an old man like that, without his being aware of it." Fascinated and moved by his discovery, van Gogh began a long series of lithographs and drawings of the veteran, women, and hospital patients, all in the same pose.

Vincent van Gogh, Worn Out, 1882
For eight long years, van Gogh did not return to the drawings and lithographs he had made in that formative time of his career. And in those eight long years his life had drastically changed. He had found his artistic style, collaborated with artists like Gauguin, created what would be his most famous painting, Starry Night, begun frequenting brothels, cut off his left ear, and had started to lose touch with reality. By 1890, the hallucinations and periods of madness had grown so strong that van Gogh could no longer keep their effects from affecting his work. During this time there passed entire months of inactivity, months that took their toll on the artist's outlook and work. It was directly following a mental relapse that van Gogh finally revisited the old man in the chair. This time he forsook pencil and lithograph, and went straight for his paint.

Blues, greys, whites, orange. They play off one another, but they do not dance the way that the colors of van Gogh's landscapes do. Instead they seem to tremble. The man in the painting seems smaller, weaker, than his predecessor. And where the subject of Worn Out seems to be resting his eyes, the fists in Eternity's Gate look like weary guardians of tear-filled eyes. The men are not the same. At Eternity's Gate is more than a final play on an early artistic motif, it is a mirror of van Gogh's life. He has replaced the old war veteran. He is a veteran in his own right. A veteran of art. A veteran of life.

Two short months after painting At Eternity's Gate Vincent van Gogh shot himself in the chest while out on a walk in the wheat fields of Auvers. He lived a night and the better part of the next day, managing to make his way back to his room in the local inn, where his brother Theo comforted him and recorded his final words:

"The sadness will last forever."


  • 7:00 AM