Vincent Glowinski & Walter Hus: the antler kings

In La tête d'Actéon, Vincent Glowinski dives head first – but not only – into the myth of Actaeon and Diana, propelled by the musical metamorphoses of Walter Hus, Teun Verbruggen, and Andrew Claes.

"It seems to me that my work metamorphoses continuously. Incessantly," says Vincent Glowinski, when we meet him and composer/musician Walter Hus in the Museum of the Botanique. It has only been a couple of weeks since "Mater Museum", Glowinski's joint exhibition with his mother, multidisciplinary artist Agnès Debizet, closed its doors here, and there are still several of his parchment leather sculptures lying around – or flying, in the case of his imposing pterodactyl – while a painted canvas of a dense forest forms the backdrop of Walter Hus's impressive Decap organ.

That constant shapeshifting is what characterises Vincent Glowinski through and through. A few years ago, the young Frenchman still donned his near-mythical pseudonym Bonom, under which he painted enormous tableaux on Brussels's façades. Murals that looked like they came straight from a book of fables or myths and were bursting with playfulness, profundity, poignancy, and soul. Since he was forced to abandon his anonymity, Glowinski has directed his passion towards dance, performance, sculptures, drawings, and even puppets. Incessantly shifting from one language to the other, without ever compromising the mythical and at the same time highly personal universe he has been building since day one.

STRETCHED TO BREAKING POINT
This peculiar universe is now expanding in La tête d'Actéon, a production for which Glowinski – under the banner of both Les Nuits and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts – is joining forces with Walter Hus, Teun Verbruggen, and Andrew Claes for a round of mythology in the making, by (literally) diving head first into the tale of Actaeon and Diana. In brief: Actaeon is a hunter, who one day is walking through the wood with his pack of hunting dogs and happens upon Diana, the goddess of hunting, while she bathes in the nude. Actaeon is transformed into a stag and ultimately ripped to pieces by his own dogs. Vincent Glowinski: "The metamorphosis, as I understand it, is the punishment for a 'mistake' that Actaeon made. According to some kind of supreme, divine code of ethics, Actaeon is to blame because he saw Diana naked. The crime is in his sight, the transgression is in looking."

Within the architectural setting of the Museum, with its columns and elongated space, with Walter Hus's organ that rises at the front, a whole symbolic order has free rein. "You have Greek mythology, which is very precisely about the world of human emotion, and Christian iconography, but also science, which you might call a kind of total mythology, and, from a Judaeo-Christian perspective, even the Shoah, which is a kind of eradication of all imagery: all these elements are part of me, influence me, and appear here in a kind of spontaneous interplay, between the visual language of hell, paradise, virginity, the violation of that virginity, and the fate of Actaeon. All things that are very charismatic, human emotions that are stretched to breaking point."

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
All these aspects are expressed, but they do not offer or provide inalienable truths. "Mythology or religion don't offer truths. They are keys that allow you to read and understand humanity better." Certainties are there to be challenged. Rather than staying on solid ground, the "singe boiteux" leaps into the void. Idiosyncratic, uncompromising, intuitive, almost obsessively searching for balance between body and spirit, between the moment and the history that has led up to that moment. "La tête d'Actéon is an exploration into the psychology of that character. At the same time, it is a way of delving into myself. For this project, I use many of my older images and sculptures, so it is like revisiting what I have already done, circulating in my own head. With the antlers as the excrescences of that memory."

La tête d'Actéon also means a trip back to the future for Walter Hus, who since founding Maximalist! has been creating an irresistibly multifaceted oeuvre. "I have spent my whole life deviating from the straight road. I was destined to become a classical pianist, and then I combined that with free jazz. I have now become a kind of orchestra unto myself, and I have gone through so many genres that I barely know who I am anymore. [Laughs] They were always encounters – acts of love almost – that led me to unknown areas in which I just had to improvise solutions. But this collaboration with Vincent, Teun, who brings an incredible wealth of percussion and performance to the table, and Andrew, from STUFF., who contributes electronica, is extremely fruitful because it connects me to where I first started: playing free jazz. That term is perhaps a bit outdated, but this is really experimental. For me, this is the first time that I have applied the notion of improvisation and total experiment to a live act with my organ. This is an unbelievably powerful thing, a chapter that was not anticipated, which germinated from an encounter."

That is also the fruitful seed from which Vincent Glowinski's universe grows. "That freedom is profoundly important. I could say a lot about the project, but explanations always come afterwards. This production is based on human encounters much more than on a structure. With Bob, a set builder and good friend of Walter, who painted me with antlers and thus contributed the idea of the myth. With Teun, with whom I have worked before, like on Duo à l'encre. We discussed the project together, and we understand each other. But otherwise it is all freestyle, you know."

LA TÊTE D'ACTÉON
12/5, 20 & 22.00, Botanique, www.botanique.be, www.kunstenfestivaldesarts.be