The Golden Fang

The Golden Fang is the actual occurrence of a script that has been rearranged many times. Moods change, sets move and sometimes buildings substitute for car parks. Each piece is a reworked version based on the corpus of each artist, leaving the usually static state of the work in suspense.

At Pauline Perplexe, the shapes that surround us seem to have absorbed an existing vocabulary while their desires have supplanted possible underlying behaviour. Each of them has already been exhibited under a different aspect or in a different context. And if one seeks out the gestures that preceded these adaptations, none of them really dissolve, but rather contain others by way of encasement. In these rhythms effects, these forms seem to have languished in an elastic state where emotions and moods have been negotiated like a raw material.

Thoughts agglomerate and saturate the space. Folded and shaped like pieces from a set, these forms are dissociated. To blur the texture they exude is tantamount to dreaming their own fatigue, or to bring out a malleable material from which a self-reflexive space can operate. In these movements of introspection, questions about the patterns, discourses and powers that act in our relationship to the world stick to the forms, but through stretching, it is also about their own mechanisms that they cogitate. At Pauline Perplexe, they investigate as much a speculation of their image and their materials as what they project of the reality. And somehow this implies an escape, an attitude of extension as a way of shifting.

In Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice (2009) and again in its film adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson (2014), The Golden Fang is so many occurrences or representations that refer to a name: a schooner, a dentist’s office, a cartel, a rehabilitation institute, a (discrete) establishment organisation. Its hazy contours and nebulous system change roles, mirroring the late capitalism that creates needs as much as it fills their lacks.

Fiona Vilmer, July 2022