Adrian Ghenie: The Hooligans, Pace Gallery

January 1, 2022

Texts by Apsara DiQuinzio and Masha Tupitsyn

Published to mark the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with Pace Gallery, this book features recent paintings and drawings by Ghenie, who explored the notion of “hooliganism” in the creation of the works.

Excerpt:

"If, as Otto Rank concludes,'When the conscious Self sleeps, the Double works and watches' (Ichabod Crane’s 1858 story of the Headless Horseman comes to mind here), without the same structures of containment, how are we to know who is controlling whom? Which Self is rational and which Self is irrational? It is difficult to know what form consciousness even takes today, much less which Self is conscious and which is dormant. The more apt question might be: What kind of Self is at work when all post-capitalist subjectivity has been abdicated to the free-market schedule of the digital algorithm? In Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, this now antiquated split function is further upended by the deregulated clock of affective labor and the disturbed economy of sleep, altering not only the sleeping cycle and the working cycle but the psychic order of selves."

-Masha Tupitsyn