The Statue and the Readymade: Thinking is Not Ready-Made

Statues and other monuments that mark the great names of colonization and empire are specifically privatized forms of colonizing memory. To reduce the collective forces of history to a single name is a form of defacement. This essay argues for a mode of history and memory beyond the face and beyond the individual. Debates surrounding the removal or preservation of statues for the sake of history and memory assume a humanized and privatized form of historical time. The destruction of statues is a positive event that opens the possibility of collective time. Rather than preserving history through terms that are readymade, this essay argues for an aesthetics of the ready-made, or the found object that appears alien and out of place.