In 1917, Marcel Duchamp placed a mass-produced urinal on a pedestal and declared it art. This "Ready-Made" not only revolutionized art history but also fundamentally redefined the question of what constitutes an artwork: What is art* and who decides what art is?

Today, over a century later, we are witnessing a quiet yet profound rebirth of the Ready-Made. But its function has shifted. No longer driven by irony or Dadaist provocation, it now serves as an analytical lens on the societal conditions of control, surveillance, and freedom.
At the center: the Ankle Bracelet Monitor. A highly functional device designed for real-time surveillance of individuals. It is not merely a symbol of deprivation of liberty – it is control in technical form. Its presence marks the entanglement of body, technology, and power. When transferred into an artistic context, it is not neutralized, but made visible – the invisible infrastructure of surveillance that has long since inscribed itself into everyday life, social structures, and the self-image of the individual.

This new form of Ready-Made is no longer spectacular. It does not shout. It refrains from expressive gestures. Its aesthetic is one of silence, coldness, technocracy. It mirrors the logic of the very systems it addresses – systems that measure, categorize, and localize human beings. The surface of the ankle monitor – smooth, functional, without ornament – becomes a symbol of a post-human order in which the individual becomes a data carrier and the body a monitored zone.

In contrast to Duchamp’s ironic gesture, a somber seriousness emerges. RMFC does not stand for the liberation of the object, but for its enslavement – and thereby for the enslavement of its wearer. The Ready-Made is not “freed from everyday life” but remains anchored in it as a critical object, making that very everyday life visible. It points to a society in which art no longer serves as a point of escape but functions as a mirror of systemic reality.

RMFC – Ready Made For Control means that it is no longer art that questions the everyday, but the everyday itself – through its controlling technologies – that intrudes into art. The  ankle bracelet monitor stands as an exemplar for a world in which the boundaries between individual and system, freedom and surveillance, body and machine, are increasingly dissolving.

The ankle monitor becomes a symbol of a new iconography of the present. An iconography that no longer needs images, but only objects with function – and practice willing to approach these objects with analytical coldness.

01.04.2025

* The Unmaking of Art   A lecture by Walter Benjamin