spindle comes down

Philip Von Zweck alerted the gochgo list to this video.

The sculpture was dismantled on Friday, May 2. Though officially called Spindle, I also heard it called Eight Car Pile-Up. In the decade-plus that I lived in Chicago I only made it out that far west on Cermak twice, I think. One time I drove by it, and one time I stopped, parked in the sculpture's parking lot home (ie the parking lot of the Cermak Plaza shopping center), and spent a few minutes walking around. Spindle was only one of quite a few art works on permanent display installed around the shopping center.

One thing to know is when I visited Cermak Plaza it was a classic late sixties-early seventies shopping center in visible and perhaps irreversible decline, with a covered walk running the length of the center. Architecturally, this was that strange kind of inner-ring suburban retail center that drew car-dependent shoppers in the days before enclosed malls and big box stores. Unlike in the video, neither of my visits were after dark.

I did not know how to feel, watching this video. It is sad, but also exhilarating in a minor way. And given that Spindle was part of a whole on-site portfolio of works, it could be argued that this particular work loses much of its meaning as the shopping center changes and erases those parts of itself that made it the ideal setting for Spindle. This is rust belt art, and this work may depend on for its completeness a rust belt milieu of fading shopping centers and cracked asphalt.