Fans Rally to Save the 'Spindle'

Enlarge Dustin Shuler

Spindle by Dustin Shuler in Berwyn, Ill., is scheduled to be removed and destroyed.

Dustin Shuler

Spindle by Dustin Shuler in Berwyn, Ill., is scheduled to be removed and destroyed.

Enlarge Dustin Shuler

Shuler's Pinned Butterfly (1982) was a temporary installation that consisted of a Cessna pinned to the side of a four-story brick building.

Dustin Shuler

Shuler's Pinned Butterfly (1982) was a temporary installation that consisted of a Cessna pinned to the side of a four-story brick building.

At a protest earlier this summer in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn, Ill., demonstrators on bicycles rallied in support of a sculpture at Cermak Plaza Shopping Center.

Spindle — which achieved worldwide exposure in the movie Wayne's World — is scheduled to be removed and destroyed in order to make way for a Walgreens.

The sculpture consists of a 50-foot high spike on which eight cars are impaled. The car at the top is a VW beetle. The one just below is a BMW that David Bermant, the owner of the shopping center, donated to artist Dustin Shuler in 1990.

"I always knew it was a possibility after a 10-year grace period that it could be destroyed because it's a commercial shopping center," Shuler says. "It would have been a lot easier for me if people hadn't fallen in love with it."

Shuler talks to Robert Siegel about the controversy surrounding Spindle, how he came to create the tower of cars, and why "transportation disasters" play such a prominent role in his body of work.