Das Rad des Realen

The outdoor sculpture »Das Rad des Realen« [The Wheel of the Real] consists of ten bicycles attached to a supporting structure and a lead human figure. The industrial revolution of the 19th century was based on wheel technology. Wheels set the production machinery in motion in the factories around 1800, from which the wheel-driven machines of movement (bicycle, trains, automobiles, and airplanes) developed, as well as image machines (camera, film projector) in the early 20th century. With this sculpture, created in 1988, but lost later and reconstructed in 2014, Peter Weibel pays tribute to the technology of the wheel as one of the foundations of today’s technologically shaped world. In view of the mass murder of people and the inhuman technologies of war that the 20th century produced, for Peter Weibel the sculpture also stands for the wheel of history that is turned by politics and in which the individual human being is only a small, insignificant passenger. Citizens do not play a role in the »wheels« of power (J.P. Sartre, 1948).