Roll ‘Em! : Artists Hopes 14-Ton Concrete Sculpture Makes Impression With Santa Monica Beachgoers

Within the pattern it was possible to put lots of humorous comments on Los Angeles. There are streets that are bumper to bumper and there are a number of car accidents that occur in various places. --artist Carl Cheng

Become the Paul Bunyan of Los Angeles and step over jammed freeways, city streets and housing tracts. Feel free to kick over an office complex or flatten a shopping mall on the way through.

Santa Monica beachgoers soon will be able to indulge in these and other fantasies as they romp through a detailed 2-inch-high cityscape of homes, office buildings, roads, highways and cars imprinted on hundreds of yards of sand.

Just north of the Santa Monica Pier, artist Carl Cheng has assembled a 14-ton concrete roller indented with an intricate pattern of a cityscape resembling Los Angeles. The 12-foot-wide roller is actually a sculpture, titled “Santa Monica Art Tool,” which, when hooked to a tractor and pulled up the beach, will leave a second art work imprinted in the sand, a cityscape appropriately titled “Walk on L.A.”

“I want to put art where people would not expect it,” Cheng said. “I like making a project interesting to the general public, not just the art collectors.”

The 46-year-old artist’s work is the second sculpture commissioned for Santa Monica’s beach as part of a planned 10-piece Natural Elements Sculpture Park. The first sculpture, a pair of steel chairs 16 feet high that produce tones when struck by the wind, is on the beach near Pico Avenue. All the sculptures will employ elements of nature, such as the wind, sand or sun.

Cheng’s pattern of a city on the sand is expected to erode during the course of a day. But the roller can be used to re-create the sand art work.

Under his Santa Monica-based John Doe Co., Cheng has created public art works using natural elements throughout the world for more than 20 years.

“I’m inspired by philosophical questions about man being a part of nature,” he said. “It’s an artist’s job to think up stuff, and that’s based on what a person gets inspired by.”

Cheng has long been inspired by Santa Monica’s expanse of sandy beaches. The artist, who can often be found wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt with his long, dark hair tied in a ponytail, has spent years studying machines that use rollers and taking aerial photos over Southern California to create an art work that can create another art work in the sand.

“I thought about this for five years and decided what I wanted to do was make a generic Los Angeles,” he said. The imprint created by the roller should “have that sprawl look to it. From the air all of Southern California is a carpet of grids, streets, pavement and freeways running all over the place.”

Cheng began his roller by drawing a detailed 12-foot-by-30-foot map, which is roughly equal to the surface of the 12-foot-wide, 9-foot-diameter roller.

The map was used as a guide to make the drum’s surface of 14 concrete panels, each weighing 1,500 pounds.

Plastic Mold

To make a panel, Cheng used hundreds of models of buildings, homes, roads, freeways, cars and buses. Once he had composed a panel, he used an industrial process to make a plastic mold.

Each mold was placed in a wooden frame designed to curve it so the casting would fit onto the drum. Concrete was poured over the mold to make a curved panel with an outside surface indented with a portion of the cityscape.

Also cast were two concrete end caps for the roller, each 9 feet in diameter and weighing about 3,500 pounds, with a hole in the middle for an axle.

Cheng moved the parts of his sculpture to the beach and began assembling the roller on March 11.

Using a crane, the artist and his helper, Jeff Chapline, wrestled the end caps upright. They added three steel rims with spokes and used a large metal axle pushed through the center of the caps and rims to hold it all together.

Fastened by Bolts

Cheng and his friend were muscling the heavy panels into place last week. Protruding from the inside face of each panel are 14 steel bolts that fasten the panels to the rims and end caps.

By the unveiling at 3 p.m. on Sunday north of the pier, the completed roller will have a large hitch attached to the axle. The city will use one of its big, 120 horsepower diesel tractors, normally used to rake trash off the beach, to pull the roller and create a small city in the sand.

Cheng was awarded a $60,000 commission to create his sculpture. The City of Santa Monica, the National Endowment for the Arts, and SMARTS, a nonprofit foundation that raises funds for public art works in Santa Monica, paid for the project.

“When you know what the roller does you automatically look at it as an abstraction,” Cheng said. “The indentations on the surface of the roller look like hieroglyphics. It is an abstraction and it triggers people’s imaginations.”

Subtle Jokes

The imprint created in the sand by the weight of the roller will have some surprises. Cheng said he has hidden subtle jokes and some landmark Los Angeles buildings within the cityscape.

“Within the pattern it was possible to put lots of humorous comments on Los Angeles,” he said. “There are streets that are bumper to bumper and there are a number of car accidents that occur in various places.”

Cheng would not say which landmarks he included in his city. “I want people to find them themselves,” he said.

The executive director of SMARTS, Henry Korn, is enthusiastic about Cheng’s work for Santa Monica.

‘Something to Say’

“This work is playful, it encourages public participation,” Korn said. “But at the same time it has something to say.”

Korn said no decision had been made on how often the roller will be used to renew the cityscape over the length of the beach. The roller will be permanently displayed north of the Santa Monica Pier and will be rolled daily over a nearby 30-foot stretch of sand.

If someone feels like walking through Cheng’s city and stomping on a few office complexes, that’s all right by him.

“They can think about what it means to walk on L.A.,” Cheng said. “People have always debated what is art. That is the beauty about art, it makes people think.”

Carl Cheng’s sketch of his mammoth “Santa Monica Art Tool” shows how sand sculpture is created and re-created. Cheng dons hard hat and work gloves to help put the sculpture together. A concrete imprint of one of the designs in “Walk On L.A.” is stamped on the side of the sculpture.