Delicate Architecture Joins Art and Commerce

In front of the red bras and panties of Victoria’s Secret, Leonardo da Vinci sits in a canvas plane he can’t pedal fast enough to fly. Alongside him is mustachioed Salvador Dali, who mulls a painting of a normal-looking clock, while next to him a real 3-D clock melts off a table.

Meanwhile, in front of the preppy Gap store, a formally attired Ludwig van Beethoven has spun around at his writing table, quill in hand, to throw a glower that defies any sense of symphonic beauty. As if that’s not enough, the corpulent and menacing Brunnhilde from Wagner’s heavy-as-a-dumpling German operatic cycle “The Ring of the Nibelung,” confronts anyone happily emerging, cartoon gewgaws in hand, from the nearby Warner Bros. Studio Store.

Things are different these days at The Oaks mall. These characters are part of a massive sculpture installation that rises beneath the twinkly lights in the mall’s center court. From a tepee shape that reaches 25 feet in height, the nine Muses of Greek mythology look down over four partitioned “theaters” that manage simultaneously to cartoon and to revere the arts: music, dance, theater, visual media.

The installation will be here through August. Then it will be demolished. Or smashed. Or whatever else you call it when, at the beach, it’s time to beat the tide and ruin the afternoon’s work on a sand castle.

For The Oaks installation is, in fact, pure sand: 270 tons of it, mixed lightly with water for the packing and carving and smoothing. Finished just weeks ago, it remains wet along the base as it dries to a hardness that can withstand mild earthquakes.

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It almost didn’t make it. Half completed and vulnerably wet on Washington’s birthday, portions of it cracked and fell from fault-line tremors that shook The Oaks like a giant hand jiggling an omelet pan. That’s when the artist, Manhattan Beach native Todd Vander Pluym, considered abandoning the project.

“Then,” he says, “I figured: ‘I just don’t want a pile of sand to beat me.’ ”

If anyone understands the properties of a medium so plastic and ephemeral as sand, it is Vander Pluym. He’s an architect who chucked his flourishing practice 14 years ago to “do,” as he puts it, sand sculpture full-time.

He’s “done” more than 200 malls and more than 1,000 sculptures in more than 40 states and in Australia, Canada and Japan. He’s been asked to do all sorts of things in sand--and does--though he did turn down as “just too stupid” the 27-year-old woman who wanted a nude sculpture of herself carved at her birthday party. You didn’t know that sand sculpting was sport? It is, and Vander Pluym holds four world championships and seven U.S. open championships.

But statistics do not do honor to the art, which is achieved as a team effort. Vander Pluym acts as choreographer and head sculptor, employing three other full-time sculptors to help carry out his vision. Moreover, in every mall project, he invites anyone to join in--as long as they’re willing to give a commitment of four continuous hours of work. For the more talented among the volunteers, he’ll “block out” a major figure within the installation to retain scale but then let someone else do the actual sculpting.

In Thousand Oaks, about 60 volunteers helped lend shape to the installation, titled “Impressions of Art” and commissioned by The Oaks’ management as an homage to the new Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. Vander Pluym thus calls his work “patchwork, like a quilt with many hands behind it.”

Among the hands were those of a retired electrician, a hair stylist and, says Vander Pluym, “a professional homeless guy who asked what he’d get paid” but packed sand for free anyway. One of the volunteers, in fact, gave Brunnhilde her finely etched air of menace.

Still, it would be wrong to characterize as a work of democracy any piece as coherent and dramatic and ably executed as this one. Vander Pluym clearly drives things down to the final detail. He sounds Dali-esque in describing a personal vision that “just kind of happens as you go.” This contrasts with architecture, he says, “where 90% of the effort is nuts and bolts and 10% (is) imagination.”

“Sand sculpture is precisely the reverse of that,” he says, adding, “I’m intrigued by working within a system in which suspension of disbelief is key.”

Moreover, he seems just as intrigued to be standard bearer for a very old art and to celebrate sand as a legitimate medium.

“I was in Rome and discovered that Michelangelo first carved the ‘Pieta’ in sand,” he says. “The guy didn’t have the money to buy paraffin, which was the standard choice of the day. This blew me away.”

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At 9 p.m., as security guards whisk late shoppers from the mall, two women dart between da Vinci and Victoria’s Secret, the younger using a tiny camera to line up a good overall shot of “Impressions.”

They are the last of the mall’s visitors to take pictures on this day; it seems flashes are triggered at “Impressions” every 10 minutes during afternoon and early evening hours.

The shooter is Bonnie Barr, a biochemist by training. Her mother is Dorothy. Both are from Ventura. Bonnie gets her shot and says: “This is so precise, so mathematical. The sense of balance is incredible. I’m just so struck.”

Then Bonnie allows as how she hates going to this or any other mall--as malls overwhelm her. Indeed, she hadn’t been to one in years until the night before, when her boyfriend took her to The Oaks. She dropped everything on this night to bring her mother to see “Impressions,” which she says “makes the mall so insignificant, I can bear it.”

When told that the artist does not own a camera and never takes pictures of his art--that Vander Pluym, just finishes up and moves on to the next one, because, in his own words, “it’s about the process, not the thing”--Bonnie drew in a deep breath.

She shakes her head back and forth, putting her hand on her chest before saying:

“How godlike.”