CITYSCAPES / MILES CORWIN : Smashing Success of an Artist in Her Wrecking Ball Phase

This is art: Six stoves are lined up on a dirt field in Valencia. A violinist wanders about playing discordant, disjointed music. A man operating a 14-ton crane drops a 3,000-pound wrecking ball on the stoves, picks up the stoves and drops them on each other, swings the stoves and catapults them through the air.

After all the stoves are demolished and the crowd disperses, the artist, Veronica La Jambe--who had shouted instructions to the crane operator for the past hour--reflects on truth and beauty and interprets her art. The stoves, she says, could represent femininity. Smashing them could represent the breaking of gender roles. The crane could represent masculinity.

“You have symbols, process, performance . . . and instant sculpture. That,” La Jambe says, pointing to the mangled remains of one Roper and five O’Keefe and Merrit stoves, “is art.”

But the man who supplied the stoves disagrees. A few hours after the stove smashing, Floyd Wimberly was crouched in his Pacoima junkyard, rewiring a 20-year-old refrigerator. Wimberly, an irascible man who is unshaven and wears a frayed flannel shirt, sold La Jambe the old stoves for $30 apiece, with $5 off on the last one.

“That ain’t the kind of art I like,” he says. “I’d rather see a picture of a nekked lady anytime.”

Wimberly then looks up from the refrigerator and says wistfully: “You know, those weren’t bad-looking stoves. With a little work they’d be a nice addition to somebody’s kitchen.”

Controversial public art has a long tradition in Los Angeles. A young Saudi Arabian sheik attracted much attention when he purchased a 38-room mansion in Beverly Hills and promptly painted four Greek statues so that the flesh, the hair and the body parts--traditionally covered by fig leaves--were highlighted in vivid detail.

The statues on the veranda attracted so many gawkers, and even tour buses, that there were frequent traffic jams on Sunset Boulevard. But one person’s eyeful is another’s eyesore, and neighbors complained loudly. The controversy ended in 1980 when an arsonist destroyed the estate.

Among the other notable public art controversies was the 39-foot-high mound of dirt in the shape of a naked women’s posterior on a Rancho Palos Verdes hillside. The creation precipitated a face-off between the artist, who claimed it was art, and city officials, who claimed it was a construction project and demanded a building permit. But the city recently backed down, a victory of art over bureaucracy.

With the confluence of mild weather, which Los Angeles is renowned for, and crackpot residents, a longstanding city tradition, eccentric public art is inevitable. So when La Jambe, a graduate student at California Institute of the Arts, was preparing to smash six stoves, she faced little opposition.

The stove smashing was the capstone in La Jambe’s artistic career, a career that has a clear, discernible theme. She has demolished a piano with a backhoe. She has destroyed an iron bed frame with a front-end loader. She has set fire to wooden planks. 3 She has scratched canvases with sharp metal objects.

“I guess you could say there’s a certain hostility in my work,” acknowledges La Jambe, 27, a small, intense woman with a shock of unruly black hair.

Although, in the past, she has destroyed objects to obtain materials for sculpture, this time she decided to make the stove smashing itself the art exhibit--a melange of performance art and kinetic sculpture. La Jambe obtained a $1,300 grant from the school, purchased the stoves, rented video equipment to record the event, reserved a field at the campus and contracted with Spud’s Crane Co.

Crane operator Bill Champagne does not look like the type of man usually seen at art openings. He is wearing work gloves, heavy boots, a trucking company T-shirt and has two tattoos, including one of a motorcycle on his bicep.

Although this is art to some, it is hard work to Champagne, who usually uses the wrecking ball to break up concrete slabs or knock down walls. On a warm, spring afternoon he perspired heavily as he checked the “quick release cables” on the crane and measured the angles to the stoves.

“I can’t say this looks too artistic to me,” says Champagne, climbing into his cab. “But I guess everyone has their own taste.”

About 100 art lovers gather on the hillsides and study programs, with the first item listed as: “50 foot drop, free fall, wrecking ball on stove.” The expository comments usually heard at art openings are not the kinds of things uttered at the stove smashing. Instead, this crowd, which is rowdy and inspired by a collective blood lust, chants: “Crush them!” “Smash them all!”

And Champagne does.