Jim Day in an under-the-radar warehouse art collective somewhere near central Los Angeles.
My friend Jim Day, an artist, was over doing a little repair on my house. He is in his mid-fifties, a little older than me but we are both art lifers, share the same roots, have similar points of references, and have run in the same circles for almost a quarter-century. Sometimes in relationships like this, a conversation can occur in a sort of short-hand that the uninitiated might not follow.
While Jim was grabbing wrenches and twisting pipes we were lamenting the Oakland Ghost Ship tragedy. He told me a tale of similar circumstances that happened to him in New York many years ago, minus the tragic loss of life, but one that underscored the necessity of artist spaces that are not governed by the sameness of code-enforced conformity, that mark stretches of independence, freedom and yes, risk-taking, and are a necessary part of the formation of many artists. More than a rite of passage, artist collectives are transformative endorsements of giving one’s life over to one’s vision. While Ghost Ship’s manager was an outlier, Jim articulated that any crackdown on this sort of existence could go into the extreme with nitpicky regulation. I insisted we speak about it in a more formal manner to document the position of artists who rely on this type of existence to be who they really are.
MAT GLEASON: So we were talking about the fire, the tragedy…
JIM DAY: The Oakland fire... what can I say? It hits home on so many levels.
MG: The media makes it look like it was Sodom and Gammorrah in there. The dude running the place doesn’t really help either…
JD: Ghost Ship was not a bunch of kids partying and getting in trouble, it's part of a whole art movement that most people know nothing about. To me this is not some abstraction or something I just saw on the news, and though personally none of my close friends are in the known dead, I've met people who were involved in Ghost Ship and know half dozen spaces in L.A. that are working on the same premise in similar venues with similar artistic ideas.
MG: Do you foresee a crackdown on these types of spaces?
JD: Before I get into that, let me tell you a stupid story. Back when I was a young artist right out of grad school, I had a studio on the third floor of a wood building built in the late 1800s in New York. At the time I was being pursued by several New York Galleries. My coolest friends were renting spaces with me. The Landlord was one of my best friends, we had retrofitted much of the building together, and we had plans to advance it as a major art hub in the community. I thought I was on top of the world.
MG: When was this?
JD: The late 1980s. On a night just like any other, I went to a bar, and there I met a friend who suggested we go to his place and take some acid. While hanging out we saw maybe half a dozen fire engines pass his place. We ran out of beer around 4 AM and I suggested we go to my place, but when we got there we saw those trucks and my building had burned to the ground. Everything I had made, all my friends’ art I had collected, all my tools, all my media and equipment, all my art documentation... gone.
MG: Was it on the news? Was anyone hurt?
JD: No. Nobody. My friend bailed, I walked up to the building in tears on acid. The next thing I knew, I was talking to some conservative fire inspector. I was a skinny artist punk rock kid, dyed burgundy red hair, half shaved on the sides, with three earrings in one ear and four in the other.
MG: Did you tell him that you lived in the space?
JD: I never had a chance. He already knew who I was because they thought I had died in the fire. He asked me a series of questions about the building.
MG: Since you had helped renovate it, were you of any use?
JD: Well, I answered most his questions, but on the electrical... there I lied. I knew the most likely issue. There was a faulty junction box with bad wiring in the stairwell of the second floor right under my studio where the wiring had overheated before. The landlord, and again, he was a friend, a good friend, we had discussed it and he had balked on paying for a rewire. I'm pretty sure that box burned down the building, either that or one of my housemates did something really stupid, but I didn't say anything.
MG: Why not?
JD: To protect my friend. I loved him like a brother, I didn't want to fuck him over.
MG: Was that all that the fire inspector cared about?
JD: No. The inspector asked me about my habits, where I was that night, did I do drugs, if I had a job et cetera... He then asked for exact details of what I had done that night. I said I had changed my clothes, thrown them on the bed, then turned off my heater and left for the bar. He looked me in the eye and said: “You put your clothes on the heater and caused the fire.”
MG: Oh no. What did you do?
JD: I could have said: "I'd never do that”, or "I've never done that, I'm not stupid.", or "Fuck you, fascist pig!!!", but instead I walked right into the smouldering ashes, right to the heater which was then on ground level, pointed to the valve and said: "Look this is the valve and it is turned to the off position." And in response, he looked at me and said with a smile: "You just turned it off… I'm the fire inspector, what I say goes.”
MG: Pretty cruel considering he had just thought you had died in the fire, yeah?
JD: Yeah. To him it was simple: he did not like me, and he did not like my look, so it had to be my fault. I'll never forget a single detail of that day, it''s burned into my psyche. I lost all my art, my potential art career in New York, all my tools to make said art, all my art documentation, all my music, clothes, personal belongings, closest art friends, maybe even my mind.
MG: Your friends bought the inspector’s party line?
JD: Even counter-culture people at times blindly follow authority. I'll never forget when I first saw a good friend, one of the best sculptors I knew at the time. He said simply: "Do you ever feel like killing someone, then killing yourself." I got it. Add to that I then had to leave New York to escape a series of lawsuits from various insurance companies who wanted blood from my burnt artistic stone.
MG: So you came to Los Angeles but you didn’t turn your back on living in alternative spaces?
JD: You make your way where you can. I was lucky. There was no social media to demonize me, nobody died, the media never took it up, nobody prosecuted me to make an example out of me.
MG: Times have really changed…
JD: If you think any of the people involved in the Oakland tragedy are going to be fairly treated by media or the authorities you are out of your fucking mind. They are totally fucked and I think they already know it. The best thing they could do right now is leave the country. Mainstream culture is not going to get it and they will absolutely crucify them.
MG: Do you think that mainstream culture is averse to art lifestyles and adversarial whenever they get the chance?
JD: Heads are going to roll, spaces are going to close, and people are going to end up in jail, because that is the world we live in today. Like I said though I'm not friends with the people involved, they are friends of friends and I have met some of them at various events in the past. I've also been privileged enough to see what likeminded people are doing here in L.A. first hand. I'm lucky. Though I have been involved in the established art world for decades I was introduced to this underground art-world through some incredibly talented people, and though they might not have the money or connections for fame or critical approval they absolutely personify the artistic spirit.
MG: What happens when these types of spaces are closed and establishing new ones becomes impossible because of zealous regulation?
JD: These artists in these spaces, they are the future, all they want is a place to do their work. If we close their venues, or try to force them into the "legitimate" artistic mainstream we are just going to lose them. It's a terrible tragedy. I can't even express how bad I feel for these artists and kids. I would only suggest that people hold back on the criticism or the absolute dismissal of those involved.