In 2006 Charlie was living at NIMBY, a live-in DIY art space in Oakland, CA. Run by Michael Snook, NIMBY was, and still is, a hotbed of creativity. Over the years many well-known Burning Man art pieces have been created there such as the Cleavage in Space, the Steampunk Treehouse, and the Trojan Horse.
Charlie was doing freelance electronic assembly jobs to make a few bucks and I suspect, with all that creativity floating about at NIMBY, he was inspired to go beyond merely decorating his cars. But when I say merely, I am understating by a mile. Cinnabar Charm, Charlie’s Volkswagen bus (named after Th. Metzger’s poem), is a masterpiece of assemblage art — Charlie’s specialty. Meticulously and lovingly decorated with castoff bric-a-brac and whatever he could find, the Charm is amazing inside and out. His other art car, Mutagen, was likewise encrusted with circuit boards, empty nitrous bottles, bullet shells and other durable trash. Not just encrusted willy-nilly but laid out artistically, turning the exterior surface of the car into a cohesive work of art.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if he could take that talent and, using selected bits of the massive amounts of trash thrown out in America every day, go beyond decorating cars to creating and decorating an entire house, yard, and maybe more? Unfortunately Charlie didn’t have the money to buy land somewhere to start this project. And I think he knew he didn’t have time to go out, get a job, save up, and buy land before starting the project. What could he do?
The best option Charlie could think of was to take his idea to the only free place left in America – Slab City. This ignored corner of California used to be a military base. It was abandoned right after World War II and has been a haven for squatters since then. The government doesn’t mess with them. It is such a forsaken location, sandwiched between a bombing range and the toxic mistake known as the Salton Sea. Slab City is not seen as having any value and the people living there don’t cause much trouble. So it is left alone. Charlie decided he could stake a claim and start building without permits, rent, or interference. He moved there because it was free and he could start building art right away with almost no overhead. He decided that Christmas, 2006 was the goal to get himself and his cars down there so he could begin construction on East Jesus.
Since he had two cars, he needed someone else to drive the other one 550 miles from Oakland to Niland. He put an ad to that effect on Craigslist and that’s how I first heard about Charlie and his plan.
I followed his blog posts and my wife, Nita, and I went over there right after Christmas to try and find him. He wasn’t hard to find because of his art cars. People pointed the way and we found him camped a few hundred yards south of Salvation Mountain. He was sitting in a folding camp chair next to the Cinnabar Charm having a beer. We hit it off immediately, shared a couple of beers and talked about his plan to divide his time between building his own camp and helping Leonard Knight with his mountain while scouting the Slabs for a good location for E.J. At that point, I knew I would be back to check on Charlie’s project. I didn’t know how involved I would end up getting, though.
In January or maybe early February of 2007, Charlie selected the location for East Jesus. He relocated his cars to the northwestern edge of the Slabs next to a wash and staked out a claim amidst a sea of trash left there to rot by fifty years of previous squatters. There was plenty of room to expand the site and a line of ironwood trees that would provide some decent shade. It had an unobstructed view of the west where Charlie could enjoy the often spectacular sunsets. It would work just fine. The next step was to get all his stuff down there. It was all in storage in Oakland. There was an old fiberglass shipping container in the yard at NIMBY that Snook let him have. Charlie packed all is possessions into it and, once he found the future site of East Jesus, he hired a trucker to haul it out to the desert. When a semi was seen hauling a shipping container into Slab City, the locals all raised an eyebrow. What was this guy up to? Charlie got to work immediately. He built his kitchen against the east side of the container. The locals came by to check it out and in that moment Charles Steven Russell was to be forever known around the slabs as Container Charlie.
I had stayed in touch with Charlie during this time and decided to come out to the Slabs and spend a month camping nearby to help him out and work on my own art project that I was making for Burning Man. Some friends of mine wanted to come out, too, for just the first weekend or so. Around the first of March I loaded up my 16-foot box truck with steel, welders, etc. and my camping gear and drove out there. I was followed by Ty Johnson in his motor home and Blaze O’Glory and Becky Kartage in Blaze’s little pickup. Our goal was to make art out of junk.
The area around Charlie’s container was a mess. There was trash everywhere and not just cool trash ripe with potential, but the gross stuff, too. First we had to clear everything out enough to create a decent area just to camp in, but once that was done, we set about raking the trash into piles and stacking some of the more interesting pieces into sculptural towers. I had a terrible cold so it was mostly Ty who spearheaded the cleanup. Charlie split his time between helping us and continuing his efforts to get a roof over his kitchen and create a sheltered bedroom area. Once we had cleared a pretty large area, with sculptures growing out of the piles, we named it the East Jesus Sculpture Garden and Zen Center. Charlie approved.
The wind was a serious issue in these early months. Charlie’s kitchen was covered with a piece of shade cloth that would regularly come loose, flap around, and make a mess of everything. Charlie was still sleeping in the Charm or sometimes in his container which was still packed with lots of stuff. He put a big bed at the south end of the container (where the music room is now) but it was completely exposed. We spent a bit of time rounding up all the broken stoves, computers, and other appliances in the area and Charlie began to build some walls around his bed. The back wall of the music room was one of his first constructions.
Charlie’s plan was to continue to add to his environment while not working too hard, just a little bit every day. The creation of infrastructure like electrical power, water, toilet facilities, etc. took most of his time but there was always time for art, too. Often the infrastructure was art, too.
He hoped that others would be inspired by what he was attempting — hopefully inspired enough to come out to East Jesus to make art and add to the site. Although Charlie got less than five years of work into East Jesus before his untimely death, he created enough art and momentum to attract talented collaborators, contributors and supporters. This momentum has carried through to today where artists, sculptors, visionaries and technical experts continue to contribute to the ever-growing wonder that was Charlie Russell’s vision. He would be proud.
Charlie’s blog post archive – http://chaster.us/blogarchive200700.html
“Adventures in East Jesus” (a movie I made in E.J.’s early days)
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/2071843[/vimeo]