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Lydia Eccles has rallied for some unusual causes. Known to promote herself as an artist whose "performance videos depict pigeons eating seeds off her naked body," the 51-year-old Eccles once launched a grassroots presidential campaign behind an unlikely write-in candidate: Ted Kaczynski, a/k/a the Unabomber. But now Eccles is on a much less discordant crusade: to keep the Oni Gallery, one of Boston’s last remaining alternative art spaces, alive.

Another byproduct of the creative energy that once flowed from 84 Kingston Street, Oni was founded there in 1998 but relocated to another spacious Chinatown loft after the building’s demolition. When the art space first took up its new residence, the site’s landlord promised to perform construction work that would bring the Oni up to code. More than three years later, the landlord still hadn’t done the work, so when Boston’s ISD appeared last November to examine construction on another floor of the building, the Oni came under the department’s scrutiny, and the space was shut down for a week. When the ISD returned last month, the landlord still hadn’t done the work he’d promised. Now the Oni is closed for the foreseeable future, shifting its already-scheduled programming over to the Cambridge Family YMCA’s Durrell Hall in Central Square.

Eccles doesn’t blame the ISD — they’re "not the bad guys," she says. But one of her frustrations in dealing with the city government is that it seems incapable of understanding what a place like the Oni actually does. "Noncommercial art spaces that you’re dealing with are not selling a product," she explains. "So that makes them an anomaly in our culture. And that’s why I like to say that we’re ‘in the world, but not of it.’ "

It’s this lack of basic understanding between the city and local art spaces that makes the relationship so hairy. In Cambridge and Boston, there’s no zoning distinction for "noncommercial art space" — which would be a fitting catch-all term for a nonprofit art space that doesn’t sell alcohol and features live music, performance, and dance that doesn’t sell alcohol.

For instance, despite collecting rental fees, the Zeitgeist doesn’t turn a profit — which is why it doesn’t view what it does as entertainment. "If it’s entertainment, you bring in the band or the person who’ll get the most people," explains Alan Nidle over coffee at the 1369 Coffeehouse. "And you can winnow out everything [that doesn’t make money]."

"Entertainment is a commodity that’s conventionally employed to sell booze," adds Rob Chalfen, curator of the Subconsciouscafe New Chamber Music Series at the Zeitgeist. "And that’s what we’re not. We’re reclaiming art from entertainment."

And the mission of a noncommercial art space differs greatly from, say, a Newbury Street art gallery. "[The city thinks] of art and they think of art gallery where you hang art on the walls and it’s very austere," says Rickheit. "And they don’t understand that they have weird performance in that actual same space. They have it all zoned and put in their little boxes and partitions."

" ‘Art gallery’ is a weak term for what happens at the Zeitgeist," wrote Zeitgeist regular Ian MacKinnon in a recent Cambridge Chronicle op-ed. "It’s a label as musty and alienating as ‘community room’ or ‘cultural center.’ The Zeitgeist is proud of the colorful gray area it has cultivated."

One would think that Cambridge, an academic city with a national reputation for youthful revelry and open-minded progressivism, would be more receptive to a hazy "gray area" than the traditionally more old-fashioned Boston. One would assume Cambridge’s government might establish a place to accommodate noncommercial art projects. But it hasn’t.

"The whole sort of hip, liberal thing has always been the sugar dusting over this essentially cranky old bureaucracy," says Rob Chalfen.

"There’s a Cambridge myth," agrees Nidle. "Kind of like Camelot or something."

The Zeitgeist’s carefully cultivated gray area is a comfortable, liberating place, and it doesn’t want its work pigeonholed or its freedom of expression restricted. But what do you do when the long arm of the law wants to wrestle you into a category? And without a category, there’s technically no zoning protection for all the Zeitgeist’s sundry activities.

Essentially, city officials can shut down an art space whenever they decide to apply commercial regulations to it. "Not-for-profit or noncommercial creative spaces are engaged in activity that is undefined by the city," says Eccles. "We want to be able to serve food and alcohol for free — not to make money. We want to be able to have live music, live performance, screenings, public gatherings, and uncensored expression. Now, there are different city regulations for all those things. So they can come in and say, ‘You can’t do that without having gone through huge processes’ that are really unrelated to what we are doing. In other words, they could come in because we have naked art and say that we are showing porn."

Therein lies the problem. Such regulatory ambiguity could theoretically be abused as a means of censorship. At any point, a city government can decide that it doesn’t like the breast-baring woman in the cult film Neovoxer or the madcap antics going on at the Zeitgeist, send in an inspector to verify that such things are going on, and force the space to curtail its activity.

Cambridge ISD commissioner Bersani refuses to discuss this possibility. Asked if such zoning ambiguity could be used for censorship, he responds, "I’m not prepared to answer that. Thank you." Then he hangs up.

Artists are the shock troops of gentrification," says Katt Hernandez. "That’s what cities use us for."

Hernandez lives in an unheated one-room apartment with two other people and a mob of mice, all for the total monthly rent of $1000. She’s not the only local artist she knows who’s been victimized by high rents: one friend lives in a veterans’ shelter, another camps out in someone else’s closet. There’s "this prevailing, very oppressive attitude towards artists in Boston," Hernandez says. As evidence, she points to the MBTA’s recent attempt to clear subway platforms of banjo-plucking, saw-jiggling, cello-banging musicians. "In a way, that’s the last alternative venue you can go to without money."

She tried to help. "There was one month last year when I produced seven shows, because I was sort of frantically trying to counteract that; I was like, no, this community is amazing. It’s stupid that it’s dying. Every city must have its problems, right?" Yet Boston’s scene got progressively worse. Hernandez played shows at the Mobius Artists Group’s Congress Street space, but last summer the venue closed its doors. She arranged shows at Mama Gaia’s Café, a coffee shop/activist haunt in Central Square. Then Mama Gaia’s disappeared, too. Even worse, nothing new replaced these spaces. "I was very, very active, but after a while, I became exhausted," says Hernandez. "It was always a fight to find somewhere to play." So she’s pulling up roots and moving to Baltimore this summer.

"Baltimore is very, very strong for underground, alternative culture," says John Berndt, director of the Red Room, a five-year-old experimental and improvised-performance space in the Maryland city. "What makes it possible really has to do entirely with the housing market and the lack of gentrification so far."

But in Boston, artists are almost expected to run for the hills — or at least the distant suburbs. Oni director Eccles finds this offensive. "The whole point of art is to be engaged with the society you’re living in," she explains. "Art is about social engagement — it’s not about running away."

"Hopefully, there’s this big latent energy potential," says Ben Spiegelman, a twentysomething founding member of the Berwick and writer/director of The Fire of Life, a rock opera that debuted at the Cambridge Family YMCA this past fall. "When something happens, things will tip and it will blossom again."

But Hernandez isn’t as optimistic. "The Berwick was a permit problem," she says. "The Oni was a building-inspector and landlord problem. The Zeitgeist is a money problem. Mama Gaia’s was a rent problem. The subways were a homeland-security problem. It’s not like there’s this smoking room where the bureaucracy says, ‘Let’s shut down the art spaces.’ But there might as well be, because it feels that way to people. There’s a lot of exhaustion in the community."

Though it no longer functions as a physical venue, the Berwick is continuing to develop its in-house artists-in-residence program, which provides support for selected artists without pressuring them for a finished product. As for the Oni, the Chinatown loft is technically on hiatus, though Eccles continues to schedule shows at the Cambridge YMCA. But Oni’s long-term future looks bleak. "If we can’t get rent relief from our landlord, then we’ll be bankrupt," says Eccles. "I need that legal relief from rent, I need the landlord to do the work, and I need the city to approve the work."

The Zeitgeist is still holding events while waiting for a March hearing about the special permit. And it would like to stop being ambushed by city government. "It would be nice if we were more integrated in a pro-arts environment," says Chalfen. "One that would give us a head’s up instead of having to pull these darts out of our side every once in a while. It’s unnerving."

The Zeitgeist’s Nidle is a little more ambitious. "We want a ticker-tape parade right past City Hall," he deadpans. "We want all the councilors to throw confetti on us. We want city officials to be cheering, clapping, smiling, laughing, tears streaming out of their eyes."

A week later, the day after another sobering meeting with the ISD, Nidle’s cheer is deflated. "I have this feeling we’re toast," he says solemnly. "After almost 10 years, all of this could come to a grinding halt. And that would be a drag."

"Berwick Variety Show!", a fundraiser for the Berwick Research Institute, will be held on March 13, at 8 p.m., at the Cambridge Family YMCA’s Durrell Hall, 820 Mass Ave, in Cambridge. Call (617) 661-9622, or visit www.cambridgeymca.org. Zeitgeist Gallery and Art Street will present "March Forth for the Arts: An A to Z (Art Street to Zeitgeist) Collaboration," on March 4, from 2 to 10 p.m., at the Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street, in Cambridge. Call (617) 876-6060, or visit www.zeitgeist-gallery.org. The Oni Gallery’s "Bad Sex" will be held on February 14, also at the Cambridge Family YMCA’s Durrell Hall. Visit www.onigallery.org

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com