A Few Memories with Joe
The back-alley brawler, the boulder in the avalanche, the tiger in your tank, the ruffle in your feathers, the lump in your throat, a diamond in the rough. Joe Doyle.
I worked closely with Joe for a decade between 1997 and 2007. Joe liked to say: Everyone who actually does something in this world is an asshole. The quip gives a twist to what FDR supposedly said about Anastasio Somosa, the Nicaraguan dictator: Yes he’s a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch. Joe was talking about what it takes to create something new and plant it firmly in this world ...and obviously about his own blunt pragmatism. But he could also be a little subtle. As some may recall, in tense meetings, Joe had an habitual way of grooming his Wilford Brimley mustache with his middle finger that could make one wonder what he was really thinking.
I’ll leave it to others to tell the many stories about Joe’s valiant interventions on behalf of the college and the faculty. People like Foggy the institutional archivist, Joan Berezin the brilliant activist and organizer, or Jenny Lowood the mellifluous matriarch of the English Dept. But everyone knew the big guy had the guts and the smarts to risk something under impossible circumstances. And he did so at critical times with sometimes spectacular results.
I was around during those beginning days of the multimedia program and the crazy adventures that led from Vista College to Berkeley City College. As part-timers in the mid/late-90s, as were nearly all of the faculty at that time, Joe, Kim Thoman, and I were hand-picked to form a team by the Vista administration behind Maureen Knightly as assistant dean under Barbara Beno as president. We were tasked with envisioning an interdisciplinary digital-based art program that would serve the local community a stones-throw from UC and would aim to rock the Peralta system with another signature curriculum (after ASL and PACE).
The three of us did a lot of research and brainstorming together, met and talked with folks in the field, from education and from industry, and in the end we sketched out a rather ambitious idea of a multi-track program with one eye on the creative and critical thrust of the humanities and the other on vocational training. As Vista enjoyed the enduring status of a poor relative within the Peralta District, the odds weren’t exactly stacked in our favor. These were the days of de-annexation and the timing, not to mention the adventure, of the task was not lost on the three of us.
Kim, Joe and i met weekly in Kim’s loft at the Vulcan Studios off High Street in Oakland, just across the railroad tracks from my place at the Boise Cascade complex. Back then these barely converted factories were populated by artists, crafts people, students, and vagrants before local developers started building pre-gutted apartments with concrete floors and a drain to fetch obscene prices for little more than the name “loft.” The former industrial environment was a somehow fitting setting for manufacturing the ideas for the new program that would be installed initially in the old shabby office building at 2020 Milvia Street. At the time, Joe lived not far off High Street with his wife Jane, a respected psychotherapist, just below the Oakland hills near Highway 13. So there we were, all more or less neighbors, artists of different stripes, and fellow teachers at Vista College who frankly had no real experience with what we had been enlisted to do.
By our benefactor at the district office, we were told we had so-called “deliverables,” a bit of business patois that at the time to me sounded unfamiliar and yet Orwellian. Joe was regularly and loudly fidgeting about what he called “mugwump,” the moniker he barked at all red tape paperwork. But of course the ideas had to be articulated, developed and ultimately presented to the institutional gatekeepers. I’ll never forget Joe arguing once in a great flight of fancy that it was the very existence of nightmarish bureaucracy that prevented World War III. These were lively exchanges among the three of us, full of philosophical disagreements, false starts, shifting points of agreement and a lot of laughter. Joe was often getting up and pacing around the room banging on subjects hoping that Kim or I would surrender to something that was usually quite apparent and that we’d already agreed upon. But nobody minded since the theater of these outbursts injected an element of passion into the mix when the “mugwump deliverables” started dampening the creative mood.
No one can question that Joe was an indispensable figure in the mix. He had key ideas about digital imaging in particular, established important relationships in the field, and was the first of us to be hired full time for reasons that the team discussed (including his political acumen). Of course, to his credit, Joe was also the only one from the original team who remained over twenty years and dedicated himself tirelessly as a BCC teacher and advocate to the very end.
Joe and I had differences, a few that even played a small part in my decision to leave the college. But we had a mutual respect and a funny if not sometimes annoying kind of big brother/little brother dynamic. At the end of March, Rachel Simpson and Joan Berezin emailed me about Joe’s deteriorating condition, and I’m very grateful to have had a chance to talk with him briefly by telephone a week or two before he passed. We reminisced about our decade together getting the program off the ground, the improbable circumstances, and our mutual appreciation. Because of Joe and the incredible community of students, staff, and faculty, I wouldn’t have traded those years for anything.
I want to end by expressing my delight at the Academic Senate’s resolution to preserve Joe’s artwork on the BCC walls. While his work was collected by art institutions, Joe was disappointed not to get the critical recognition, attention, and validation that many artists with long careers hope for. Knowing this was important to Joe, I would like to propose that someone here at his memorial begin a process to find a writer of some talent and stature to compose and publish a critical text and overview of his work. I’m aware that there is an effort afoot to start a foundation and assemble something akin to a catalogue raisonné of his oeuvre.
I’m sorry I couldn’t attend the online memorial. At the moment, I have an unreliable internet connection, not to mention a time difference, as I’m now living outside the U.S. I hope the memorial is being recorded so that I and others who couldn’t attend will have a chance to see and hear the testimonials.
Peter Freund