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04/16/2007: "Leaving Tulsa: (part two) From One Life to Another" by Walter King
From my best recollection Chris and Kevin left Tulsa at the same time. But Chris says he left Tulsa in sixtyeight since he was already out of high school and Kev in sixtynine so he could finish his last year in high school. However it happened I lost the two people who made me feel like I was a creative person. Kevin, I found some years later, went on to get his BFA and MFA and moved to Brooklyn New York with his wife and two daughters, Jessica and Lauren. He had a loft space during the late 70’s. He was primarily trained as a photographer. He eventually had an exhibition at Holly Soloman‘s Gallery in New York. She had him take photos of her openings and she gave him a show of his celebrity shots. For most of us that would have been the high point of a life time. A show at Holly Soloman Gallery during the 70's would make most of our careers, or so we think. But she wouldn’t let him show his more creative and experimental work so at some point he left her gallery and went back to California. There he paid the bills by renovating homes for a while. He had a family to raise. Meanwhile he was experimenting with video. Kev couldn’t keep his mind limited to just photography. Video was still a very new medium and Kev loved performance…all those stories, lies and pranks were a great training ground for his experiments. 
Chris often got into the act just like when we were goofing on prank calls or doing fake band photo shoots back in Oklahoma. Chris is a natural exhibitionist, extremely outgoing and effusive. Chris had been writing about the music industry for years. He’d interviewed a great number of famous rock stars like Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison. If you do a google search for Chris Boyle, Reggae you will find his Peter Tosh interview made just before Tosh was murdered. Being a musician himself he had a love of performance. He made a perfect actor for some of Kev’s ideas whether in the videos or those haunting timelapse photos. But Kev often would get in front of the camera himself alone in front of a white or dark backdrop. He would begin his droll dialogue with its twists on logic and irony that would leave your brain hog-tied and gasping for air. His work was about society and its hypocritical dogmas and dysfunctional norms. Kev was truly one of the early pioneers of video performance and conceptual art.
(Invitation to one of Kevin's performances)A lot of artists eventually find ways of working in the art business, often installing exhibitions for galleries and museums. So did Kevin. He began doing installation work and archival photography and later became a curator for the California Museum of Photography. He curated a show of photography on the birth , evolution and life-styles of the surf movement with its ties to customized hotrods, the “back to nature’ and environmental movements and a kind of art that connected the beautiful chromatic surf board art to the kind of kandy colored minimal westcoast painting of the 70's. Of course it is also the basis for the whole skater dude (and later snow boarder, extreme bikers and other extreme sports so popular today.) This trilogy of shows, Ocean View --on surfer culture, Life on Wheels—a show about skateboard culture—and Rearview Mirror—a show about America and automobile culture— were Kevin’s last curatorial projects and reflect his lifelong immersion in these aspects of American culture. Kev was always on mark.
Here’s what Jonathan Green of the California Museum of Photography said about Kevin’s curatorial process:
“A curator generally begins with a theoretical premise, or is motivated and engaged by an aesthetic, philosophical, or political supposition. A curator works from the outside in, slowly unraveling the material to find its essential premise. Kevin worked from the inside out. It was not that he wasn’t fully aware of the intricacies of current theory and postmodern critique. Indeed, his wonderful essays move easily between current critical styles and personal souvenirs, easily mixing Baudrillard and the Beachboys. But Kevin’s artistic and intellectual activities were always unleashed by the most personal and primitive engagements with the subject and not by abstract concerns.”
Kev did his own work. No one quite knew yet what to do with the kind of video art Kev was making. But he found ways of showing the stuff. According to Chris you just never knew who might appear at one of Kevin’s shows. People like Dennis Hopper would just show up. His daughter Jessica, herself a filmaker, sent me some great post card invitations to his performances in the 70‘s.
Kevin died of cancer in 2001. I was in California that year. Although we’d all managed to stay in touch over the years, the last time I’d actually seen the two of them face to face was on a trip I made with friends to California and Mexico just after I graduated high school . Kev was working in a surf board shop finishing boards before beginning his studies at the University in Huntington Beach. Chris was writing for music magazines. Later he worked as a press agent for the Doors. He even got himself a cameo in the Doors movie playing a reporter. But I lost touch with the two of them sometime in the late 90’s and while on a Hollywood junket to learn about how our students could get work at Disney I made the effort to try to find them-- to no avail. All my old numbers and addresses were dead ends. I didn’t know anyone in California who knew them. I take that back. I did know that my friend from art school, Mike Flechtner had worked with Kevin once at the CMP. But he’d lost touch as well. I figured then that Kevin had already died.
A couple years ago I ran across a eulogy like statement Chris wrote for Kevin’s a retrospective at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside. In it Chris said the following about his brother :
“He knew he was an artist when he was a little kid growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. ‘To you,’ Kevin said, ‘life is a game. Me, I just wanted to make art. You would say, ‘Hey Kev, come on, we need one more guy for softball,’ and I’d say, ‘No, I’m gonna paint my model car.’” Kevin made clay sculptures and metal works in shop classes in junior high. When the ’60s hit, Kevin did stipple-shaded black-light posters with Day Glo colors and we strung Indian beads and sold them at dances where my band played.”
Reading and Writing by Kevin Boyle, Los Angeles, CA
That’s when I found out Kevin had died. I felt awful. I could have had a chance to spend a little time with him if I’d just tried harder to keep in touch. I was nearly in tears when I read this part of an essay for the show-- especially the part about seeing the water tower in the rear view mirror:
“Kevin Jon Boyle etched a decades-long trajectory through the American art landscape, but he had zero tolerance for art world puffery, posing, and hype. So if you sat and swapped stories with him in some diner in Seal Beach or Santa Monica, Kevin would never mention his work with Dennis Oppenheim on a California dry lake, his NEA individual artist grant, his solo show at Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, or his exhibition design for the John Cage retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Instead he’d spin out a story about how the triple overhead surf break at Mavericks will drive you so deep and hold you down so long that you’d better be able to hold your breath for a full two minutes before you even think about paddling out. He’d sing some wry lyrics from the demo just cut with his brother Chris and their blues band Sibling Rivalry. Or he would offer a personal tale connecting a small town Oklahoma water tower in his rearview mirror with Zen concepts of departure.”
Water Tower Series Untitled, circa 1995
We could see the water tower on the Eastern horizon up on a hill in Broken Arrow about 20 miles from our neighborhood. It would have been one of the last things you see as you make the top of the hill above Regency Park. He may have seen that tower as he left for California in the late 60’s. But it doesn’t look like the one Kev painted. Maybe he was talking about a tower near Sapulpa to the west of Tulsa which he may have seen when his family moved to my neighborhood. That would have been about the time I met him. You know, maybe he didn’t paint either one. Maybe it was just a zen metaphor.
I e-mailed the Museum Director who gave my e-mail address to Chris. Chris got back to me in no time. So I caught a flight out over spring break because the show was only up till the beginning of May. It was early April. I spent 4 nights with Chris in his little Laguna Beach apartment overlooking the ocean from the hillside above Coast Hwy. It was like we were teenagers again, telling stories, more truths than lies this time as we’d actually lived some life and had something real to tell. Chris played some of the songs he’s written while he and Kev had a band before he was too sick to play. I just received a CD that Chris recently cut. Its pretty good and reminds me of the band he played with in Oklahoma with Dick Gordon and Jim Byfield. Gordon did studio work for a while in L.A. and now teaches guitar in Tulsa. Byfield later worked with Eric Clapton on a couple albums and wrote a couple of the songs including the title track for Clapton’s “There’s One in Every Crowd.” I was their roadie and substitute drummer for a brief time. Chris didn’t like to sing and play at the same time so in between hitting the reset switch on Gordon’s amp when it would quit on him I would sometimes sit in for Chris on drums.
Chris taught writing at Vanderbilt University for a while and was teaching English at an inner city high school when I caught up with him. He’s great with kids if only because he’s still one of them at heart. He‘s so enthusiastic that its catchy. He told me he walks into the classroom on the first day and says " Hi. I'm Mr. Boyle. Anyone who plays an instrument or can sing raise your hand." Several kids raise their hands. "Cool man. Lets start a rock band." At the end of the year their band plays in the talent show. Sharing music keeps his students emotionally and intellectually bonded to him through the year. But during the year he can encourage them to think and write critically. He’s somewhat controversial for sure with his ratty straw surfer/hipster hat, his multi colored ray-bans and his habitually positive but up front, in yer face personality.
Chris and Kevin Left Tulsa in the late 60’s. I didn’t get out of Oklahoma until 1976. I eventually got a small art scholarship here in Columbus. Sometime around my senior year I got a call from Chris who was teaching down at Vanderbilt. He’d driven through Tulsa and the old neighborhood on his way from California to Tennesee and saw my Dad working on his truck out in front of the house. He stopped and they talked until after dark. Chris got my phone number from my dad. We talked on the phone like no time had passed. He gave me Kev’s address and we wrote each other a few times. Again in the late 90’s I ran across an old Art In America gallery guide with Kev’s name listed with Holly Soloman. I called the gallery and got Kev’s number. The snooty gallery assistant said Ms Soloman doesn't represent Boyle any longer so I lied and told them I was the visiting artist coordinator for the College and that students had been asking about Kev’s work and we were thinking of inviting him to do a visiting artist stint. I just wanted to get back in touch with him. The two of them had more influence on my own early artistic mindset than any one other than my mother. They were the first truly creative people I’d ever met outside my own family. And, to my credit, they accepted me as an equal from the first time I flipped my cigarette butt from the driveway to the street from the seat of that purple stingray. They taught me to be myself and to believe in myself, to trust my own creative instincts and spirit and to express myself like an artist by being selective in what to show and what to leave out for the sake of an interesting idea whether visual or verbal. Yeah, back then it was just lying to one up the other guy. But in fact art is a lie that reveals the truth as Picasso so famously noted.
Chris and I back in April of 2004
http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/exhibitions/ocean-view/
One of several sites with some of Kevin’s work.
www.myspace.com/ctboyle
Chris is promoting "Driving Through One Life into Another" a new music CD.
Kev took the cover photo before he died.
www.myspace.com/Jessicajanos
Jessica has some photos of her father and uncle Chris up on this site. You can also see some of her video work here.
