Did You Ever See Such a Thing in Your Life?

I first met Norma Cole in October 1982 when I was visiting San Francisco from Paris. The landscape architect Jeff Miller, who later became my husband, introduced us. At the time, Norma was deeply involved with her work as a studio artist, along with the aesthetic, political, and community discussions around New College, the progressive school established in the Mission District in 1971. Her friends and collaborators included Robert Duncan and his partner Jess, David Levi-Strauss, Duncan McNaughton, Aaron Shurin, Leslie Scalapino, Bob Grenier, and Michael Palmer. Laura Moriarty, Susan Gevirtz, Kevin Killian, and Barbara Guest expanded the work and friendship circles, along with the French poets Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, Emmanuel Hocquard, and more. Over time, other younger poets and artists joined the nucleus of a lively interdisciplinary artist community.

In subsequent years, Norma taught widely and performed, often in the synergy of Poets Theater, largely helmed by the beloved late Kevin Killian, with whom Norma wrote several plays. Norma’s house became a central station for coffee, readings, rehearsals, and postcard packet and book assembly, threading together many points in the celestial sky of Bay Area poetics, visual art, and Poets Theater.

The walls of that house (where she still lives, with her husband Rob Kaufman) are lined with books floor to ceiling. A labyrinth of bookshelves continues throughout the house, providing a linear plinth for postcards and collages sent, saved, and gifted to her. The artbooks range from Cimabue, Louise Bourgeois, and Tintoretto, to Matisse, Rachel Whiteread, and the Khmer Temple Art of Cambodia. Hung on the walls are paintings, photographs, collages, broadsides, and drawings from her community of fellow artists and poets.

The workspace/dining room with the long, blond wooden dining table is overtaken by stacks of books with notations, newspapers, a French magazine, and her typed pages. Manuscripts and envelopes with correspondence frame her current notebook, along with the pen that’s central to everything at her pilot’s seat. A receptacle of cut flowers in either their beginning or their end state offers further signals of temporality. A pot of tea or cup of coffee is at the ready.

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The act of drawing, painting, or building a collage is essential space away from the notebook, away from the typewriter, or, now, the laptop. As a visual artist, Cole straddles abstraction and representation, her perspectives shifting with contact of the lead, the ultramarine blue of pigment against raw surface, and the scale of the canvas or page. Uncertain logic probes color and form while falling and failing with surgical rigor. She is ever the witness to excised images placed and glued in the midst of energetic marks. Up close, she is diagnosing or telegraphing by her code. An impulse for baring truth is imbued with moments of unlikely comedy in directly observing the world. Her notebooks are full of absorption, then abstraction. Trust. Memory. Invention. Inventory.

Cole engages daily with the global news cycle. As either a starting point or a punctuation in a tender scene are her works on paper: drawings are often combined with collage and text, composed with photocopies of (or actual) newspaper clippings. Whether within a painted canvas or an installation, the actualities of the world command her attention and receive her response. The insertion of a war-torn landscape or a violent act is built into the overall scene when necessary. What stops the breath may be given physical space on the page as would be needed in real time on a playing field, a dance floor, or in the negative space of a painting. Constantly informed by an attention to—and active involvement in—real-world issues, Cole moves her frame from the lyrical to the abominable.

From Mars (1994):

News just keeps on coming 
What is questionable in the production of a text, its evidence 
And the history of all experience 
  
Theirs or in turning one’s back going through it heuristically, 
choosing the specificity

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widows, we are all widows

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From Contrafact (1996):

I saw shells . . . 
. . . that were bigger than I was.” 
Journalist, Chechnya, 8 March, 1995

In one of my “Norma” folders of saved correspondence is a Xeroxed page of five undated drawings and collages from the 1980s. One page holds four drawings of heads, one sprawled body, and an abstract collage that includes cut-up text and textures, possibly frottage, reading “LOSING THE WAR.” Underneath each head /portrait is written WAR = business and/or W=b. Handwritten around three sides of the page is the question, “Did you ever see such a thing in your life?” Along the wide side of the bottom of the page and turning the right-side corner is the note: "These are photos of drawings/collages – xeroxed together. Circa the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet troops, the people/refugees were in Time magazine.” Three of the drawings have four pieces of tape holding down each of the corners placed with unmistakable urgency. This page and this work read into a war-scarred existence. The taped corners express her immediacy and decisiveness. Hers is a complexity that notes the moderns and the ancients in beauty and tumult.

Cole’s presence in the world is deeply navigated in her own body. This is especially true since 2002, when a massive stroke paralyzed her right side and induced temporary aphasia. Every day for two decades of ongoing rehabilitation she succeeds because of a disciplined work ethic and a rarely possessed willpower. Forever magnetized by the possibilities of making and thinking through problems and opportunities, Norma stays in the work of drawing, collaging, filming, collaborating, and writing. 

From Spinoza in Her Youth (2002):

but the body is soft 
“we write in sand” 
                      (Edmund Waller) 
nak ta  ancestors 
everything is 
in play 

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From Do the Monkey (2006):

. . . Caught up in the subjectivity emanating from the extending phrases of the photographer/writer, I am first one then the other in the room, now through this reading existing.

In a letter to her late friend, the fellow Francophile bilingual poet and translator Stacy Doris, Cole wrote, “Godard is looking at, bringing into focus, things scientifiquement, trying to find rhythms in movements of the crowd; finding the origins of ‘fiction’ because the city is a fiction. The sky (blue) and the forest (green) become the ‘roman’ novel, which becomes abstraction.”  How easily this could describe Cole’s oeuvre.