The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 42

connections with the past Kate Robinson
The title of the sculpture is from a novel by Samuel Beckett.
The novel was first published as Comment c’est in 1961, by the
Les Éditions de Minuit (Midnight Press), a publishing house formed
during the French Resistance in World War II. Following Beckett’s
own English translation it was published in New York in 1964 by
The Grove Press as How It Is.
In How It Is, the narrator describes what it’s like ‘before Pim
with Pim after Pim’. Pim is the beloved, the pivotal relationship.
Presented within the text as a being immersed in mud, Pim
is described as recognisably human and yet also primeval
or ahistorical. Pim makes his presence known by being felt,
experienced, touched.
The original material for I Will Have No More Desires, before it
was cast in bronze, was clay – appropriate, given Pim’s primal mud.
It was made for my first professional exhibition after graduation
from Art School – a solo show called In Ms. Aristotle’s Garden at
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.
Ever since, for more than twenty years, I’ve been drawn like a
magnet to make sleeping, dreaming heads – often in materials
that dissolve back into the earth. A dreaming head made from huge
blocks of ice in Alaska, before it melted in the spring thaw…
a sleeping figure in the middle of a Scottish bay, before it was
washed away by the tide.
It might seem like a stretch to connect the idea of dreaming and
mud and dissolving with CARA but I feel there is a link. For me, it
is in the idea of the land we come from and the land to which we
escape. For the blessed and the lucky, escape might come in sleep.
For the harassed and the persecuted, escape might be on another
part of the earth.
Many of my mother’s family escaped from Austria in 1938.
I remember my grandmother saying she only realised she was
Jewish when, aged fifteen, her parents told her this was the reason
40

The Art of Resistance? Defending Academic Freedom

she had to leave the country. But my grandmother was fortunate,
as well as harassed: persecuted by National Socialists and saved by
the compassion of a Quaker sponsor in Britain.
Actually, upon her arrival in the new land, my grandmother was
more than saved: she was loved. My very English grandfather,
an officer in RAF Intelligence – who had canoed the rivers of Europe
before the war and was particularly keen on Austria – caught sight
of her blond head and slim ankles during the lead up to her tribunal
as an Enemy Alien. Before long, they were mutually smitten.
Throughout his life my grandfather was a supporter of amnesty
for political prisoners and refugees. In his belongings, after he
passed away, a part of my inheritance was a sheet of paper he kept
from his days in Intelligence. It makes harrowing reading: a secret
report of a young unnamed Catholic Austrian man – a teenager –
who, in 1935, opposed to the National Socialists, had gone walking
amongst the villages in the mountains near Salzburg distributing
leaflets from his rucksack. Leaving the path to gather wild roses
the man strayed across the Austrian border and was abducted
by the Gestapo. Years later, after beatings, incarceration and
conscription, aided by members of the French Underground, the
man escaped to Britain.
I’ve just now checked the facts of the report. I couldn’t bear to
read again the details of the young man’s imprisonment. But in my
imagination I have a picture of him: he washed up on the shore.
He appeared, rolled in with the tide by the sea, formed out of the
sand and the silt and the water, to enrich a new country.

41