What makes a great book?
One answer to this compelling and controversial question holds that any work of art that unites materials (in literature that is words, in painting pigment, in architecture bricks and boards) and meaning (ideas, pictures, structures) qualifies.
Katie Albertson (BA ’27, Business Administration) found that union in Ukranian-American Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic (2019).
Inspired by a visit to the Nelson-Atkins immersive sound and light installation “Monet’s Water Lilies: From Dawn to Dusk,” Katie created a plan for creating something similar for Kaminsky’s collection of poems as part of her work for the K-State Honors Program.
Katie thought Kaminsky’s collection, which documents life and insurgency in an imaginary occupied town, could be brought to life and put in context with pictures and recordings just as the Nelson-Atkins exhibit animated one of her favorite artists. Because great art also transcends media.
Titled “Who Deserves My Hate,” Katie’s work plan focused on one poem from Deaf Republic, “Soldiers Aim at Us,” which begins, “They fire / as the crowd of women flees inside the nostrils of searchlights / —may God have a photograph of this—” and ends with the line, “On earth / a man cannot flip a finger at the sky / because each man is already / a finger flipped at the sky.” In between Kaminsky describes soldiers mistreating the body of a boy they shot, a pregnant woman trying to defend the corpse, and a husband standing on a bridge while helicopters whirl overhead.
Here is what Katie wrote:
To start, one of the most vulgar and intentional displays of hate is to flip someone off. I think that my generation has desensitized the gesture, but it still means so much as far as your feelings towards someone. And to think the goal was to give the gesture to God means so much about the helplessness of the people being reflected in the poem. The feelings of “how could you let this happen?” or “Some God you are!” are so violently represented in this poem.
She then combined Kaminsky’s poem with Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective, a series of photographs that show the artist’s hand with the middle finger extended before landmarks and monuments from around the world. Katie explained:
The audience will watch and listen. The image will rotate between five locations and in that time the observers can explore their personal narratives and ponder what Kaminsky met with the last line that so obviously stuck out to me. This adds a visual element to the story however, keeping the eerie feeling surrounded by war and communist governments reflected in the collection. You can walk through and stay and listen. Watch all the locations and the different meanings behind each meticulously selected one. I hope the exhibit elicits introspection from its spectators and helps to translate the message of Deaf Republic to other mediums.
— Wendy Matlock, Professor
K-State English 