Lesson 5: The only rule is work.
Creating rules and standing by them.
As a class, we were introduced to the work of Corita Kent, an artist with a revolutionary approach to art and design education. Here’s a link to her website https://www.corita.org/. Her strict as well as playful approach came through in her work as well as a famous manifesto she made for her classroom :
Right from the first day of this project, the team had started talking about finding a personal and a larger purpose within the scope of the project.
Why teach visual arts to school children? How does making visual arts accessible affect an ecosystem? What is the value of having a thoughtfully produced textbook? Knowing our position towards some of these questions helped us in committing to the project.
To put our thoughts into words and visuals, we created our personal manifestos and put them up on the walls of our classroom.
Manifestos from the classroom!
These are some of the rules that we set for ourselves in preparation for the project and the process of creating them.
“I was thinking about how my art practice is the most meaningful to me but there are much more nurturing things like making space for comfort, ease and care that I wish to prioritise in my practice. Because art will be made and it’s easy to do that, but it isn’t easy to care for yourself and your contemporaries.” -Aditi
“I wanted my manifesto to be an inspiration for what my art can be. Instead of a set of rules or instructions I focused on what emotions I wanted my art to evoke and by the end, I realized I had inextricably linked the impact I want to have as a person with the impact I want my art to have. In that sense, it’s a living and breathing thing” — Niyutsa
“My original train of thought for my manifesto started with me thinking about the price you pay to be an artist in this world. That later changed by taking the word price for its literal meaning. I wanted to kind of play with the fact that people pay millions for art pieces while art is actually everywhere and it’s free to see and felt that a receipt was something that best captured the irony i was trying to depict” — Brinda
“listed down things that I thought were non-negotiables for me when it comes to rules to follow. But I wanted a very sarcastic take on these points (to reflect my personality) that seemed like serious rules. hence the tonality is the way it is. I also wanted to give absurd and extreme examples (for humor) as well as just drive the point home. Extremities make a bigger impact than reality.” -Poorvi
Manifesting!
Once we had the rules set for ourselves, we read each others manifestos out loud, making them heard. This process was just as empowering as the creation of manifesto itself!
