Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Admittedly, assigning students to do something – anything – that involves exercising their Constitutional rights is going to create some controversy, what with all that free speech ‘n’ stuff the Bill of Rights promises to citizens of the United States. That said, the reaction to a student who took a picture of a poster of George W. Bush with a thumbtack through its forehead seems to suggest a level of, shall we say, paranoia?

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent. But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

At the end of the meeting, they told her [Jarvis] the incident “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted,” she says.

The story is made all the more surreal by the involvement of corporate conglomerate and all-around bad guys Wal-Mart. Anybody who uses Wal-Mart to develop film for their art projects is asking for trouble. But considering that this artist was a student working on a school project, we’re going to let that slide. Just as a note, however, Wal-Mart’s automated development slices ‘n’ dices negatives exposed in an older SLR camera, and their content guidelines are nebulous enough that only the most innocuous of family snaps will get through – and don’t even get me started about their dubious policies on digital files.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 15th, 2005 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.