the twelve labours of hercules
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This twelve-channel installation, titled The Twelve Labours of Hercules, invites reflection on how Cold War narratives of action heroism, together with the misuse of history, inevitably lead to political and ideological gridlock. The T.V. cartoon series The Mighty Hercules was created by Trans-Lux Productions in 1962 and first aired from 1963 to 1968. Featuring the substantially reimagined, Americanized exploits of the demigod Hercules, the series chronicled Hercules’ chipper efforts to defend humanity against a series of relentless, conniving villains, against a backdrop of submerged homoeroticism. In my installation, the T.V. Hercules, already removed a degree or two from the myth, finds himself removed yet again—reappropriated, redeployed. Each video loop is constructed from footage appropriated from the aforementioned 1960s T.V. cartoon series, and features the hero Hercules engaged in some sort of intense, endless physical activity: ripping trees from the earth and hurling them through the air, punching soldiers as they confront him in sequence, holding back walls that threaten to close in on him, and so on. Locked into video loops in the age of mechanical (or now digital) reproduction, our heroic friend finds that, in the postmodern age, his already daunting, Herculean tasks seem to have no endpoint. The myths of Hercules and Sysyphus are conjoined. Undeterred, Hercules labours on, and in his labours we can perhaps see the outlines of our position in a society obsessed with terrorism, war and “security”: imprisoned yet willing participants in a digital purgatory of unending cacophony, violence and emergency. The Twelve Labours of Hercules consists of twelve looped videos playing on twelve dvd players on twelve old cathode-ray television sets. Except for the glow of the television sets, the gallery space is dark. The walls are painted a Mediterranean blue, faintly lurid in the screens' glow. Some T.V. sets sit on pedestals, while others rest on the floor. The dvd players are in plain view to the visitor, as are the video cables and power cords and bars. There is a sense of geography to the layout, as visitors must travel from set to set, as though from city to city, while the ample cabling snaking about the room suggests landforms like rivers and coasts. The Twelve Labours of Hercules Twelve-channel video installation 2009 © 2009 by Edwin Janzen. All rights reserved.
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