Erick Meyenberg: The wheel bears no resemblance to a leg

The exhibition Erick Meyenberg: The wheel bears no resemblance to a leg is the artist’s first solo show in New York. The project is the end result of the artist’s collaboration with members of the high school marching band, Banda de Guerra Lobos, at the Colegio Hispanoamericano in Mexico City. The artist and the teenagers—together with teachers, curators, musicians, composers, choreographers, costume designers, and a video production team—co-created choreographies, musical scores, and a series of performances that took the band through some of the city’s most emblematic and politically marked sites: the Plaza de Tlatelolco, where striking university students clashed with the state in 1968; the Monumento a la Revolución, commemorating the Mexican Revolution of 1910; and the Forum Buenavista shopping center, symbolizing Mexico’s embeddedness in transnational capitalism.

Meyenberg’s developed The wheel bears no resemblance to a leg (2016) over two years as a commission for inSite/Casa Gallina, the sixth edition of the public art project, inSite. The exhibition is co-organized by Americas Society and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and is curated by Americas Society’s Visual Arts Director and Chief Curator Gabriela Rangel and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Visual Arts Director Lucía Sanromán.

Composed of a three-channel projection, flags, a relief sculpture, and archival materials, The wheel bears no resemblance to a leg takes its enigmatic title from the 1917 prologue to Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1903 play Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias). Meyenberg’s project translates these sources into a critical stance toward normative pedagogical structures—here taking the form of uniforms, discipline, education, gender, the state, and symbols of nationhood—and a conception of the “surreal” not as an evasion of reality, but as an invitation to surmount other realities. Culminating in a synesthetic experience, The wheel bears no resemblance to a leg suggests the complexities of Mexican modernity.

The exhibition is accompanied by a forthcoming richly illustrated publication, which documents the process and performance of The wheel bears no resemblance to a leg and includes essays by Gabriela Rangel and Osvaldo Sánchez, as well as an interview with the artist by Lucía Sanromán.