House of Eternal Return,” Meow Wolf Art
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Volume 60 Number 3 July 2017 EXHIBIT REVIEW “House of Eternal Return,” Meow Wolf Art Center, Santa Fe PETER LINETT How perfect a name is Meow Wolf? It’s fun and culture sites, and general outlets like NPR, in the mouth but immediately off-kilter, unex- the New York Times, and the Telegraph (UK). pected: not Meow Woof, noises cats and dogs They reach for mash-up analogies that sound make, but a leap from the domestic to the wild, like a Hollywood pitch meeting gone haywire: the childlike to the sublime. It has, implicitly, “It’s something like Sleep No More meets the teeth. It might be the name of an indie rock Winchester Mystery House meets Welcome to band or, as it turns out, an artist collective that Night Vale, with a dash of Disney World and a works with technology to create immersive, bit of Burning Man thrown in there,” wrote Ben interactive installations that resist categoriza- Davis on Artnet (2016), alluding to categories tion. The last thing it sounds like is the name of as varied as immersive theater, historic house a museum. tours, fictional podcasts, and counterculture arts And it isn’t a museum, though it has a great festivals. Yet all of those comparisons are apt, deal to say about museums if we’re willing to lis- and indeed a towering, retro sheet-metal robot ten. Meow Wolf was formed in 2008 in Santa from Burning Man stands in the Meow Wolf Fe, where its first permanent installation, House parking lot, a mascot for the aesthetic inside. of Eternal Return, opened in early 2016 in a for- One could also mention the locked-room social mer bowling alley with support from Game of gaming trend; social-practice and site-specific Thrones author and local celebrity George R.R. arts experiences; and especially the museum Martin. Meow Wolf has become so popular and field’s own longstanding exceptions-that- such a nexus of interdisciplinary creative prac- prove-the-rule, the Museum of Jurassic Tech- tice, arts entrepreneurship, the maker move- nology in Los Angeles and the City Museum in ment, musical performance, hanging out with St. Louis. (In late 2015, when I took a hardhat friends, economic development and placemak- tour of the then-unfinished space with Meow ing, and yes, even education programs, that the Wolf founder Vince Kadlubek, he cited both parallels with what museums say they’re trying Punchdrunk Theatre Company, which pro- to achieve (but mostly aren’t) are unavoidable. duced Sleep No More, and the City Museum as For the first few months, part of the fun for conceptual progenitors of House of Eternal Santa Feans was trying to describe Meow Wolf Return.) to people who hadn’t yet experienced it them- The category confusions are intentional, of selves. (There appear to be few such people left.) course; House of Eternal Return is the product of, That challenge was soon taken up by writers and in some ways is thematically about, rum- from around the U.S. and abroad, writing in tra- maging among the found objects of culture and vel sections, art-world publications, technology banging together something destabilizingly, Peter Linett, [email protected] Chairman and Chief Idea Officer, Slover Linett Audience Research. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 367 Figure 1. Visitors on the catwalk near the central atrium of the installation. Photo: Courtesy of the author. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] grin-inducingly new. It models for us the art of through the windows on both stories, explor- synthesis, of adaptive reuse, a key component of ing the rooms. You enter and join them, struck all creativity (something at which the City first by the normalcy and specificity of it all: Museum also excels). Yet one gets the sense that the knick-knacks and framed photos, throw the artists and technologists involved aren’t blankets, clutter of papers, and televisions left much interested in cultural categories in the first on tell you this is a house you’ve been in place. They’re “post-” all that, doing their thing before, inhabited by people like you. But the and letting the rest of us struggle out of those familiarity rapidly gives way to oddity and rigid, twentieth-century frames and catch up. absence (and after all, you’ve entered knowing After waiting outdoors in a line that often that there’s a mystery to be solved): What hap- extends the length of the building, then paying pened to the inhabitants, the Selig family?On in a drab lobby and walking down a narrow one of the televisions, a cheerful Lucius Selig hallway, you enter House of Eternal Return is pitching something called Portals Bermuda through a door that deposits you in front of a and talking about the “power of positive two-story, hyper-realistic Victorian house. The mechanics.” Notebooks contain cryptic jot- house’s porchlight glows warmly in the (fic- tings. Upstairs, in the bedrooms and bath- tional) night and your fellow visitors are visible room, the familiarity and the estrangement 368 Exhibit Review: “House of Eternal Return,” Meow Wolf Art Center, Santa Fe Figure 2. In the bedroom, visitors reading a diary for clues. Photo: Courtesy of the author. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] (the meow and the wolf) only deepen—literally experience. Open the refrigerator in the so in the case of the Selig’s toilet, where if you kitchen, crawl into the living room fireplace peer down into the bowl you’ll see a boy float- (shades of Harry Potter), or squeeze into one of ing in blackness far below. In one of the kids’ the bedroom closets and you find yourself pass- bedrooms, a perfectly real clock-radio runs ing into another world—or rather, worlds plural manic, nonsensical numbers. It’s oddly inti- that loop unpredictably and mazelike into one mate to watch your fellow visitors pulling back another. In these worlds, the tools of spatial the children’s sheets and blankets, rummaging design, installation art, interactivity, media, through their dresser drawers, and flopping on color and light, sound and music are used to cre- one of their beds to read a diary—all in a ate what I can only call a psychedelic, steam- search for understanding, for the story behind punk Gesamtkunstwerk for all ages. (See, I’ve the mystery. reached for mashups myself.) In one set of But the house is only the beginning, and chambers, you walk into the arched skeleton of the mystery turns out to be merely the hook on some beast’s ribcage and join others playing which Meow Wolf has hung a much more intu- tunes on them with large percussion mallets; the itive, hugely creative sensory-participatory “bones” of plaster and plastic respond with Peter Linnett 369 Figure 3. Entering a passageway in the fireplace. Photo: Courtesy of the author. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] deep-toned sounds and colors, like some mam- you be trespassing if you stepped on those malian xylophone. Elsewhere, you make your biomorphic forms? (You wouldn’t be.) way through a black-and-white, geometric In my favorite installation, pitch blackness kitchen of extreme angles, half M.C. Escher is pierced by intermittent whirls of light that and half Phantom Tollbooth. You pass posters illuminate theatrical fog, in the middle of which and billboards advertising things you can’t iden- you gradually perceive a two-story “harp” made tify, with prices in some futuristic or alien cur- of thin red laser beams. Pluck the beams with rency. A neon sign has melted to the point your fingers and throaty notes sound. Both where the letters are unreadable, but somehow times I’ve visited, some people were playing this it’s still shining brightly, advertising without a harp inventively and intently, almost dancing referent. A full-size, hollowed-out school bus with their arms and bodies in the flickering stands on end, its lights still on and people rest- light. Others sat on black wall-ledges nearby, ing in its belly, visible on the level below you nearly invisible, listening and watching. through its cloudy windshield. In what feels like Throughout House of Eternal Return,in the center of the labyrinth, an atrium of sorts fact, sound and music play a crucial role, though offers hillocks of strange, shaggy, and spongy that role may be mostly subliminal for first-time materials. Is it inviting you to lounge, or would visitors. In one sequence of rooms, cryptic but 370 Exhibit Review: “House of Eternal Return,” Meow Wolf Art Center, Santa Fe Figure 4. Exploring the black and white kitchen. Photo: Courtesy of the author. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] passionate pronouncements (“This is the mentioned works in the service of a kind of moment. I just want to be reunited”) and chil- Brechtian alienation, forcing you to step back dren’s voices (“Can we just play?”) float atop and see the familiar anew. This is very different long, new-age synthesizer tones and metallic from the irony that saturates postmodern cul- percussion. Everywhere, layers of near and dis- ture (think late night talk-show hosts or snarky tant sounds mix in the ear, including the visitor- podcasts). Parody is friendlier, more inclusive, made music from that ribcage-xylophone and and trickier. It presumes our familiarity with the other interactives. It’s a cacophony, but an artful values or conventions being parodied and one; like a good film soundtrack, it adds emo- doesn’t require that we reject or disdain them in tional depth to the experience and helps unify order to have a good time.