Meow Wolf - House of Eternal Return

Santa Fe, New Mexico – Sunday, August 22nd, 2021

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.’”

Friedrich Nietzsche popularized the concept of eternal return, which is that all the universe and the life within it will eventually repeat itself, and continue to repeat itself ad infinitum. While the concept has roots in ancient cosmology, Nietzsche was more interested in the existential implications of believing it to be true, even if only as a thought experiment. The question asks us to reconsider our relationship to time. Often, we treat any given moment as something fleeting, ephemeral, and thus of little lasting value that cannot be made up for later. By considering that every moment will repeat infinitely, our relationship to time becomes incredibly heavy. The choices we make don’t fade away. Rather, they are cemented into the timeline, with all other possible worlds now closed off for all eternity. The consequences of each moment weigh forever.

The question Nietzsche ultimately asks, when you take stock of the life you lived and are living, does the prospect of eternal return becomes a horrifying burden, or a divine prospect?

On my first visit to Meow Wolf’s debut installation, Santa Fe’s House of Eternal Return, time felt heavy. I’d been hearing about Meow Wolf since its debut in March 2016, and now five years, three presidencies, and one global pandemic later, I was finally, belatedly making my pilgrimage. Every masked breath was a reminder of this fixed moment in history I found myself in. I had three hours, give or take, to experience whatever I was going to experience here… and the House of Eternal Return is nothing if not experiential. With so many possible worlds ahead of me, each choice in every moment became impossibly heavy. Would I look back on how I made use of my limited time here with gratitude or regret?

They make it easy for you at the start. Although as soon as you enter the exhibit there are hidden passages you can take to the far left or the far right, most first-time visitors aren’t even aware of these options. The attendant recommends checking the mailbox, reading the letters within, then going through the front door of this family home tucked within a black box warehouse. The House of Eternal Return gives us the radical freedom to go almost wherever we choose, but at first it’s comforting to delegate that freedom to others and know, “this will be my path and it will be good.”

But don’t get too comfortable. “Beyond Here, There Be Dragons” warns the doormat as we step through the front door.

There are many ways to engage with the House of Eternal Return. Do you move quickly to discover the spectacles beyond the house, or do you slow down and take your time with the story that develops inside the domicile, savoring the anticipation to the big reveals? There was no question I was in the latter camp, perusing the books and newspapers that lay strategically throughout the living room and kitchen for details that might help enrich my understanding of the house and its occupants, the Selig family. There’s a government conspiracy of sorts. Also a loss in the family. Each member seems to have their own story. Interdimensional rifts are hinted at, although the exact nature of the disturbance always seems one or two documents away from being revealed. I’m tempted to scan ahead as I read, wary of both time and awkwardly occupying a physical space, but I might miss an important detail. I seem to miss many details regardless. Time to move on. There may be more answers in the next room.

When the complete history of themed entertainment is finally written, the multidimensional refrigerator portal in the Selig house (along with the nearby washing machine) will probably go down as one of the medium’s greatest moments. Not that either is a particularly elaborate or even spectacular moment in and of itself, but because there’s something about this threshold between worlds that just perfectly captures the ideas that represent Meow Wolf at its best. There’s nothing better than a good reveal, and the fridge/washer are both double-whammy reveals: first the reveal that this ordinary household appliance is actually a portal to another dimension, and second the reveal once you’ve passed through that portal of the strange new worlds on the other end. Unfortunately, both also achieve their power through a certain degree of exclusion. The fridge and especially the washer are decidedly non-ADA compliant, and it’s the fact that you have to navigate these physical spaces with some degree of caution and dexterity, kinesthetically aware of your body’s relationship to these compression points, that signals their uniqueness in your brain. Future Meow Wolf installations will find ways to retain that specialness while including more people of different abilities, but in Santa Fe it’s still the original, raw and tactile.

Over and over, through each new space, House of Eternal Return requires you to decide what you want to get out of this experience. Each environment is so surreal that it’s hard to rely on our ordinary mental scripts for navigating the world. There’s an initial moment of surprise and awe, and then a choice of how to interact with the space. Sometimes it can be as simple as just standing and appreciating the view for a moment before moving on. Other times you discover there’s something that requires your participation, even if it’s not entirely clear what that is. The sense of exploring the space in detail can be rewarding enough, especially in those rooms that have lots of hidden discoveries on the shelves or behind doors. Some even offer a physical challenge. Taking a picture can also be a rewarding way to preserve the moment, either to document what you’ve seen (back lens), or to document your own privileged act of having been there to see it (front lens). The choice is up to you whether your experience is about you, or about finding something new that exists outside of yourself.

The house and its branching multiversal portals rewards easy solipsism for those who want to make the experience all about themselves. But it also provides a seemingly endless rabbit hole for those who want to challenge themselves and dig deeper into the mysteries the house offers. I wanted to not only find that deeper story, but to find a story that seemed to mean something important. The fact that themed entertainment, which insists on calling itself a storytelling medium, almost always then tells shallow and derivative stories, has become such a baseline fact that there’s little point in even considering it within criticism anymore. As long as the craftsmanship of the storytelling is good enough, it makes little difference whether the story itself was rewarding in the same way other narrative-based arts strive for. But it was clear that House of Eternal Return was designed with pretensions to tell a more complex, challenging, and artistically rewarding story that went far beyond the limited conventions of themed experiences. I wanted to find it.

Very little of it has stayed with me. (Although, full disclosure, it has been eight months after my visit as I write these words.) Meow Wolf’s maximalist artistic ethos also applies to its storytelling. There was simply too much to take in for a single visit. For the most part, the exhibits lack intuitive systems for categorizing or prioritizing the different story threads. Each time you pick up a book or letter or watch a multimedia piece, it often feels like you’re starting over again, and they rarely end with any conclusivity. Questions are raised, but answers are held until you can find the next piece of evidence. And repeat.

The one storyline that had the most staying power, mostly because I was able to follow a relatively complete arc within a single notebook, was that of Nimsesku. A pet hamster with mechanical (or metaphysical) innards that ultimately fails to meet its promise of eternal life, and provides its owner, ten-year-old Lex, a lesson in letting go. Indeed, when the ‘pataphysical antics or governmental conspiracy story threads take a backseat, there’s another throughline that dwells on the family’s loss and process of acceptance that felt earnestly moving, especially after nearly two years of death and disease. I just wish I didn’t have to spend so much effort on the mechanics of the storytelling and could have been more focused on the story itself.

I wanted it to be neat, but House of Eternal Return wears its messiness as a badge of pride. Countless diverse artists have contributed to make this house a reality, which makes it a challenge to find clean throughlines or organizational patterns to make sense of your senses. The depth of the family narrative and the use of a familiar entry point as a launchpad to the unfamiliar is what makes House of Eternal Return unique from most other immersive art installations (and are the aspects that most themed entertainment people I know tend to appreciate the most). But there was a point where I realized that this fictional framing might even be a distraction to the project’s larger artistic mission of empowering outsider artists and reclaiming the art world as a playground for everyone and not just the elite. Immersive storytelling has always required a certain level of suspension of disbelief, which when you boil it down is a psychological distancing technique that allows us to play in situations that might otherwise command skepticism. Yet there were multiple times where entering with that mindset felt at odds with many of the art installations themselves. The point of so much art is to establish an authentic dialogue between artist and audience that’s rooted in the immediacy of the work as a creative piece existing within a cultural and political reality. The multiverse can include infinite things, but to explore it means you’re still expecting on some level to leave this universe behind. Can the set of all sets also contain itself?

The way the house works as a business in order to support all of those artists is simply to look at the house’s instantaneous capacity (measured by its maximum crowd density multiplied by its usable floor area), and then multiply that by its daily turnover rate (measured by the average visitor dwell time). In other words, how many bodies fit into this space, and how long do they stay in this space until they leave and make room for another body? What happens to those bodies during that time is an open question, which Meow Wolf seems to leave the individual visitors free to decide. But average 2-3 hour range of dwell time seems less a measure of how long it takes to have an emotionally and intellectually rewarding experience, or even how long it takes to complete a full tour of most spaces, than it really is how long one can physically and mentally stand the hyperstimulation before needing to return to reality. House of Eternal Return has so much to take in, which means it can also take a lot from you in return. It’s exhilarating to be immersed in the presence of such a monumental creation, and it always offers the opportunity to go a little further. The responsibility is entirely on you to decide when it’s time to slow down… or when to crash.

Ultimately, part of the house’s lesson in letting go was coming to the acceptance that, while I might be able to eventually tour nearly every room, that’s not necessarily the most rewarding way to experience the house, and regardless is still far from “completing” all the house has to offer. You can always stay longer, but the joy and curiosity of discovering something new for the first time is finite. You will have to make choices of how you spend your time when your eyes are fresh and it really matters, and those choices will impact how meaningful or lasting an experience House of Eternal Return is for you. Do you want to leave with some really good photos for social media? With some new insights on life and the universe? Positive memories with those you share your experiences with? Or simply enjoy a few moments of wonder and appreciation at what humans are capable of creating through art? But I want to leave with all of those things!

I emerged, squinting into the sun, carrying with me a slight headache.

As a final aside, if you need space to decompress after a visit to Meow Wolf Santa Fe, which you almost certainly will, there are several good options along the main Cerrillos Road strip. I tried and would highly recommend a restaurant in a strip mall called Jambo Cafe, serving the best Afro-Caribbean food I’ve had. We enjoyed savory stuffed phyllo, jerk chicken wings, and coconut pili pili shrimp, each bursting with complex flavor. Best meal I had in New Mexico.

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