Meow Wolf: Revenge of the Artist?
From Issue 0: Commitment
Meow Wolf was founded as an art collective in 2008 by a close-knit group of six artists living in the small city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Its creative vision was incubated by an art world whose leading institutions — galleries, museums, and biennials — had fully internalized the idea that aesthetically organized experiences can themselves constitute works of art. Its founders absorbed the implications that the exhibition-as-artistic-medium posed for art and responded to it by staging their own community-based events throughout the Santa Fe area. When Meow Wolf’s claim to fame, House of Eternal Return, hatched in March 2016, the art world was forced to confront the monster that two decades of discourse around socially-engaged art had unwittingly created. At a time when large-scale installations had been the norm for decades, there was a consensus among artists: it was not objects themselves that signified a work of art but the institution that housed them.
In the years since the early seventies, when Lucy Lippard wrote on the dematerialization of the art object, the activities that can be defined as art-making have continued to expand well beyond the creation of an object and into the administrative activities of exhibition planning. Now, two decades after the height of relational aesthetics, the wide range of practices in which artists actively intervene in and construct their own exhibitions are well-represented at venues like the Venice Biennale, Documenta, Tate Modern, and MoMA, and have been since the early aughts. Artist-curated exhibitions at the RISD museum, mini-museums such as those by Claes Oldenburg and Meschac Gaba, Thomas Hirschhorn’s low-budget reading groups, Simone Leigh’s guided meditation sessions: these are just a few examples of the kinds of exhibitionary artworks one can expect to encounter in contemporary art museums today. However, as James Voorhies describes in Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form Since 1968 (2017), the ongoing legacy of relational aesthetics has also resulted in a widespread conception that any organized social experience can be an artwork, whether it occurs within or without the institution:
The experiments with basic human behaviors in the exhibition form quickly became a locus for a deteriorated, fragmentary, and misunderstood… form of art that embraces any kind of social engagement in activities and exhibitions occurring inside and outside the institution. Art that generally falls under the rubric of “social practice” has developed out of this conflation of a desire to make the world a better place and often the notion of using the spectator to do so. It does not always have or require the context of art to gauge its capacity — as art.
House of Eternal Return resonates in form with the immersive and uncanny Surrealist exhibitions of the 1930s. Indeed, the influence is direct, as Meow Wolf’s name was chosen by picking two words out of a hat, exquisite-corpse style. A Victorian-style suburban house whose every room has been collaboratively constructed by a network of local artists and volunteers, the House is also reminiscent of Judy Chicago’s collaborative feminist art space from 1971, Womanhouse. However, visitors looking to explore The House of Eternal Return must first (at least before COVID) wait in an up-to-three-hour line, buy a ticket, receive a neon wristband from an artist/cashier, and then wait behind other guests in a dark hallway. After watching a mandatory exhibition safety video — the kind that will be familiar to anyone who has been to Disney or Universal Studios — the visitors will be invited to enter at their own risk. Once inside, one will encounter a living room, a kitchen, and a dining room, each equipped with magic portals to an alternate universe: one finds a secret tunnel in the fireplace, another discovers a dazzling, intergalactic slide when he opens the household dryer, and another happens upon a bright white passageway when she opens the refrigerator.
Visitor exploring Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return. The California Sunday Magazine
Looking back at the numerous experimental art-exhibition models that have been proposed since the 20th century, the activities organized by Meow Wolf in the twelve years since its founding stand out as community-specific events that cannot be comfortably situated in any one genealogy. This is partly because Meow Wolf wants to stand out from, rather than stand with, the institutions that constitute the center of the art world. Since the beginning, Meow Wolf has conceived of itself as an underdog on the periphery, its low-budget, DIY activities situated squarely outside the sanctioned art spaces of the gallery and the museum. One of the collective’s earliest projects was realized after Vince Kadlubek, a co-founder and would-be CEO of Meow Wolf LLC, convinced his fellow artists to collectively rent a former hair salon that would be used as a party-venue-slash-collective-workspace. The group staged its first “monster-battle” in 2008, which took place on Santa Fe’s 600-year-old historic plaza, known by locals as the Mecca of the capital’s numerous tourist destinations. The artists involved pulled all-nighters making elaborate costumes and invited the public to participate, both as fighters and audience members. The Monster Battle came to be known as an event that brought the local community together through a playful critique of tourism; participants found satisfaction in the crinkled faces of annoyed boomers who wanted to enjoy their vacation unbothered. These days, like all of Meow Wolf’s functions, the Monster Battle is a highly organized production resembling a music festival, complete with food trucks, drunken crowds, DJ sets, and intermittent cop supervision.
In 2012, Meow Wolf completed its most successful project, the opening of a fake natural grocery store called Omega Mart. With the help of art teachers at various Santa Fe public schools, Meow Wolf members visited art classes once a week, each working with a group of four or five students who were tasked with inventing the products that would stock Omega Mart’s shelves. A seventh-grader at the time, I remember looking forward to Meow Wolf’s weekly visits; my group was proud to present Hair in a Can: “it’s faux real!” Meow Wolf advertised Omega Mart’s grand-opening in local papers. While it was open to the public in summer 2012, many deal-seeking natural food shoppers, of which there is no shortage in Santa Fe, were disappointed, and often angry, to discover “unreal bargains on ‘Nationally Localized Products’” and “Organically Recommended Produce.”
In these early years, the artists associated with Meow Wolf often worked shifts in the service industry, a cornerstone of Santa Fe’s tourist-based economy, and made art together in their free time. In 2010, Kadlubek worked with my mom at a local café in the Railyard arts district, a five-minute walk from SITE Santa Fe, a collection-free contemporary art museum that exemplifies the values of “New Institutionalism.” After school, my sister and I would spend our evenings in a booth until my mom’s shift was over. I remember Vince brooding behind the pastry counter while my mom took all the orders, his defiant laziness the only way of coping with an occupation so beneath his ambition and talent. He wanted Meow Wolf to become something bigger than a part-time refuge for working-class punks. Small galleries would occasionally invite Meow Wolf artists to construct installations inside their walls, but these were costly endeavors that forced members to take off work, buy their own materials, and travel to the site in question. In a New York Times article published in 2019, Sean Di Ianni, a RISD graduate and core member of the initial collective, described the difficulties Meow Wolf encountered as it tried to expand its presence in the art world by participating in gallery exhibitions:
We would send 15 people to New York or Chicago for three weeks to build an installation at a gallery that wasn’t going to charge admission. If there was any financial support, it was superminimal and would barely cover the cost of materials. We’d be taking time off work, paying for things out of our own pockets, just trying to make things work on a shoestring budget — it just wasn’t sustainable.
The Times article later described how “Meow Wolf begrudgingly considered itself part of the art world, even as the group felt excluded from it.” Caity Kennedy, a co-founder who now boasts the corporate title of Meow Wolf’s Senior Vice President for Creative Direction, summarizes the challenges that conventional exhibition practices posed for the group: “We were frustrated by lack of access to consistent opportunity, and to agency.” Meow Wolf believes that its activities have always resisted the relationships between artist, audience, and institution that we — as art historians, critics, curators, self-described intellectuals, and art students — take for granted. The art world by which Meow Wolf felt excluded presumes that institutions of art — the gallery, the museum, the biennale — are the proper mediators of the interactions between art and its public, not artists themselves. However close the relationship between artist and curator may have become, however irrevocable the fusion of art and exhibition, the institution remains the gatekeeper of this state of affairs, its sponsorship ensuring that socially-engaged art remains pedagogical, serious, and critical. However, given the situation Voorhies described, in which the label ‘art’ includes such disparate practices as giant slides installed at Tate, a juice bar in the catalogue of Manifesta 2, and a bike ride through the city of Kassel, the distinction between art that engages the spectator and a mere gathering of strangers around a shared activity has become close to impossible to pin down. Conceived by a generation of artists who came of age as the line between the work of art and the space it occupies blurred beyond recognition, Meow Wolf began to question if this line still needed to exist at all. Why Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Höller, Yayoi Kusama, and not us? Meow Wolf bit into the forbidden fruit and finally asked the multi-million-dollar question: what would happen if artists sidestep the institution altogether?
Given its rebellious crust-punk origins, I do not believe that the founders of Meow Wolf will be offended when I describe their project as a hybrid monstrosity on a mission to release art — and artists — from the stuffy, insular, exclusive, and low-paying bureaucracy known as the contemporary art world. Their mascot Snaggy — literally a one-eyed monster with a broken horn and a facetious smile; available for purchase as a sticker, plush pillow, or T-shirt — embodies Meow Wolf’s desire to distinguish itself from the ‘official’ art world. Meow Wolf’s vision for art is different: silly, fun, irreverent, and overall, accessible (read: marketable). On its website, the art-collective-turned-corporation proclaims that “Meow Wolf champions otherness, weirdness, challenging norms, radical inclusion, and the power of creativity to change the world.” It goes without saying that such language reflects an overall trend in businesses that are run by, and/or cater to, millennial consumers. Lingerie websites boasting models of varying shapes and colors, specialty coffee shops with LGBTQ+ merchandise, Hallmark’s recent commercial featuring a lesbian wedding — the list of examples of capitalism’s efforts to profit on ‘otherness,’ ‘challenging norms,’ and ‘radical inclusion’ is obvious, endless, and ever-expanding.
Snaggy gear available for purchase on Meow Wolf’s website.
Despite Meow Wolf’s own skeptical distancing from the discourse of contemporary art, a shared, self-proclaimed desire to ‘make the world a better place’ is quite evident in Meow Wolf’s mission statement. Its support of ‘radical inclusion,’ its belief in ‘the power of creativity to change the world,’ and especially its statement “that successful businesses give back to — and participate energetically in — their communities” (on Meow Wolf’s website, “Community” has its own page ), are congruent with the self-proclaimed goals of the institutions — museums in particular — that had originally disillusioned Meow Wolf artists. Indeed, in her review of House of Eternal Return, anthropologist Lillia McEnaney argues that Meow Wolf fits perfectly into Santa Fe’s bolstering contemporary art scene: the city’s artistic identity is becoming less defined by the tastes of retired, turquoise-hungry tourists eager to buy up tacky ‘western’ paintings and ‘traditional’ Native American art. Rather, in the last decade, art in Santa Fe has taken a turn for the contemporary:
With SITE Santa Fe’s intensely political exhibitions, as well as various Native and nonnative art galleries overtaking the city’s Railyard District, Santa Fe has positioned itself as an up-and-coming epicenter for contemporary art, and Meow Wolf fits right into this transforming arts context.
There’s no doubt Santa Fe’s art scene is undergoing some drastic changes, but neither SITE nor Meow Wolf would be comfortable being classified as partners in this endeavor. They are, in fact, ideological archenemies. SITE was founded in 1995 in order to establish the first international biennale in the United States. McEnaney is correct to assert that its highly curated exhibitions have political overtones. However, this is one reason that Meow Wolf and SITE cannot be grouped together, even if they both proclaim to be innovative venues for innovative contemporary art. The evolution of Meow Wolf’s brand is striking, for it points to the founding artists’ open embrace of New Institutionalism’s most haunting fear: that art has become merely a space for entertainment and public distraction, akin to an amusement park. Defiantly, Meow Wolf openly embraces this comparison. When Kadlupeck won a pitch contest on Meow Wolf’s behalf in 2014, the six founders took a business trip to Disneyland. Economic and arts publications alike have described Meow Wolf as the new Disney, suggesting that the future of art may very well be in the for-profit experience economy. The blossoming corporation’s current plans to develop a Meow Wolf hotel in Phoenix and an “immersive bazaar” (read: mall!) in Las Vegas are indicative of an unabashed unity between aesthetics and corporate logic, a reality from which non-profit academic art institutions, such as the neighboring SITE Santa Fe, benefit, but try their hardest to distance themselves from.
Interior of House of Eternal Return. Westword.
Meow Wolf can no longer describe itself as an art collective. Its website currently identifies the newly christened B-corporation as an “an arts and entertainment group” that was “established in 2008 as an art collective.” Meow Wolf has successfully profited on the non-logic of Surrealist aesthetics, resurrecting them in an immersive funhouse that encourages the spectator’s active involvement. This phenomenon is difficult for the ‘official’ art world to apprehend because Meow Wolf’s creative vision is unabashedly entrepreneurial and artistic; its founding members have resisted the image of the starving artist scavenging for representation, impoverished by the galleries and museums that at the same time offer the only pathway to success. Instead, Meow Wolf likens the artist’s urge to create to the ambition of a successful entrepreneur: both are diligent, committed, and innovative at heart. Naturally, the politically subversive overtones that were obvious in formal precedents like early Surrealist exhibitions in Paris and Womanhouse are not registered in the viewer’s experience of House of Eternal Return. This is due not only to obvious differences in historical circumstance, but also to the contemporary art world’s assumption that art cannot be socially progressive if it is overtly profitable. Meow Wolf doesn’t strive to refute this claim; its relative success merely shows that the opposite is also true: any art institution’s claim to political efficacy, profitable or not, is opportunistic and self-promoting in nature. Both Meow Wolf and the stuffy art museums it opposes assert their active involvement with — and necessary relationship to — their ‘communities.’ Both public organizations describe themselves in moral and political terms, committed to “making the world a better place” through art. But how is this commitment manifested beyond the mission statement?
Questions have been posed as to whether or not Meow Wolf is a museum. As a for-profit arts corporation that echoes the contemporary museum’s responsibility to engage the community with socially-engaged art exhibitions, Meow Wolf stands its ground as an anti-museum, simultaneously a reflection and a one-sided negation of the status quo. A monstrosity birthed by disillusioned artists of the twenty-first century, Meow Wolf holds a distorted mirror up to the institutions of contemporary art. House of Eternal Return, as well as Meow Wolf’s forthcoming projects, attest to what the art world could look like if the distinction between art and the space that houses it is collapsed for good. By successfully resisting the art world’s dictum that artists need art institutions for support, the artists-turned-corporate managers at Meow Wolf have claimed the exhibition-as-artistic-medium for themselves. Meow Wolf will continue to send an unsettling warning to the legacy of socially engaged art: be careful what you wish for. //
