LUNA LUNA
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A CHILD BEFORE?
Luna Luna, the world’s first art amusement park, comes back to life
By Kalila Bohsali
In 1987, the world’s first art amusement park opened in Hamburg, Germany. Named Luna Luna after the small-scale Luna amusement parks of the turn of the century, it sported a Keith Haring carousel, Jean-Michel Basquiat ferris wheel, David Hockney forest pavilion, Salvador Dali surrealist fun-house, and music by Miles Davis, and was a fantasmic exploration of the intersection between play and art. Luna Luna was conceived by popstar and public art visionary Andre Heller, who wanted to build a bridge between the art world and the “real world.” He initially succeeded, bringing together thirty artists, performers, composers, and musicians to produce a spectacular spectacle seen by 250,000 visitors. But after the stock market crash of October 1987, and an unrealized European tour, Heller defaulted on loans and was forced to sell the project after just one season. The dream had come crashing down, or so everyone thought.
After years of legal battles over ownership, in 2006, forty-four shipping containers containing the Luna Luna collection traveled from Vienna to rural Texas where it was subsequently forgotten. Then, in 2018, DreamCrew, led by the rapper Drake, contacted Heller in the hopes of purchasing back the collection from its new owners. Upon buying the collection sight unseen, the team was shocked at the surprisingly good condition of each piece and began the long arduous process of cataloging and restoration.Now, after years of work, the collection has finally landed in a Los Angeles exhibit titled Forgotten Fantasy. Curated by Alessandra Gomez, the project is a collaborative effort, involving conservationists, restoration specialists, engineers, and sound specialists.
Gomez began her career working as a curator at The Shed, an interdisciplinary arts organization in New York City. She is interested in “‘total works of art’ where multiple art forms are synthesized into a single experience,” and her curatorial practice is “rooted in the belief that access to art is a right, rather than a privilege.” Of her work, she says she pulls inspiration from large spectacles such as Olympic ceremonies and the Super Bowl halftime show, and is invested in creating new ways to incorporate the audience with the art.
On display are about one third of the original pieces, lovingly restored in an exhibit reminiscent of the original park, alongside new pieces and music commissioned by Daniel Wool, stilt walkers, puppets, performances, and a documentary film. Frolicking amongst each piece are actors and circus arts performers in costumes recreated from photos of the park. The gift shop offers original ephemera from 1987, including original merchandise; the whole place is a mixture of nostalgia and modern reclamation.
As Gomez puts, it “the making of art is to contribute to culture and you don’t contribute to culture by only making art for galleries.”
In conversation with Gomez, she explained that her vision for Forgotten Fantasy is for it “not to feel like a conventional exhibition display at all.” Although it was important for her to “present information about all the artists and give it that historical context,” she was equally invested in incorporating the “theatrical aspects you would find in a Luna Luna park.” The opportunity of Luna Luna for Gomez is producing art that is interactive. Art that you get to activate and that activates. After all, Heller’s dream was an art landscape that also invites a lightness, a different form or interpretation, and an impetus for amusement and merriment. As Gomez puts, it “the making of art is to contribute to culture and you don’t contribute to culture by only making art for galleries.”
Beyond amusement, the new show tells the story of Luna Luna, Andre Heller, and an innovative artistic creation that broke convention at its time and forced us to think about high and low art and the audience’s “job” as viewers. For Gomez, re-telling this history was one of the most challenging and fulfilling aspects of the project. “As an art historian, I feel a huge responsibility towards presenting information in an accessible and accurate way for our audiences.” Beyond a blog post, there was little online about Luna Luna at the start of this project, but what Gomez was able to find the original intent of the park, to create “an environment that allowed visitors to do all the things people are not allowed to do inside museum spaces: ride the art, touch the art, step on the art.”
Moreover, after extensive research, Gomez found that, “Many of the artists of the post-World War II period were processing their own personal traumas. Artists Daniel Spoerri and Arik Brauer’s fathers were both murdered by the Nazis and Rebecca Horn spent her first year hiding in the Black Forest with her Jewish family. The site of Luna Luna was in Moorweide park which was also the assembly point for deporting Hamburg’s Jewish people from 1941-45.” Furthermore, “Basquiat’s Ferris wheel was originally built in the 1930s when places of leisure and fun, like amusement parks, were racially segregated in the US.” For Gomez, her “hope is that audiences will be in awe of these imaginative and beautifully designed rides and attractions, but also consider these different historical intersections that inject more meaning into Luna Luna’s framework as a whole.” What links the Forgotten Fantasy and the original Luna Luna is the radical notion that play is art, and that art is healing. Emerging from the post-war era, Luna Luna engaged leisure and amusement to change viewers into active participants, a message that continues to be relevant in a world where viewing (online) is the primary way we engage with the people, ideas, and problems around us.
For Gomez, her “hope is that audiences will be in awe of these imaginative and beautifully designed rides and attractions, but also consider these different historical intersections that inject more meaning into Luna Luna’s framework as a whole.”
Today, the show is necessarily different from the original presentation, as the rides are no longer up to code. Instead of riding the rides, the exhibit immerses you in the history of Luna Luna, part museum, part visual amusement park. You can marry “whomever or whatever you want” in the Andre Heller Wedding Chapel, wander through Salvidor Dali’s surrealist Dalidom, or explore David Hockney’s arboreal dreamscape. The experience is deliberately curated to invite the exploratory, spontaneous meandering usually reserved for childhood.
The original park was always rooted in a child-like sense of play. When recruiting artists for the original project, Andre Heller would arrive at their studios and ask, “have you ever been a child before?” When the artists would inevitably say yes, Heller would continue by exclaiming, “Well, you can’t necessarily recreate being a child, but you can create childhood memories.” “Bring curiosity,” Gomez advises, and bring a sense of play. Bring a sense of fantasy and childhood with you, but also know that “there are no expectations that you need to know anything.” (In an interesting parallel to the original Hamburg Luna Luna, many of the original artists did not know how to piece together their amusement park rides, and so turned to craftsmen, providing them with detailed design notes and instructions to bring their visions to engineered life.) Heller’s belief that “Art is not a secret society for a select few,” is made material in the park’s rescuing of cultural history from the lip of irretrievability.