The Experimental Art Carnival Luna Luna Comes Back to Life

Over the past two years, a secretive team of art restorers has been hard at work excavating a trove of long-lost treasures: a theme park built entirely by artists, many of them legends of their time, that enchanted a major European city for several months and then disappeared. A Ferris wheel by Jean-Michel Basquiat. A carousel enlivened by Keith Haring’s energetic lines. A cylindrical pavilion made of geometric trees by David Hockney.

This December, Luna Luna, as the park was called, makes a triumphant return. A show titled “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” will open to the public in a warehouse in East Los Angeles that spans more than 60,000 square feet—more exhibition space than the entire Whitney Museum. In an attempt to re-create the hazy, romantic mood of a carnival at dusk, the space will be largely undivided by interior walls. In addition, lighting will be kept to a minimum, which will allow the artworks—which is to say, the amusement park rides, many of which are illuminated—to shine. A 1980s soundtrack, featuring everything from Philip Glass to Euro pop hits, will thrum throughout. “What we’re hoping is that the experience is something like seeing the original,” says Helen Molesworth, the show’s curatorial adviser. “It’s going to have a magical feel.”

Luna Luna was the brainchild of André Heller, an Austrian multidisciplinary artist known for his fantastical installations and mischievous streak. “Carousels and swings have always been revolving sculptures,” he once wrote. “Scary train rides—they have always been a space for images, reliefs, and theatrical machines.” In the late 1970s, Heller began to conceive of an art theme park. Members of the establishment scoffed at the idea, but artists ranging from early-20th-century masters like Salvador Dalí to upstarts like Haring and Basquiat soon came on board. Kenny Scharf made a swing ride. Basquiat decked out a Ferris wheel in his signature style and added music by Miles Davis. Dalí made a “Dalí Dome,” a mirrored, photography-friendly precursor to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. Heller’s own contributions were a Wedding House (where people could marry what or whomever they wanted) and the Dream Station (an inflatable sculpture that housed a café).

Heller’s choice to hold the fair in a park in Hamburg, Germany, was no lark. His father had been detained by the Nazis during World War II, and the ground where Heller’s joyful artistic experiments were installed was once used as a staging area to deport Jews to concentration camps. “Heller thought of Luna Luna as a postwar project,” says Molesworth. “It asks the question: What needs to happen to make sure that fascism never takes hold again? As much as Luna Luna is a funhouse, it’s a funhouse designed to try and keep you open, curious, empathetic, and childlike so you don’t become a hard, crass person capable of hatred and anti-Semitism.”

During the summer of 1987, thousands of people experienced what was praised by Life magazine as “an international art carnival of the avant-garde” that “simultaneously elevates the mind and makes the jaw drop.” But once the carousels stopped spinning at the end of the season, the rides and attractions were “buried alive,” as Heller once put it, for 35 years. There were plans to revive Luna Luna anywhere from Vienna to San Diego, but after a series of philanthropic false starts, funding disputes, and legal battles, the works ended up languishing in crates and shipping containers in rural Texas.

During that time, Luna Luna almost became a lost chapter in the contemporary art narrative. Although the fair had made a splash regionally, it didn’t really make an impact overseas. “One of the things we’ve all forgotten is what life was like before the Internet,” says Molesworth. Records of the park surfaced online in only a handful of places, among them a post on the culture blog “Minnie Muse.” In 2019, a link to the site made its way to the inbox of Michael Goldberg, the astute and well-connected founder of the creative agency Something Special Studios, whose antenna immediately went up. “Luna Luna had soul,” Goldberg says. “There was a purpose to it.”

Soon after, Goldberg brought up the project’s sad fate in a meeting with Anthony Gonzales, a partner in DreamCrew, the rapper Drake’s business arm. Within a day, Gonzales texted him: “Do you think there’s an opportunity for us to buy it?” Soon—with Heller’s blessing and financial backing from DreamCrew; Goldberg, who is now Luna Luna’s CXO; and several other investors—the carnival made its way to L.A., where it has been painstakingly reassembled.

Sadly, even the most thorough restoration can’t quite get a 35-year-old theme park ride up to modern safety standards, meaning visitors won’t get a chance to take a spin on anything. But “Forgotten Fantasy” will put the project into context with artistic timelines and insight into the process of unearthing and restoring the rides. An early vision for resurrecting Luna Luna was to incorporate new experiences by leading contemporary creatives into the mix, but the idea was scrapped in favor of showcasing the original in all its glory. But Goldberg sees the display as just the beginning of an ongoing project that includes “a full-on contemporary art amusement park.” While details are sparse, one can only imagine the possibilities. It’s not a huge stretch to envision a Jeff Koons roller coaster, a Cindy Sherman funhouse, or a snack bar by Rirkrit Tiravanija.

“Heller showed us what the future would be, which is a blur between art and entertainment,” Molesworth says. And although it might be tempting to be cynical about an art carnival in the age of social media bait, the central ethos of Luna Luna remains as relevant as ever. “Art offers food for thought and qualities of all kinds, making people laugh or administering a positive shock,” Heller wrote. “The peculiar undertaking that is Luna Luna is an expression of this conviction.”