‘Luna Luna’: A Forgotten Fantasy and a Preserved Promise (The NoPro Review)
The art amusement park spotlights the true potential of experiential shows
What if I described a Ferris wheel turning to the tune of Miles Davis, its steel baskets circling a giant baboon ass painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat? What if I recounted a fairground with a Keith Haring carousel, Roy Lichtenstein mirror maze, and Salvador Dalí dome? Would you think this a fever dream? It wasn’t. It was Luna Luna, the world’s first art park.
Luna Luna was the avant-garde vision of André Heller, a Viennese multi-hyphenate. For years he imagined a different kind of carnival. After securing a grant in 1985, he gathered 30 esteemed and rising artists, both globally known and regionally famous, to co-create a new celebration of wonder and play, one that mixed circus arts with fine art. Luna Luna opened during the summer of 1987 in Hamburg, Germany. The park’s menagerie of costumed performers, jugglers, stilt-walkers, and magicians welcomed nearly 300,000 visitors during its seven-week run. Next up was a tour. Heller envisioned a traveling fair, a festival for the masses.
His dream never came to pass.
The park’s attractions were sold, packed into storage, and forgotten. Its legacy quickly faded. Despite its impressive roster, the art industry cast its gaze elsewhere and the event’s historical record was largely absent from the internet (a digital capture materialized in 2018). Heller’s masterpiece wouldn’t be resuscitated for 35 years. Then a coterie of advocates — including a creative director, scholar, lawyer and one unlikely figure: the rapper Drake — banded together to rescue the park. Recovering more than 40 shipping containers from the Texas desert, they discovered that the majority of Luna Luna was intact and in astonishing condition.
Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy is remarkably comprehensive. Many of the 1987 attractions are on display. Visitors with a VIP Moon Pass can step inside Dalí’s Dalídom and David Hockney’s Enchanted Tree. Heller’s Wedding Chapel offers officially unofficial matrimonial unions and a 30-minute documentary is a viewfinder into the past. Architectural plans, original merchandise, a cultural timeline, and installations of the recovery and restoration process round out the presentation.
On opening day few visitors traversed the show’s expanse. The ambiance was odd, despite the staff’s warm welcome. Two Bob Baker puppeteers strolled about with marionettes, an atmospheric delight, but they were swallowed by the warehouse’s massive footprint. I could imagine the energetic explosion from full attendance. Still, I had an unshakable sensation that something was missing. Was it the lack of guests or something else?
I pictured Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Room, his fantastical factory’s “nerve center.” In the 1971 film, a brick-walled depository with exposed pipes houses a colorful confection forest. The natural-industrial contrast emphasizes the room’s hallucinatory spirit. A key difference between this cinematic reference and the modern-day Luna Luna lies in the ground, specifically in the grass of both the Chocolate Room and the park’s original outdoor location. The current exhibition’s concrete floor felt antiseptic, anti-carnival, and amplified an institutional tone. I longed for an emotional anchor and environmental bridge to the surreal pageantry of 1987.
As the world’s first art amusement park, Luna Luna is a singular entity, but it’s an echo of its former self. The exhibit is extraordinary. It’s also a playground under glass. By separating visitors from most attractions the fundamental vision has been bifurcated. The rides continue to operate, minus their riders. In a timed and rather ghostly rotation each attraction illuminates and animates. It’s closest to the original without compromising artifact integrity, because now the art is “too valuable to be experienced directly by the public,” an accurate callout by Joe Coscarelli in his recent New York Times article.
It’s an understandable, necessary choice for what has become an historical relic. It also begs the question: Why? Why do we insist on delineations between art and entertainment, especially when the end result is less whole, less magical? For hundreds of years we’ve endured countless expositions of “entertainment” vs “art” vs “Art,” and capitalism only greases those wheels.
What does this arbitration afford us? We may be marginally enriched by the sheer exercise, but these debates are unsolvable and unwinnable. They traffic on a longstanding idea that such categories are inherently, verifiably distinct. This cultural elitism has been misapplied as an estimation of value and confirmation of quality. We’ve lost the thread that taste is individually subjective.
In 2017, art critic Ben Davis coined the term Big Fun Art, specifically in relationship to Meow Wolf and broadly to the rise of immersive productions. His article is an excellent reference for the art-as-spectacle discourse. By amputating art from entertainment its precious commoditized state remains uncorrupted. There is, however, scientific evidence of “aesthetic chills,” no matter the source’s provenance, market valuation, or lack thereof.
Six years after the anointing of Big Fun Art we find ourselves at Forgotten Fantasy, but Luna Luna isn’t a complete anomaly.
Carsten Höller’s Amusement Park exhibited at MASS MoCA in 2006. Rides were similarly staged as kinetic sculptures rather than functional attractions. A later show, Carsten Höller: Experience, included a usable 102-foot slide which elicited the whinging of critic Karen Rosenberg, “Does relational aesthetics still mean anything when the experience of visiting a museum — any museum — has become so performative and interactive?”
In 2015, Banksy corralled a whopping 58 artists into making Dismaland, an apocalyptic “bemusement park.” Delivering political commentary in spades, it too lacked the theme park tradition of operational rides. Its attendance couldn’t match Luna Luna’s either: 150,000 guests for the five-week run.
Nothing has paralleled the Luna Luna of the ‘80s.
So can we go forward by going back? Luna Luna serves as a beacon of experiential’s ultimate promise: permission to play and the freedom of imagination. Immersive productions are portals; a chance to step inside a story, to explore versions of ourselves, to see the world and ourselves through a new lens. Like all great immersive, the original park is a true intersection of expression between makers and participants. That’s not to say these experiences are without rules or restrictions, but when art is shackled by financial value — whether perceived or actual — the barrier between creator and beholder can become impenetrable.
Heller himself said, “Art is not a secret society for a select few.” Luna Luna was a promise momentarily fulfilled. Art and entertainment were one and the same. Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy is a reminder of a past whole and a challenge for experiential’s future: lose the classifications and dismantle the barricades; embrace the blur, hover in the in-between, and celebrate the spectacle.
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