“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.”ĭuring 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. “Heller thought of Luna Luna as a postwar project,” says Molesworth. 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’s choice to hold the fair in a park in Hamburg, Germany, was no lark. 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). Dalí made a “Dalí Dome,” a mirrored, photography-friendly precursor to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. Basquiat decked out a Ferris wheel in his signature style and added music by Miles Davis. 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. “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. “Carousels and swings have always been revolving sculptures,” he once wrote. Luna Luna was the brainchild of André Heller, an Austrian multidisciplinary artist known for his fantastical installations and mischievous streak. “What we’re hoping is that the experience is something like seeing the original,” says Helen Molesworth, the show’s curatorial adviser. A 1980s soundtrack, featuring everything from Philip Glass to Euro pop hits, will thrum throughout. 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. In an attempt to re-create the hazy, romantic mood of a carnival at dusk, the space will be largely undivided by interior walls. 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. This December, Luna Luna, as the park was called, makes a triumphant return. A cylindrical pavilion made of geometric trees by David Hockney. A carousel enlivened by Keith Haring’s energetic lines. 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.
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