“The world’s first art amusement park” is being revived in Los Angeles

A new amusement park will open in Los Angeles in December. This news would be an unnoticed line in the posters of traditional pre-Christmas fairs and booths if Luna Luna Park was not a restoration of the famous art project in Hamburg in 1987, which attracted 240 thousand visitors in one summer. And there was something to attract – the park was the work of the first artists of its time: from Joseph Beuys to David Hockney, from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Keith Haring, from Salvador Dali to Sonia Delaunay. Tells Kira Dolinina.

The California park will open under the name “Luna Luna. A Forgotten Fantasy” and is a revived art utopia of the 1970s and 1980s, when the young Austrian artist and musician Andre Heller traveled around the world in order to persuade the most famous artists to participate in his project. The idea of ​​an attraction as art (or vice versa, art as an attraction) was at that time not yet as rooted in the practices of public display of art objects as it is now, and Heller offered the titans of modern art an original game.

He managed to persuade 30 artists. He started with Sonia Delaunay, whom he visited in 1976. The veteran abstract artist gave permission to use her geometric imagery and font for the entrance arch of Luna Luna Park. The latest to join the project was Keith Haring, whose instantly recognizable sketchy people and animals became the theme for the carousel and the banners around it. In the ten years between these visits, Heller received works from the mastodons of modern art (Dali, Beuys, Erte, Hundertwasser, Lichtenstein), from new stars (Basquiat, Baselitz, Rebecca Horn, Hockney) and from rising stars (mostly of German or Austrian origin ). In addition, he managed to agree on music for the pavilions of his park with Miles Davis, Philip Glass and even the terror of everything bourgeois, Hermann Nitsch.

And all this for money that was ridiculous even at that time: Heller received $350 thousand from the German magazine Neue Revue. With such a budget, it seemed that it was not worth approaching celebrities, but the Austrian had more than enough charisma and faith in his business, and it worked. The rising star of the New York art scene of the 1980s, Kenny Scharf, said that he received a fee of only $10 thousand, but succumbed to the charm not of money, but of Heller’s ambitions, who dreamed of taking his amusement park around the world and eventually reaching the UN building in New York. York. Unfortunately, the tour was not a success: despite excellent reviews and a very impressive influx of visitors, tangled finances led to Luna Luna being dismantled after the first season. After 35 years, 44 containers will be found in a warehouse in Texas and will be purchased by DreamCrew, whose founders, Canadian rapper Drake and television series producer Adele Noon, decided to recreate an amusement park.

Luna Luna is a great idea. Firstly, this is a classic mobile amusement park: with carousels, a shooting gallery, a Ferris wheel, rooms of fear and distorting mirrors, food kiosks, etc. That is, visitors are offered an instantly recognizable format of entertainment. Secondly, Heller was very attentive to the specifics of the work of each of the involved authors. Basquiat’s Ferris wheel became, as it were, the reverse side of his graffiti – Basquiat’s drawings are applied here to white-painted chairs and the base of the wheel, which transfers “dirty” street art into a playful, “children’s” context. Californian visionary David Hockney composed a tree pavilion with Strauss waltzes. Daniel Sperri placed his signature still-life collages in an outdoor toilet called “Shit Chancellery,” whose classicizing façade was a direct reference to Speer’s Reich Chancellery. The ideological artist Jörg Immendorff came up with a shooting gallery in which one had to shoot at political images. The Viennese fairy of gingerbread art, Gerti Fröhlich, was, of course, responsible for the sweets. Rebecca Horn invited viewers to measure their feelings with her “Love Thermometer,” and Heller himself opened the doors of the “Wedding Chapel” to those “who want to marry someone or something.” Jean Tengely and Friedensreich Hundertwasser made posters for Luna Luna. Joseph Beuys also limited himself to a billboard. His programmatic statement was: “Money is not capital at all. However, ability is capital.”

Then this maxim could well be the slogan of the entire park. Today, when almost every high-profile exhibition is an attraction, when art has taken to the streets not only as a protest, but also as a familiar habitat, the pathos of Heller and his co-authors is already history. However, the mixing of museums and attractions in our minds will not at all prevent Luna Luna from becoming a fashionable immersive spectacle, and at the same time reminding us that the art of the 20th century, unlike us, was not shy about being pretentious and speaking big words. Sometimes they are needed most.