Shana Nys DambrotLuna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy is a lot of things, but it’s not actually an amusement park—or at least, not anymore. Alas, climbing atop and spinning on its curious funfair rides was the privilege of visitors to its original 7-week run in Hamburg, Germany in the Summer of 1987. However, its buzzy sojourn in downtown L.A. is in many ways so much more.
Long story short, in the mid-80s, artist André Heller had a crazy idea—to build a real life amusement park, but make it an art show. To everyone’s surprise and delight, Heller not only secured the participation of many of his era’s most celebrated Pop and conceptual artists—including marquee names like Salvador Dalí, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, David Hockney, and Roy Lichtenstein—but he also found angel investors to pay for the whole thing. He built it, and people came.
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024
It was spectacular, if the contextualizing but jealousy-inducing short films on its creation process and public opening and the trove of evocative documentary images by photographer Sabina Samitz are anything to go by. But soon enough even this most successful and surreal of summer carnivals came to an end, and the rides, games, and attractions were sealed in 44 shipping containers where they languished in a stockyard in Texas—until now.
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024
But here’s what folks lamenting that they can’t ride the rides are maybe missing—at this point, it’s not an amusement park anymore. It’s now a museum-scale (at 60,000-square feet) exhibition of monumental, kinetic, and occasionally interactive sculpture—a magnificent art historical unicorn of epic proportions, filled with surprises. From the childhood-evoking and delightful, to the scatological and even frightening, with a dynamic clash of American Pop and European style, dark-humored surrealism, there are only a few things you’re allowed to touch, but the looking will still captivate you for hours.
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024
From visionary 20th-century artist and interdisciplinary designer Sonia Delaunay’s monumental entrance archway built of fabric based on her inventive Cubist abstractions and topped with the original lit-up Luna Luna sign, iconically old-timey and visible throughout the 1987 footage, you know you are in a designed exhibition, something on a biennial scale, as though with a tightly curated theme. A bespoke soundtrack incorporating the music that was played at the site in 1987 and wandering costumed circus performers amplify the vibe but with a thankfully light touch. For an historical presentation, it’s pretty lively.
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024
And for anyone skeptical about whether serious artists should have this much fun, Exhibit A is the entire career of Kenny Scharf, whose works have always drawn from a cartoon-inflected language of wild gesture, bulging eyes, and technicolor palette. As he himself says in the documentary, making an amusement park like the ones he loved as a kid (think kitschy, classic Coney Island) has always been a dream for him. In a way, all his work comes from a cosmic carnival, and Luna Luna is a natural extension. As he lives and works in Los Angeles, he (along with all the other still-living project artists) was able to not only visit the new iteration, but actively participate in its restoration.
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024
David Hockney’s circular tree/house (one of the few attractions it is still possible to enter inside of) and Keith Haring’s marquee tarps and painted carousel (which is not rideable) have the same energy—that of artists who always borrowed from a simple, even childlike aesthetic to discuss bigger issues facing humanity. It’s easy to see what attracted them both in the first place—especially Haring, who always felt strongly about bringing kids along for the culture.
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024
Arik Brauer’s extremely surreal and all in German carousel is less for children; it reminds one of the fountains outside the Pompidou and other Dadaist-leaning Pop. Its very strangeness in the guise of such an innocent object, and the photos of happy but confused children wearing its seats like costumes, set a different tone—one more in the key of conceptual art than carnival. Manfred Deix’s Palace of the Winds—a theatrical proscenium where video footage from the 1987 farting concerto meets vintage vaudeville in a perfect send-up—and the trussed up Olympian loo of Daniel Spoerri’s Crap Chancellery, give a richer sense of the wholesome transgressions afoot in the European modern art world of the late ‘80s.
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024, pinhole exposure
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painted Ferris wheel, with music by legendary musician Miles Davis (part of the soundtrack by Daniel Wohl) is literally a Basquiat painting in the shape of an antique wooden ride. He used one that dates to 1933, which for Luna Luna was painted by artisans in Vienna in strict accordance with Basquiat’s instructions—the only time a Basquiat work was executed remotely. Kids or no kids, he pulled no punches with his trademark texts and images, though the black and white refinement of the piece is somewhat belied by the giant monkey showing its ass to viewers around the back. You can get a plushy version of the cheeky monkey butt in the gift shop through which you will exit.
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024, pinhole exposure
Salvador Dalí’s geodesic pavilion—one of those which you are encouraged to enter—with its hot pink mirrored kaleidoscope interior seems destined to break the internet, though it was made a decade before there was really even an internet to break. Its ambient soundtrack of Gregorian chants by Blue Chip Orchestra and entrance wall of billboard sized disco-inflected figure portraits in some ways comes the closest to what amusement park aficionados might have been expecting. Likewise Roy Lichtenstein’s glass maze with its Philip Glass soundtrack and the entertaining panic that comes from being lost in a labyrinth with everyone watching.
Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy (Photo: Shana Nys Dambrot)
The fourth work which is available to be participatory is maybe the scariest ride of them all—commitment. At Luna Luna founder André Heller’s Wedding Chapel, “anyone and everyone can marry what and whom they want.” That is, in the end, the only real rule of Luna Luna, then and now—anything can be art, and anything goes at the funfair.
Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy is installed at 1601 E. 6th St., downtown through May 12; $38 and up; lunaluna.com.
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024, pinhole exposure
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024, pinhole exposure
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024
Osceola Refetoff: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Los Angeles, 2024, pinhole exposure
❖Editor’s note: The disclaimer below refers to advertising posts and does not apply to this or any other editorial stories.
Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.