Somewhere, in a city of 8 million people, there must be New Yorkers with amazing flatulence and extraordinary sphincter control.
Back in the summer of 1987, in Hamburg, Germany, such talents were found to accompany a violin in “concerts” at Luna Luna, an artist-designed funfair that thrilled the city.
On Nov. 20, a reduced version of that fair opened inside the Shed at Hudson Yards, as a spectacle now called “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy.” It runs through Jan. 5.
Unfortunately, its original “windy” concert is now present only on a monitor. (It’s not even shown in Smell-O-Vision.) Carnival rides decorated by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf can’t be ridden, not even touched. They come surrounded by stanchions, like precious sculptures in a museum.
Most of the “fun” has been bleached from this fair, so it feels worthy rather than rowdy, respectful instead of transgressive. Weekend admission for a family of four begins at $198, so thrill-seeking parents might save their pennies for “Wicked.”
Luna Luna reserves its greatest pleasures for visitors with more art-historical tastes. Crammed with informative wall texts, this event — or is it an exhibition? — documents, but barely recreates, a long-lost cultural experiment that “blurred the lines between art and play.” Thirty-seven years later, at the Shed, those lines stay largely well defined. Most everything stays ensconced on the “art” side. The whole thing feels weirdly peaceful, hardly the midway I expected.
Luna Luna’s origin story is fairly well known. The fair was conceived by André Heller, a 30-something Austrian artist, poet, musician and impresario who worked for about a decade to win the participation of more than 30 artists, some famous, most not.
In Hamburg, a few of them decorated traditional rides: Basquiat got German artisans to cover a diminutive Ferris wheel in his signature stick figures and cryptic phrases; Haring switched out the wooden horses of an old carousel for the tumbling figures in his paintings, rendered in 3-D; Scharf added colorful, East Village verve to a ride of whirling swings. Other artists conceived completely new attractions — if a concert of farts can be said to “attract” — or, as with the art-stars Salvador Dalí, Roy Lichtenstein and David Hockney, they designed or decorated the fair’s pavilions. (Photos from 1987 show a whole sprawl of structures and amusements, filling a big swath of land.)
After Luna Luna’s Hamburg run, plans for future editions fell apart. An American foundation ended up buying the fair’s remains, but then fought a 16-year legal battle to have the sale voided. After a court finally affirmed the purchase, in 2006, the rides and structures got mothballed in 44 shipping containers in a field in Texas. Enter the rapper Drake and his company DreamCrew, who came on board in 2021 as majority owners of Luna Luna, to see to its resurrection and restoration, apparently spending $100 million.
“Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” premiered last winter in Los Angeles, stripped down to attractions by only 15 of its Hamburg artists. (One, Joseph Beuys, didn’t make it to the Shed.) Its main attractions are the unridable rides by Basquiat, Haring and Scharf, as well as their famous elders’ three pavilions.
Those, you can go into, but they’re barely worth the time standing in line.
From Dalí we get the “Dalídom”: a facade decorated in one of his 1930s dreamscapes, fronting a little geodesic dome whose inside is covered in mirrors. According to the fair’s organizers, the effect is “meant to induce spatial hallucinations.” Without chemical help, it feels like … a geodesic dome covered in mirrors.
Lichtenstein merely covered a boxy structure with a pattern done in his classic stripes, as an insider’s jest about pop art and abstraction. Inside it, Heller installed a labyrinth of glass panes that functions pretty much as a classic hall of mirrors. Threading your way through it, you suffer about as much spatial confusion as navigating the sales floor at Ikea.
The Hockney is a tall cylinder, like a New York water tank, painted with abstracted trees. Inside, visitors are treated to music by Johann and Josef Strauss, the long-dead Viennese Waltzmeisters. During my visit, people spent seconds and seconds listening.
If Luna Luna scored a hit in Hamburg — 300,000 people are said to have attended — that can’t have been because it out-amused other amusement parks. Its very special amusement came, I think, from the way it confused what was clearly supposed to pass as art, given the art-world names attached to the project, with the attractions of a funfair. That confusion worked as its own hall of mirrors, jumbling visitors’ cultural expectations.
Marcel Duchamp, godfather of such confusions, talked about how a “reverse ready-made” might use a work of art (a Rembrandt painting) for an everyday function (as an ironing board). And that seems to have been the energy driving the rides and pavilions at the original Luna Luna: You aren’t supposed to touch a Basquiat, let alone ride it into the air, and there you were, being asked to do both.
At the Shed, however, hardly any of the attractions leave the saferoom of art for the wilds of daily life. The best of them is a little wedding chapel, conceived by Heller himself, that invites visitors to stage a “marriage” to anyone, or anything, that they’ve brought along. (Pets, however, are not allowed in the Shed.) In 1987, when marriage was only allowed between a man and a woman, the chapel came with a real transgressive and political punch. It has lost that now, but it still manages to feel real-world and artistic at the same time.
During its first run, in Hamburg, the fair was recorded in a lavish book, now reissued in English, whose photos capture a Felliniesque, literally fire-breathing energy that must have had a special import that vibrant German summer, after Ronald Reagan visited Berlin and made his famous call to “tear down this wall.” I could barely sense that kind of charge in the Shed.
There were traces of it, however, in a new commission from a Puerto Rican collaborative called Poncilí Creación, added since Los Angeles. The Poncilí performers came costumed as wacky creatures — a bright-blue elephant, almost life-size; a red blob that might be a virus come to life — running loose among Luna Luna’s paying guests. Encountered on a midway, these creatures would feel like good clean fun. Among the precious, off-limits rides at Luna Luna, on the grounds of deluxe Hudson Yards, they conjured up that infamous scene from the 1989 “Batman” where the Joker’s gang invades a museum.
When the Poncilí apparitions first came in view, a couple of nearby kids seemed both thrilled and terrified — just the way the best art, or a great ride, leaves me feeling. But few thrills and terrors survived the trip from Hamburg to the Shed.
Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy
Through Jan. 5 at the Shed, 545 West 30th Street, Manhattan, (646) 455-3494; theshed.org.
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