Flashback to last summer, I was working in a small bouji shop back home in Dorset. It was a slow day at work, and I was scrolling through Google when I came across the most incredible find. Embedded unceremoniously in some hyperlink, this half-dismantled idea lay under a dusty star-lit veil, waiting to be revealed.
Since starting at The Ruskin School of Art in 2020, I have become fascinated by the popular arts, specifically the weird and whimsical, but sometimes dangerous, world of the fairground. In search of such freakery, I was trawling through articles and essays when I came across the experimental fairground art exhibition Luna Luna, held in 1987 for one summer only. I’d scored a bullseye and won the biggest teddy in the fair. Not only did this event reimagine what a fairground could be, but the curator André Heller had convinced thirty-two of the world’s leading artists of the 20th century to join him: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sonia Delaunay, David Hockney, Philip Glass, Roy Lichtenstein, and Keith Haring amongst others.
What on earth was happening, I asked myself. I remember my dad going on about Banksy’s 2015 Dismaland, a theme park in dreary Weston-super-Mare, made up of performances, sculptures and installations mocking the likes of Disneyland. Banksy, at the time, described it as “a theme park unsuitable for children”. I thought Dismaland was the only art theme park of its kind to have ever existed, and yet here I was reading about the epic undertaking of art spectacle that is Luna Luna, which had taken place on the outskirts of Hamburg, Germany, thirty years earlier.
For the next six months, I was hooked on this exhibition, confused by its elusiveness and enchanted by its wonder-filled story. This experimental project allowed artists to make a real, working, travelling fairground of art that the public could interact with. I learnt that the event was a heady mix of stimulation and consumption, laced with a nostalgic memory of the fairground. Described by Heller as a “Gesamtkunstwerk”, or “total work of art”, in his book about Luna Luna (of the same name and reissued by Phaidon Press earlier this year), it encompassed sculpture, painting, performance, music, and immersive installations. Heller’s commission was framed as an opportunity for the artist to travel back in time, to their younger selves, before the cynicism of adulthood had emerged, in an effort to see their work anew within the context of the fairground.
Although arguably a project tailormade for the late 1980s with its hedonistic rave culture, I saw it as something completely unique – an art world Greatest Hits Album: Now That’s What I Call Art ‘87. I chuckled as I saw in archive photographs the recurring image of a nun, as well as a couple in matching flamingo costumes running around the park. What a laugh! How surreal?
Never before had I seen such diverse work outside of a formal gallery. Take Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, for example, pasted with feverishly quick sketches and words. His design points towards the absurdity of art making as spectacle and disrupts the nostalgic aura of the fairground with a violent vision of childhood, fixing words like “Pornography,” “Bleeding Fingers,” “Wooden Balls” and “Crushed,” to the frame of the Ferris wheel. Next to this attraction is Hockney’s geometric Forest Pavilion, a structure reminiscent of an inverted cyclorama, made up of rectangular portrait panels, with trees painted in primary colours and solid abstract forms. Hockney’s creation is evocative of the set design he became known for in the 1980s with his work for The Met in New York and at Glyndebourne in the UK. In the same way that a play or musical runs for a limited period, with sets being constantly renovated and reshaped from one production to the next, the fairground also takes on this temporary, ever-shifting nature. With the opening of the park, there is an activation of its stage, its actors being both the audience and the attractions; improvised chaos becomes the fairground script.
This is all well and good for an exhibition that took place in 1987, but what can it possibly tell us about contemporary art today?
I believe that there is now, more than ever, the need for an emotionally driven experience of art. Take Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms at Tate Modern, or the Van Gogh Alive exhibition at Kensington Gardens, both of which have been overwhelmingly popular. The public love the fairground; an experience which is both dizzying and transgressive. Luna Luna offered this immersive experience, whilst still being undeniably concerned with the proposal of the artist – their individual view of the world through the rose-tinted spectacles of fairground accessibility and excess.
As a mode of seeing art, the fairground embraces chaos and cacophony, taking colours, sounds, words and visuals from everywhere and anywhere. It is not simply the mannered chronological practice of exhibition or museum curation for Luna Luna, as each of the spectacles inside the fairground represented wildly different 20th-century artists. Instead of compartmentalization or containment of works from separate periods, places, styles or mediums, Luna Luna embraced the awkwardness and commotion of a pick-and-mix type approach. Rides and attractions sat alongside each other as an ensemble. We see this in the placing of Austrian Illustrator Günter Brus’ Universe of Crayons Pavilion, a structure housing paintings of imaginary half-human, half-crayon figures, next to American Pop artist Keith Haring’s narrative wall pieces depicting dancing figures in his signature shorthand drawing style. Each distinct voice works within this strange, layered disharmony.
When I approached people who might know about it, artists or otherwise, no one could confirm the existence of the Luna Luna fairground. This led me to disbelieve the event ever having existed: the incomplete midnight run cemented a perfect ‘15 minutes’ of fame, conveniently snuffed out and its artists disbanded.
Until one morning in January 2023.
Typing Luna Luna into Google suddenly, inexplicably and miraculously, brought up a heap of different internet pages – from articles to news reports, and even a website.
With a 100 million dollar investment by the Canadian rap artist, singer and songwriter Drake, Luna Luna announced its return. Shipping containers housing all the artworks, as well as the odd rattlesnake, were rediscovered in Texas and brought to Los Angeles, where they are currently under restoration. The aim is that these spectacles will perform once again, alongside newly commissioned artworks and performances that will attempt to capture the spirit of ’87 for the contemporary moment.
The more I searched, the more information I found. Drake announced on his Instagram page in November 2022 that this project had been in production for a while. I contacted the new curator, Alessandra Gómez, to share both my excitement and disbelief for the revival and, perhaps cheekily, ask how Luna Luna will operate today. The importance of arts accessibility was at the forefront of our conversation, with a necessary move to push the relationship between art and audience beyond the walls of the institution. This comes as a result of the post-pandemic moment we found ourselves in, with a popular appetite for a new kind of physical art experience. The original fairground exhibition offered the blueprint of a space for art to co-exist and continually be experienced not only on tour from state to state, but between continents. This new Luna Luna differentiates itself from its former in not only its publicity — or hype — but also in the opportunity the artworks have to gain exposure to a different, more diverse, audience than the predominantly white middle-class one evident in the original photographs from 1987.
This new iteration takes the potential of the fairground as a site for art to new levels and aims to hit Los Angeles on an undisclosed date in the near future, with many new commissions alongside the original rides and attractions. The new artist collaborators are unnamed as yet, adding to the thrill of anticipation.
Heller, the artist and impresario of Luna Luna, stated his inspiration was taken from the original Coney Island Luna Park established in 1903. A fairground for the ages, Coney Island is known for its spectacle, and Luna Park was no exception. The medium of the fairground offers up popular trends, people, places, characters, stories, and subjects, all pulled from the public’s psyche which makes for what I believe to be the perfect environment to view art, like a dream or moment of suspended belief.
The role of the artist has always been to look at the world and reflect their vision of it back to us, the audience. This has very often taken on spectacular forms, such as Tracey Emin’s wildly honest My Bed or Damian Hirst’s conceptual installations: cross-sectioned cows, sheep and sharks in formaldehyde cases. However, Luna Luna engages with spectacle directly, creating rides and attractions out of art – or, as I like to think, creating art out of rides and attractions. Beyond its carnival exterior, accessibility lies at the heart of this 21st-century Luna Luna. As Gómez described it to me, this new era represents a “return to the joy of a different type of engagement with art that transcends the museum”.