Luna Luna, in Los Angeles, is a park with works by Basquiat – 04/08/2024 – Tourism

Imagine climbing a Ferris wheel created by Jean-Michel Basquiat to the sound of Miles Davis, riding a carousel painted by Keith Haring, and entering a hall of mirrors designed by Salvador Dalí.

An arts amusement park, which also had attractions by David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and 30 other artists, actually took place in the German city of Hamburg in 1987, but was lost in history in a rollercoaster of litigation lasting more than 30 years.

Instead of traveling around the world, the work on the Luna Luna park ended up disassembled into dozens of containers and forgotten in a warehouse in the interior of Texas. Until in January 2022, a group of investors decided to pay millions of dollars to see what was inside.

The content surprised the group, which includes rapper Drake and his company DreamCrew. Works by some of the most famous artists of the 20th century were there in relatively good condition, as well as various promotional products, such as posters, t-shirts and plastic bags.

“Each attraction took a small army to assemble,” curatorial director Lumi Tan, part of the team that brought Luna Luna back, told the report. “We have an incredible team responsible not only for handling the jobs, but also for the installation. They spent over a year taking care of them, rebuilding them one by one, piece by piece, as soon as they came out of the containers.”

But what was a toy in the German open-air park has now become an object of art in a closed warehouse in Los Angeles.

Luna Luna is open until May 12 at Ace Mission Studios, next to the new Sixth Street overpass in Boyle Heights. Afterwards, he travels around the country, in cities that will be announced in the coming months. Tickets range from US$38 to US$85 (R$175 and R$426), and those 1987 t-shirts are also on sale, with designs by Lichtenstein and Haring (between US$250 and US$500).

“Not only is it the world’s first artistic amusement park, but it is also the only one. Luna Luna evokes that old idea of ​​making art accessible,” said Tan. “The ambitions of today’s artists extend beyond traditional museum spaces; this is the perfect time to share this historic event and inspire a new generation.”

“As these works were created to be interactive, our conservation approach was to reflect their use by nearly 300,000 visitors in 1987, rather than restoring them as they were before the park opened.”

Although it is frustrating not being able to ride the Ferris wheel and carousel, it is understandable as safety standards have evolved a lot since the 1980s, not to mention the astronomical values ​​of the works of the artists involved.

Still, the exhibition is a journey through time. The “toys” still work and are turned on several times a day. Artists walk around the exhibition in costume, trying to recreate the circus atmosphere of the original park. And there is ample photographic and video footage to see children and adults having fun at the attractions on a sunny day in 1987.

André Heller, a 1970s pop star from Austria, was the inventor of Luna Luna, but lost the rights to the park after a series of litigation, debts and scandals while trying to get the show on the road.

Heller says the name comes from the small amusement parks of the time called “luna.” With a US$350,000 sponsorship from a German magazine, he traveled the world to convince his favorite artists. That’s how he arrived at Basquiat, presented by Andy Warhol.

Basquiat’s Ferris wheel is decorated with a baboon’s butt. The chairs are white and feature recurring themes from his works, such as violence and racism — written on one panel is “Jim Crow”, a reference to racial segregation laws in the USA. He only agreed to participate in the park when he got permission to have a Miles Davis song, “Tutu”.

Another famous musician at Luna Luna is Philip Glass, who provided a composition for Lichtenstein’s work, an immersive box with a dimly lit, mirrored maze through which visitors could get lost.

Now it is only possible to see Lichtenstein’s paintings on the outside of the box and imagine the mess of the maze to the sound of Glass.

But Dalí’s hall of mirrors, called “Dalídom”, is open to anyone who pays the most expensive ticket. The experience is not that surreal and is reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s immersive installations. A photographer is on hand to record the moment.

The premium ticket also includes entry to Hockney’s attraction, a wooden pavilion titled “Enchanted Tree,” inspired by the set he made for a Stravinsky opera in New York in 1981.

There are more curious works by lesser-known artists, although of dubious taste, such as “Palácio dos Ventos”, formulated by Heller himself and Walter Navratil.

It is a theater whose facade was designed by Austrian cartoonist Manfred Deix. You have to look closely to realize that the painted characters are, you see, passing gas. Already on stage, artists fart into microphones accompanying a man on the violin. But don’t worry, none of that happens live anymore. They are just video recordings of a very crazy time that will never come back.