For more creative projects, check out jechadwick.com I spent Saturday afternoon exploring a 60,000-square-foot L.A. warehouse trying to make sense of Luna Luna, perhaps the greatest art story ever told. It spans six decades and features Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Miles Davis, Philip Glass, and a $100m investment led by the Canadian rapper, Drake. The story begins in cold-war Vienna and Hamburg against a backdrop of post-war Holocaust trauma. If it were a painting, it would feature dark, European surrealist roots, neon-colored graffiti of New York’s pop-art explosion, and a long sandy exile in the Texas desert in 44 metal container boxes. It reminds us that art does not need to be confined to individual frames on well-lit gallery walls in capital cities, or the dark vaults of billionaires. Art also lives. Outside the constraints of the boxes created by their industry, artists can collaborate playfully and create physical spaces for crowds to enjoy together for reasons other than money. It leaves us wanting more. Luna Luna is a forgotten fantasy, and perhaps the greatest story that art has ever told, which I will explore here in three action-filled acts. Act I, Hamburg 1987: “The most dizzying, dazzling art show on Earth” Over a seven-week run in Hamburg in the summer of 1987, almost 300,000 visitors came to enjoy a colorful, surreal amusement park built by the eccentric Austrian maverick André Heller and 32 of the world’s most talented artists. The mostly German families rode in a large, white Ferris wheel designed by Jean-Michel Basquiat, rotating to Miles Davis’s haunting track ‘Tutu.’ They explored the mirrored Dalídom of Salvador Dalí and wandered through a glass maze designed by Roy Lichtenstein, to a soundtrack composed by Philip Glass. They could step inside David Hockney’s ‘Enchanted Tree’ structure, or whizz around on Keith Haring’s painted carousel or Kenny Scharf’s chair swing ride. It was a big hit. At the time, Life magazine called it “The most dizzying, dazzling art show on Earth”, and arguably that still stands, if only because it somehow fused pop art and surrealism with abstraction, art brut, Dada, nouveau realism, and Viennese Actionism. Heller managed to unite established post-war artists like Dali, Hockney, and Lichtenstein, with emerging stars like Haring, Basquiat, and Scharf. Even Andy Warhol, who didn’t participate and died a few months before the show, was memorialized with a booth where visitors could get their 15-minutes-of-fame snaps with cut-outs of Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. It was joyful. From the 30-minute documentary video shown on Saturday, we get a feel for the true magic of the 1987 live carnival. Kids squeal with delight and roam wild, as couples cuddle affectionately and enjoy a mock wedding at Heller’s surreal wedding chapel, surrounded by jugglers, magicians, stilt-walkers, and costumed performers. To remind us that this is 1980’s Europe (and definitely not 2024 California) we can watch the stunned and sniggering audience of Manfred Deix’s ‘Palace of the Winds’, a live performance of amplified bare-cheeked farting, accompanied by a concert violinist. (Apparently, there was a tradition of public ‘flatulists’ in Europe earlier in the century.) And then it ended. After one summer of fun, Luna Luna was packed up into containers, ready to be shipped to the next destination. As they meticulously packed and labeled everything for the next event, nobody dreamed it would be forgotten for almost forty years. But who was Heller, how did he come up with such a colossal idea, and how did he pull it off? Franz André Heller was born in 1947 in Vienna into a wealthy Jewish family of sweets manufacturers, Gustav & Wilhelm Heller. In 1964 he began a prolific and eclectic creative career as a German-language artist, author, poet, singer, songwriter, and actor. Sixty years on, he’s still going. The idea for Luna Luna was inspired by his childhood memories of the Prater amusement park in Vienna, and a strong desire to bring the progressive, avant-garde art he was so passionate about into the lives of everyday people who wouldn’t normally visit galleries and museums. In short, he wanted to bring artists together, and then bring their art to the masses. But it took him a decade to pull it off. His first meeting with an artist was in Paris in 1976 with Sonia Delaunay, the Ukrainian-born artist who co-founded the Simultané movement and designed the Luna Luna entrance archway, finished posthumously in 1979. Heller persisted with his vision. After turning down funding from McDonald’s, in 1985, he closed a grant for $350,000 from a German magazine and started traveling to visit the world’s most talented artists. With a budget of only $10,000 each, he had to inspire them into acceptance. In his own words, this was the pitch: "Listen, you are constantly getting the greatest commissions. Everyone wants your paintings or sculptures, but I am inviting you to take a trip back to your own childhood. You can design your very own amusement park, just as you think would be right today, and really, without exception, everyone answered by saying, sure, that's a nice, pleasant challenge." Eventually, the ball got rolling and the artists themselves started making introductions. Warhol apparently sent Heller to meet Basquiat, Lichtenstein introduced Hockney, and Haring brought him to meet Kenny Scharf. Haring and Scharf relocated to Austria to build their attractions by hand, and the scale of their output is remarkable: apart from the hand-painted carousel I counted eight enormous bus-sized original Haring banners. In the documentary we see Kenny Scharf building six large goofy sculptures and hand-painting over 100 colorful panels for his chair swing. Most of the American artists, however, worked remotely with Heller’s team, who provided the resources they needed. For instance, Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, and the Dalídom were built by Viennese opera and theater workers from vintage carnival attractions. It was the only time Basquiat ever allowed one of his works to be painted remotely, and the 1933 white wooden wheel is covered with dozens of his slogans and sketches, topped with a giant monkey’s butt at the rear! Recently, Basquiat’s sisters have shared that their brother loved visiting Coney Island as a kid, and we feel he would have approved. On Saturday I wasn’t aware how old the original attractions were, and I couldn’t understand why the attendant warned me that it was ‘probably over a hundred years old’ when I stepped nervously into Lichtenstein’s glass and mirror maze. I had never walked into a piece of pop art history before, and it gave me goosebumps to know that it had a pre-war history all of its own. Act II, Texas: Forty years in the desert After such a successful debut in Hamburg, Heller understandably thought he had options. Initially, it looked like Vienna's city council would buy the park for permanent display, but this fell through. At one point, it was rumored to be heading to the Netherlands, and a US tour was being explored. A wider European tour also went nowhere, and the storage fees started to mount up, sending Heller into debt. He ran out of runway. Finally, he agreed to sell Luna Luna for around $6 million to a Delaware-based philanthropic group, the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation. They intended to recreate it in San Diego’s Balboa Park (still a great location!) and an LA Times article in 1991 suggested it was a done deal: “What seemed impossible has become all but definite: A local arts venture has won the enthusiastic support of both arts professionals and city officials.” But again, the relaunch fell through due to a dispute about charging commission, and various rights concerns, and the ownership went into decades of litigation. As the legal issues dragged on, the 44 containers were shipped to rural Texas where they sat baking by the side of a road, accompanied by rattlesnakes, armadillos, and scorpions. Meanwhile, the art world moved on and forgot all about Luna Luna. Perhaps because it took place in Germany and before the internet and smartphones, it didn’t take long for the memories to disappear. In fact, I personally spent time in a commune in Hamburg just a couple of years afterward, and nobody ever mentioned it. Why was Luna Luna so easily forgotten? Of course, great art often goes missing and has to be rediscovered, but this was so unique and contemporary, and on such a large, public scale, that the collective amnesia feels strange. Perhaps because it deliberately sought to disrupt the art industry’s collective control of value and meaning through its arteries of auctions, museums, and galleries? Was Heller’s ambition a threat to the establishment: to bring the artists together, and then art to the masses? Meanwhile in England in 2015 Banksy, another artist operating outside the establishment, managed to pull off a darker sort of bizarro Luna Luna “bemusement park”, called Dismaland. Banksy managed to persuade 58 artists to contribute, including Jenny Holzer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Gillette, and Jimmy Cauty, and described it as a "family theme park unsuitable for children." Over a five-week run, it attracted a respectable 150,000 visitors, but the visitors weren’t able to interact with the art and it didn’t delight the critics. (Arguably Weston-super-Mare, the seaside town he chose for his dystopian vision, already does a good job at evoking the apocalypse even without the input of 58 visiting artists.) During these years, there were plenty of potential wealthy suitors for Luna Luna, but few were comfortable committing without a full inspection. The sellers insisted that the 44 containers must be purchased as-is, sight unseen, which understandably put buyers off. Apparently, one buyer was permitted
