Kepha

Luna Luna, 3/30/24

Walking through these grand, majestic structures from world famous artists I could not help but feel out of place. This feeling persisted even as our laughter loosened our spirits. It’s almost like a constant queasiness radiating off of the brilliant displays, maintaining a foreign air that forcibly surrounds you in their historic aura. And as I departed the museum/theme park, this feeling lingered, as if the original mystique instilled into the theme park by its creators were twisted by the 30-year fermentation process of being locked up in a shipping container and brought out in a new light.

At first, I thought irony was at work. I mean, this vibrant collection of carousels and merry-go-rounds that once enthralled Hamberg children on open grass fields are now being enclosed in a stifling black box in the decaying 6th street of downtown LA. Outside of its entrance, vast stretches of blackened concrete structures, barbed-wire fences, and dilapidated cars were in full view, while the warehouse that contained the park’s fantastic structures is almost imperceptibly seated. The same urban decay that many of the street artists that created the amusement park sought to change through their works.

Indeed, the shocking contrast I experienced upon entering the museum contributed to the alienating feeling later on, but that’s not the whole story. Yes, the situation reminds one of a paradise lost in the labyrinth of urban decay, but there’s something more pernicious to the nature of the artworks hidden inside that speaks to my experienced queasiness, almost as if the artists themselves are part of their works, silently trying to speak to me and commenting on their society and their lost futures.

Thinking about it further, I was reminded of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Not only are we both flanêurs inspecting outdated modes of entertainment, but also we are both contemplating the social irretrievability of cultural and political situations of older times. The dreams and futures envisioned by the artists that created Luna Luna, as well as the socio-economic conditions that inspired their dreaming, are so unreachable from our age. I imagine that they might have looked upon the original Luna park in Coney Island with a similar lens as we do to their works — even though the amusement structures are the same, the context surrounding their creation are so vastly incomparable to the point where their expressions become intelligible. 

The park, built in the 1970s to 80s by European and American artists in schools of surrealism, pop art, art nouveau, represents a jumbled state of culture with a drastically different supporting economic base, a list of distinct influences, and divergent beliefs. Their influences cannot be more foreign to us American consumers now than ever before, ranging from Austrian psychoanalysis to Victorian art to Modernist music to AIDS-activist street art. The park’s design was obviously contradictory to the commercial influence of modern theme parks as well, with all the amusements simply placed on a grass field free of much commercial activity. Again, to modern American consumers, such designs are unfathomable, as art is so inextricably linked to business nowadays that a theme park with its amusements as artworks of their own sake seems illogical.

For the New York street art trio specifically — Keith Haring, Basquiat, and Scharf — the park originates from a time of stagflation and one of stagnant culture, where civil rights issues were put on hold while urban decay in the form of crack and AIDS epidemics spread through major cities. Although some might deem it a stretch to say that an amusement park demonstrates any of the economic structures or even the cultural status of the artists, I would argue that given the situation of their environment, protest is inherent in their art.

This is much true for Jim Whiting, whose mechanical theatre can hardly be interpreted as anything else than social commentary to the moral corruption of his society. The labels he puts on his characters are evident of this fact.

For all the artists involved, the amusement parks truly represent a fantasy, an innocent world free of strife and their struggles. The frivolous inventions are not coincidental — they mask the contradictions of a society more than 30 years in the past.

I think this is the part of Luna Luna that fascinates me the most. It’s not the humorous art pieces involved, although they are delightful. It’s the hidden protests drowned out by the silence of history, both metaphorically and literally locked up in a cell. Seeing them again after 30 years, trapped in a state of limbo, and then followed by a sudden transition from an active theme park into a cultural museum, elevated the experience from a simple gallery to a form of historical and cultural commentary not easily accessible in a place as commercially oriented as downtown LA. 

The Basquiat Ferris Wheel

One of my favorite art pieces. On the sides of the carriages are quirky messages including: “pornography”, coupled with Miles Davis’s Tutu.