Child’s Play

This past winter, empty rides dotted the void of The Shed, Hudson Yards’ protrusible, perennially unloved kunsthalle that slowly expands on giant wheels like a torpid, $475 million carnival attraction. A menacing Ferris wheel tattooed in Basquiat runes carried no one to vertiginous heights. Two carousels—a gyre of materialized Keith Haring squiggles and a whirl of fairy-tale chimeras by Austrian magic realist Arik Brauer—spun no one around and around. Queasy demons lorded over empty whizzing seats on Kenny Scharf’s technicolor chairoplane. Visitors could stand in the sylvan cylinder of David Hockney’s forest pavilion, which resembled a Rotor ride but was actually a motionless, albeit beguiling, can. Salvador Dalí’s mirrored geodesic dome occasioned a flashy celebration of the humble triangle, with ample opportunity for infinitely regressing triangular selfies. Mildly disappointed reviews reflected an expectation that Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, the remains of the 1987 avant-garde Luna Park envisioned by Viennese poet/pop star/actor/impresario André Heller, would be fun. With ticket prices north of MoMA and south of Six Flags, the cost implied fun. In fact, it was a memorial to fun. It was no amusement park, but Forgotten Fantasy’s melancholy unlife was its own poignant statement.

Four decades ago, Luna Luna gave apt form to Heller’s merry-go-round of a career: Blink and the multimedia Zelig was teutonizing Dylan’s “Forever Young” as “Für immer jung”; blink again and he was monologuing the final act of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s seven-hour Hitler: A Film from Germany; a third time and he was being documented by Werner Herzog organizing a daylong, two-thousand-person pageant at the City Palace of Udaipur. (Herzog, in his 2002 book Herzog on Herzog, referred to Heller as “the man who once staged what I think was the largest fireworks display in Europe.”) In 1985, Neue Revue, a semi-smutty West German general-interest tabloid, funded Heller’s fantasy of cultural democracy, marrying the cachet of the international art world—other bold names included Georg Baselitz, Erté, Rebecca Horn, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jean Tinguely, with posthumous contributions from Joseph Beuys and Sonia Delauney—to the wonderment and low comedy of an amusement park. Under Heller’s puckish superintendence, the project came to fruition in 1987 in Hamburg, the one place Luna Luna would ever be experienced as designed. Contemporary art, affixed to crude technologies of pleasure, gave some 250,000 fairgoers the cheap thrills of dizziness and disorientation: the convulsive beauty of surrealism, returned to the body.

After a prosperous summer in Hamburg, Luna Luna vanished. Its impresario had tried, unsuccessfully, to sell the fair to the city of Vienna, where it was to remain on permanent display. After plans for a potential European tour came to naught, he found a patron in the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation, the charitable trust of a long-departed copper magnate. For fifteen years, Luna Luna was ensnared in a litigious conflict between Heller and the foundation—which, buyers-remorseful after the City of San Diego rejected its attempt to regift the unwieldy park, tried to renege on its purchase. When in 2006, the US court of appeals saddled the foundation with carny custodianship, the evil stepparents in turn punished the cumbersome fair and all its dormant fairyland fauna—banished to forty-four scorpion-teeming storage containers in the Texas desert—with indefinite obscurity.

Luna Luna’s revival is the stuff of PR legend: In 2019, the sleeping beauty was awakened from its repose with a $100 million smacker from Prince Charming, per Heller, “one of the most undoubtedly extraordinary people of our time—Drake.” Having spent a portion of that princely sum on restoring Luna Luna, the rapper’s retinue at his multimedia production cum management company, DreamCrew, displayed its presentable—if not safely rideable—parts in an LA warehouse in late 2023, appending Forgotten Fantasy to its name. It came to The Shed in November 2024, rides roped off, accompanied by didactic displays.

At the back of the first gallery, a timeline stretched from 1885 to 1987. “Part mood board, part cultural history,” and perhaps geared toward precocious Shed-going children who love reading wall text, the chronology told us that in 1914, “World War I begins after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand”; that in 1920, “women win the right to vote in the United States”; and so on, the long twentieth century advancing toward its apex: Luna Luna. Nearer to the entrance was a more affecting presentation, of Sabina Sarnitz’s vivid photographs of artists, artisans, and technicians assembling their respective colossi and of the masses merrymaking atop them. (During the process of documenting the fair, Sarnitz and Heller became romantic partners; according to the gallery wall, Luna Luna was a “whirlwind love story.”) The images conveyed the project’s truly monumental scale—thirty bespoke pavilions conglomerated in a deranged Candyland across 200,000 square feet of a tree-enclosed Hamburg field—and both the gaiety and wistfulness this alfresco fantasy must have brought to the city ravaged by and rebuilt after World War II.

The fairground art experience took place at Moorweide Park, a site where less than a half century prior Hamburg’s Jews were clustered before being packed and shipped away for extermination. Hamburg itself was decimated by Operation Gomorrah—a Royal Air Force firebombing campaign that incinerated seven thousand children in its blazes. The grotesquerie of forced joy that makes funfairs into nightmares seems an appropriate match for a tranquil setting swarmed by echoes of unthinkable horror. With its preponderance of Central and Eastern European artists who grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, a handful of them (Heller, Brauer, Daniel Spoerri, Roland Topor, Friedensreich Hundertwasser) of Jewish heritage, Luna Luna was perhaps in part an act of thaumaturgical reclamation: It carried, in all its delights, the sad admission that such an act can only exist on the plane of fantasy.

This carnivalesque politics of repair found expression, at Luna Luna and in its twenty-first-century reboot, in buoyancy and bathroom humor. In the West German park, the lavatory exterior was adorned by Daniel Spoerri’s Crap Chancellery, a fecal parody of Albert Speer’s frigid Nazi-neoclassical Reichskanzlei (1939). Only its muscular, steaming-shit-bearing columns were on display in a narrow sideroom of The Shed, steamless and divorced from the rest of Spoerri’s mockery of the building.

If Germany’s sadistic past was something to shit on, elitism was something to fart on. Austrian caricaturist Manfred Deix’s Palace of the Winds was a Groszian fortress of flatulence whose peachy frontage featured, among other gas passers, a unibrowed jester, his full luna blasting a squall of stink into the nose of a homuncular conductor. All around, smaller farting figures swirled in sphincter-propelled flight. Mozart’s scatological humor—and its dissonance with the stuffy echelons of high culture in which his work was received—was referenced via signage hanging above performing fartists, who added their own indigestive instrumentation to classical works. As with Crap Chancellery, only a fragmentary panel of the Palace façade was shown in Forgotten Fantasy—another elaborate joke slivered into a frail signifier.

“If you need a symbol, it’s asshole,” Heller recalled Jean-Michel Basquiat telling him in heated defense of his own contribution to Luna Luna. Heller had offered the artist, by then juggling the personae of rebel graffitist, tempestuous neoexpressionist, and vexed brand, the park’s “most spectacular and largest object as sign of [his] respect: the Ferris wheel.” To Heller’s initial protestation, Basquiat planned to make the most prominent image on the most conspicuous attraction in the fair a baboon’s anus. (“Of course it was intelligent, striking, and provocative,” Heller later conceded in an interview.) And so the pink eye of Sauron loomed, the hub of a revolving cycle of free-associative symbols that turned the weathered, Depression-era contraption into an ominous motorized doodle pad. Was Basquiat lampooning Luna Luna itself? Amid the phantasmagoria twisting across the carnival’s Central European idyll, his ghostly white wheel rotated above a foundation stained with uncanny half thoughts and American racial hauntings: rooty teeth; a featureless saxophonist and Charlie Parker’s song title “Billie’s Bounce”; gondolas individually labeled “wooden balls,” “bleeding fingers,” and “pornography”; headless nudes under a rotisserie chicken; “Red Cross” and “Jim Crow,” copyrighted; the Monticello-engraved back of a nickel. All set to Miles Davis’s slinking “Tutu.” At The Shed, the towering attraction was nonetheless belittled by the vacant 115-foot-tall cathedral of the venue’s McCourt event hall. In a sanitizing gesture, its simian sphincter faced the back wall, but a fuzzy “Basquiat monkey plush” is still for sale on the Luna Luna website for sixty-five dollars.

To keen-eyed followers of art-world scandals, the scribbles aggrandized to arcane scripture on the Ferris wheel might look familiar: They also dot the “Basquiat” work Untitled (Frame)—in fact, not a Basquiat, but Heller’s own rearrangement of the artist’s Luna Luna sketches into a nail-studded “voodoo” broomstick border, exhibited as a Basquiat at the TEFAF art fair in 2017 and later sold, without a certificate of authentication, to a collector for €800,000 in 2018. Heller bought it back before the authorities became involved, and seemed to defend the fabrication as a murky continuation of his career-long fight against art-world self-seriousness. It was a “childish prank,” he told the press—a “private fairy tale.” Even so, it prompted a forgery investigation and his retreat from direct involvement in the Drake-sired respawn of his public fairy tale. Ironically, that counterfeit—with Basquiat’s own drawings, cut up, reassembled, repackaged, and sold decades later—was just as much a Basquiat as Forgotten Fantasy was Luna Luna.

If Basquiat’s ride was a disquieting creation, a childhood amusement scarred with mature themes, Keith Haring’s hand-painted carousel was comfortably at home in its family-friendly surroundings. The artist, distinguished in a Life magazine feature on this “most dizzying, dazzling art show on Earth” as a “graffiti-inspired self-promoter” making “frenetic doodles,” swapped horses for two-dimensional sculptural renderings of his wiggly line drawings and decorated the ride’s axis with endearing, juvenescent figures—including an avatar of himself sporting a Radiant Baby T-shirt. East Village wunderkinds soon to become mythologized, posthumously commodified-to-oblivion celebrities, Haring and Basquiat have been so exhaustively decontextualized and reproduced that seeing their imagery on any unconventional surface hardly feels surprising anymore. These machines in Forgotten Fantasy—elaborate spinning shrines to their respective legacies—were striking exceptions.

As I wandered The Shed, oversized butterflies puppeteered by plainclothes performers flapped and flopped the exhibition into halfhearted activation, a memory of a plein-air dream. Slowly, other, more otherworldly creatures—from Puerto Rican performance collective Poncili Creación—started to emerge and interact with viewers: a purple pachyderm, a toothy blobfish, an enthusiastic, bubble-butted gherkin. Fearing confrontation with the caked-up cuke, I made my way upstairs to the “Butterfly Bar,” which offered a panoramic overview of the fair’s remnants. Toward the end of the cycle (entry was timed), the Poncili creatures got the zoomies, the horns of Philip Glass’s “In the Upper Room: Dance IX” swelled, and the verboten rides spun feverishly, lights dancing around them. Most of their creators have died. Something knowing, self-reflexively uncanny, and truly, gorgeously elegiac happened here, as Glass’s composition rose in recursive climax against machines, crafted to shake and energize bodies, puttering away in their absence.

Forgotten Fantasy’s run at The Shed was intended to be the second stop on a global tour. I hope this sleeping beauty—or exquisite corpse—does indeed tour the world; that the spectacular, unruly pavilions created by less internationally known artists (Heller’s own inflatable polychromatic porcupine café, Topor’s pervy Felliniscapes set to the song of whales fucking, Wolfgang Herzig’s neo–Neue Sachlichkeit shooting gallery, August Walla’s giddy painted circus wagon, Jim Whiting’s beaten-up theater of animatronic trash, among so many) are deservingly returned to public recognition. It’s hard to imagine these attractions will ever be displayed outdoors again; rather, they’ll likely continue their eternal slumber embalmed in the neoliberal mausoleums of the avant-garde, epitaphed by distanced, deferential commemoration. Perhaps that would only augment their lyricism, their accumulation of sorrows.

Back in 1987, Sarnitz’s photos were published in a book called Luna Luna. (It was reprinted by Phaidon in 2023, in anticipation of Forgotten Fantasy’s LA debut.) In her essay in its pages, Viennese writer Hilde Spiel, in a passage staggeringly prophetic of the colonial eschatology of today’s billionaire space race, lamented, “Imagination has entered the service of technologists and their sidekick—science fiction. The metaphorical flights of fancy of the poet searching for new paradises in space have given way to real-life excursions into the exosphere for the purpose of setting up cosmic experimental stations to prepare for the end of the world.”

If Luna Luna, as Spiel wrote, was a frolicsome celebration of life on earth, it also appears, in hindsight, and through no fault of its own, as a harbinger of one of the millennium’s most depressing art trends: “the experiential”—the ingestion of popular and high art by prestige pseudopopulism, the premiumization of playfulness and awe on the correct assumption that these things have been made increasingly scarce in public life. Forgotten Fantasy, now closed at The Shed and annexed again to memory until it reemerges in another such space, bore a bracingly honest relationship to 1987’s Luna Luna in this regard. Heller wanted the fair to tell “a story void of nostalgic sentimentality,” a story not about “the supposed beauty of the former times,” but “what is entirely unglorified in the here and now.” Yet nostalgia was what Forgotten Fantasy inescapably evoked in its eulogy to an experimental playscape. If Heller’s 1987 Luna Luna channeled the evils of the past into the realm of play, Forgotten Fantasy enshrined play as a relic of the past. In a present so hopeless, in a city so purchased, I’m reminded of a work featured in the Luna Luna book that didn’t make its way into the exhibition: a text written by Hans Magnus Enzensberger for a “theater painting” by Heller. Within a mesmeric Erté stage set, an actress’s head protrudes from a face-in-hole cutout of a black spider. Said the arachnid, who’s just bitten her prey: