by Anne Gabriel
I feel like I’ll be drawn and quartered if I mention aloud what I think a lot of others are thinking—I didn’t much like Luna Luna. I am philistine, I know.
Luna Luna, a very well-funded temporary exhibition housed in a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, is a re-staging of an amusement park from 1980s Germany, whose rides and attractions were either conceived of fully or simply painted on by famous artists of the day including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dali, Keith Haring, David Hockney, and others. The rides and attractions were placed into storage containers in the late 1980s and squirreled away until recently found and then purchased by Drake. Yup, the singer. Drake decided to invest his efforts and money into refurbishing the attractions and then provide them for public consumption along with the requisite gift store.
Sounds amazing, right?!
Yes, BUT, and here’s the big but… you can’t actually ride on or interact with most of the attractions. The mighty Drake apparently didn’t have enough money to hire some carny mechanics. The amusement park is presented as a strange surreal museum-style exhibition where the attractions and the cavernous space between them are filled with photographs and an encyclopedic plethora of informational placards that explicate with each attraction. They do not make compelling reading. It’s a no-touch museum-style exhibition offered up as a destination attraction.
When I think of a destination attraction, I’m expecting fun and I’m expecting to interact with most of what I’m paying to see. Instead, this felt like a visit to my grandfather’s armchair as he recounts his prior glories and makes me sit through countless old photo albums. Maybe I’m being too harsh. There seemed to be people there who thought this was fun and I rather did like seeing Basqiuat’s painted ferris wheel even if I was mad I couldn’t ride it and look down on them.
The space is large and the organizers gamely attempted to fill the space with information and imagery but it is, nonetheless, a space too large for the exhibition that fills it.The few attractions that one could actually go in, after paying another premium, include a mirror room conceived of by Salvador Dali showcasing his take on image repetition bounced among triangular mirrors housed in a dome-like structure that wasn’t any different than any other house of mirrors and a cylindrical room housed within a larger cylindrical room conceived of by David Hockney which was as interesting as walking into an empty room and then walking out if it, albeit with the requisite booties on. Oh the inside had a pattern painted in it in his palette. To reiterate: you have to pay extra for that.
Had the exhibition been at an actual museum like LACMA or MOCA, I might have liked it more because in going I would have expected NOT to be able to touch the museum exhibits, plus I could’ve seen other stuff. However, when presented as a not-to-be-missed “attraction,” I just felt mad I couldn’t ride the carousel.
Image: Staff