The Brooklyn Rail

In January 1966, critic Ruth Langdon Inglis wrote an article for Art in America about the design for a new mixed-use project on the east side of London. “The Fun Palace,” designed by Cedric Price, was to be a new kind of cultural center—a constantly changing matrix of moving walls, platforms, and floors that could be altered by visitors. Envisioned as working-class families with new amounts of free-time, the patrons of the Fun Palace were imagined as active participants in the creation of culture, instead of mindless observers of historically preserved artifacts.

The Fun Palace, though never built, created a prototype for future cultural centers. In 2015, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro broke ground on The Shed, a 200,000-square-foot museum and performance space in downtown New York. A nod to the kinetic architecture of Cedric Price, DS+R’s design for the Shed includes a telescoping outer shell that glides on rails to embrace the adjacent plaza.

In 2024, the Shed was selected to host the traveling exhibition, Luna Luna: A Forgotten Fantasy—a reconstruction of André Heller’s 1987 amusement park. Heller’s vision for an artist-designed amusement park was overlooked for ten years, before securing funding by gossip magazine, Neue Revue, in 1985. Erected in an open-air field in Hamburg, Germany, Luna Luna included contributions from Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others.

The park ran from June 4 to August 31, 1987. Despite attempts to re-exhibit the work, Luna Luna was found in breach of contract, and in 2006 was packed into forty-four shipping containers in a field in West Texas. In 2022, Canadian rapper Drake and his entertainment firm DreamCrew contributed 100 million dollars to revive the park as part of a new exhibition. Luna Luna: A Forgotten Fantasy first opened in Los Angeles in December 2023 before moving to New York. It is now on view at the Shed until March 16, 2025.

The experience of Luna Luna begins outside the museum, in the spectacle of advertising across computer screens, billboards, and Instagram posts. The website, designed by graphic design studio Something Special, uses full-bleed video, scrolling text, and bold font, to evoke the show’s pageantry. In these videos, visitors can be seen holding up their phones to the rides on view, a meta microcosm of how Luna Luna is ultimately experienced—looking at a screen to a video, through a screen, to the art.

Once inside, viewers are left to forge their own path. Closest to the entry is one of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Perfect/Imperfect” paintings, stretched over André Heller’s glass maze. The maze is guarded by two docents, who ask visitors to step on a dust-repelling sticky pad before entering. Inside the maze, the expanse of digital space fades away, cementing into a solo physical procession. An original score by Philip Glass fills the labyrinth, as the visitor is forcefully brought into their present body.

Having gone through this initiation, the show looks different. We advance to Keith Haring’s carousel and painted gates—a strange experience for a generation of viewers who have largely known Haring’s work as graphic icons to be shared and viewed digitally. What results is a reverse uncanniness, a shock to the system realizing that Haring’s figures are not two inch graphic icons, but full scale bodies, the same as our own. A second initiation: the visitor is required to reconcile with physical form.

After this point, the magic of the show sets in. An ethereal soundtrack plays through the space, created by Music Director Mattis With and Show Director Felix Barrett, with original compositions by Daniel Wohl. Arguably the most successful element of the exhibition, the soundtrack becomes the main actor, guiding visitors towards and away from artifacts, replacing the traditional interventions of walls, ramps, and platforms.

Inside McCourt hall, the rides and pavilions stand isolated, roped off by stanchions. Despite the few exciting moments of heightened senses, there is no denying the decontextualization of the work. Unlike Price’s Fun Palace, user participation is discouraged, apart from a few pavilions. The initial intention for visitors to climb, scale, and swing from Basquiat and Scharf’s rides is eliminated. At first, this feels like a loss—the rides are frozen in space as preserved artifacts, swarmed by tourists receiving the work from behind phone screens.

The strength of the show, however, lies in its multiplicity and transmutation across media. Where Cedric Price intended his visitors to be generative agents in the production of art, so are the visitors of Luna Luna. Through their photographing, videoing, and recirculating of the work, the visitors, alongside the show’s graphic designers, composers, and docents, expand the boundary between art and culture. It is not André Heller’s original Luna Luna on view, but a new, twisted, regurgitated byproduct of our digital age, re-exhibited in the galleries of Instagram, websites, and online shops. The Shed therefore becomes our very own Fun Palace, urging us to become active agents in the production of pop art through digital reproduction.