Max Hooper Schneider Envisions A “World Without End” At MOCA’s Annual Gala

The L.A.-based artist’s immersive museum takeover, including a luminous meteor crater, drew artists, patrons, filmmakers, and a spectrum of creatives

Words by ELIZABETH VARNELL

Carolyn Clark Powers, Maria Seferian, Max Hooper Schneider, Johanna Burton, Terri Smooke, Karyn Kohl.

Amid a vivid, fantastical environment set with Max Hooper Schneider’s hybrid creatures and synthetic plants, the Museum of Contemporary Art held its annual gala at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood on Saturday, April 13. The evening fundraiser, presented by Bulgari, brought out a host of artists, patrons, and creatives who joined museum director Johanna Burton and board members Carolyn Clark Powers and Maria Seferian alongside gala co-chairs Terri Smooke and Karyn Kohl to celebrate the artist-founded institution. Hooper Schneider’s piles of detritus — brightly colored trash and found objects from the present, reimagined as they might coalesce in the future — surrounded the evening’s stage near tables where Barbara Kruger, Catherine Opie, Kenny Scharf, Ava DuVernay, Kim Gordon, Jonas Wood, Henry Taylor, Paul McCarthy, Sterling Ruby, Charles Gains, Shepard Fairey, Liz Glynn, Analia Saban, Ann Philbin, Miranda July, Doug Aitken, Mary Weatherford, Alexandra Grant and Keanu Reeves, David Alan Grier, Michael Chow, Paul Pfeiffer, and Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio were seated.

Guests got a look at Pfeiffer’s exploration of visual pop culture spectacles — particularly sporting events — through videos, sound, sculpture, photography and even a massive one-million-seat stadium complex on view in the museum’s current survey, Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom. Also installed was MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, the L.A. artist’s first museum show, which includes three large-scale sculptures commissioned for the cavernous Geffen Contemporary space. Hooper Schneider’s site-specific World Without End installation, mounted for the gala, included Dendrite Bonsai plantlike sculptures and smaller circular Tide Piepools filled with objects suspended in a clear resin (evoking imaginative pie fillings) that were offered for sale to benefit the museum.

Annie Clark, the musician who records as St. Vincent, took to the Hooper Schneider–designed stage to perform tracks from her bold new album, All Born Screaming and a cover of Portishead’s “Glory Box.” Soon she was climbing atop tables, microphone in hand, bringing her music directly to her on-their-feet audience. Next, guests made their way outside to Hooper Schneider’s glowing phosphorescent courtyard crater for Kilo Kish and Kitty Ka$h’s DJ sets. Referencing the outdoor scene’s bowl-shaped cavity, Seferian said, “It’s easy to think of the world without end as dystopic, post-apocalyptic, an indictment of capitalism or the grand finale to conspicuous consumption, but Max’s presentation asks us to look beyond the maudlin and instead consider the miraculous. This is not the end of the world but a world without end, matter does not have a final state, it just changes form. Boundaries break down in their materiality. A meteorite becomes a crater, becomes a smoldering cauldron, becomes a wishing well.” moca.org.