Interview: How PS122 Is Going Global
by Alexis ClementsPage 5 of 6
And then, as you pointed out earlier, American companies are expensive for Europeans to take on.
With American companies the calculation is, how do we subsidize our general operations through touring because US foundations have gone away from covering operating expenses.
It seems clear that you've been thinking about this idea of bringing work abroad and all the details of how to make that possible for a long time, presumably since you started work at PS122.
As we've been rolling out PS122 Global, I've been booking flights for artists, I'm booking the hotels. We don't have the resources to do it another way. I mean we don't have the resources to do it full stop. The point I'm making in saying that is at a certain point I'm so tired of waiting and hoping that the resources will appear that I'm just gonna do it, and fuck it, you know, I'm sick of waiting, let's get it done. If I had the staff and the funding to support this properly, we could have twelve tours a year going out with four companies in each tour, so forty-eight tour dates. I could have that tomorrow and it would cost $100,000.
Why is this project important to PS122, as an organization?
I think when we talk about business models today, whether it's artists or venues or institutions or whatever, we need to be multi-dimensional, we need to be transmedia—a term I learned today—we need to be trans-revenue, let's say. We need to figure out how we earn. So that's box office, that's renting the theater, that's touring, that's sponsorship, that's galas. We need to find new ways of sourcing contributed, unearned revenue, because the grants from foundations are diminishing incredibly, individuals are where we're all going now and that's working well for us now, but we need to be very diverse and very nimble, and we need to be strategic in filling niches and creating niches that we can fill.
In that regard, some of PS122's new partnerships, with the New Museum, and Performa, for example, seem to be part of that impulse to diversify, to build new platforms.
Yeah, we share the costs together, we work together to promote it. And not just those partners. There's also Crossing the Line, Under the Radar, there's On the Boards in Seattle, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh...
So that idea of building a brand is really serious for you.
We are, at the moment, a building.
There's decades of history there though.
But that's what we are, right now, we're a building. We're full of history and ghosts and stories and bodily fluids. We are bricks and mortar. But actually what we need to be is a kind of state of mind and an attitude to creativity and an attitude to audience and an attitude to risk and experimentation that is exciting and fresh.
Related Locations
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Performance Space 122 (P.S. 122)
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