Art Under Austerity: A journalist returns to Spain and maps responses to the economic crisis and its historical points
Art Under Austerity by Lorna Scott Fox - Guernica / a Magazine of Art & Politics
What’s Spanish about the economic crisis in Spain? The shocks experienced by Ireland, Greece, and Portugal produce similar images on the news. Angry, bewildered people who had been persuaded they lived in bust-proof economies suddenly faced with losing the essentials for a dignified existence; marches, sometimes riots; impassive government ministers repeating that there is no alternative. But the national crises have developed in distinctly shaped historical containers, and exacerbate particular sets of problems. In Spain in the 1970s, a hastily constituted democracy threw itself with reckless euphoria into a development model based on tourism, construction, and finance, with the added boost of cheap credit, to become the eighth economy in the world by the late 1990s. When the construction bubble burst in 2007, just as the global crisis was breaking, every domino came crashing down, leaving banks, households, businesses, and the government indebted to the tune of $1.25 trillion, the state held ransom by bond markets.
I lived in Spain during the fat years of 1997 through 2004, working in the art world amid what seemed an avid, chaotic, and strangely depthless culture, less a country than a mosaic of ambitions and insularities. In September, I went to look behind the news at longer processes, consulting people seldom heard, perhaps: neither IMF mouthpieces nor the most devastated victims of the crisis, but those engaged with the mind and the arts, who I found plowing on amid growing desertification.
Spain has been through so much, and in such a relatively short time, that the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 can seem almost obliterated by the extremes of experience since. Yet the closeness of those days was brought home to me in Madrid when I met Laura García Lorca, the poet’s niece and director of the García Lorca Foundation. Youthful in her late fifties, she looks shockingly like Federico, with the same black almond eyes and seagull-wing brows. When the family returned from exile in 1967, she shared her rock albums with modernity-starved classmates amid a ferment of idealism and hope. But now “I feel angry in my Spanishness”: the culture is “careless,” as she put it, mentioning the Mediterranean coast (an unbroken fringe of ugly holiday homes that not even the British can afford anymore). We met in the Residencia de Estudiantes, the legendary college where Lorca, Dalí, and Buñuel studied in the 1920s under a band of visionary academics who resigned from Catholic universities to import the best of European humanities and science to Spain.