Madrid letter.

I started to be convinced things were changing in Madrid when I visited the cit at the end of last year. For months conversations had been littered with references to "the crisis." When I asked some young architects how this famous crisis was faring, one of them perked up visibly and half-saluted, "Muy bien!" His message was patently clear: these madrilenos might have been scrambling for every scrap of work they could get, but they weren't to be bogged down by Spain's problems.

Thanks to the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage, lavishly and expensively celebrated here, the European recession hit Spain late, but still managed to catch public and state unprepared. And just as people were confronting the idea that a great deal of Spain's economic (and cultural) recovery of the '80s had been built on sand, a mounting toll of corruption scandals arrived (including a relatively minor one in which the director of the Prado--an art critic, no less--was asked to resign after granting his wife's design magazine special dispensation to photograph modern chairs in the Velazquez rooms). Such events reverberated in the Madrid art world in the same way as elsewhere: collectors stopped buying. prices dropped, galleries shut their doors.

In true '90s fashion, one generally has to go down the economic ladder to find the action. There seems to be more variety among the smaller galleries: old reliables like Fucares, Moriarty, and Oliva Arauna, who have been operating at the fringes of Spain's "official" art world for years, as well as relative upstarts like Elba Benitez and Masha Prieto, who seem to have inherited the avant-garde mission of tweaking local sensibilities. Last season Fucares showed I.V.M., a "project development corporation" run by conceptual artist Isidoro Valcarcel Medina. When I visited the gallery, I was asked to wait in a receptio area until a receptionist called me in and took down information about the proposal I was to present to the "director" waiting in an inner office. After waiting for a quarter-hour, I was told he was unable to see me, due to the sudden arrival of a prior appointment. I returned to the street with the implicit understanding that I had gotten what I had come for.

Moving farther down the socioeconomic ladder, one runs headlong into Madrid's alternative-space/small-press movement, which eschews the careerist mentality that all but strangled art-world discourse in the '80s. Spaces like Galeria del Progreso, El Cruce (The cross), founded by painter Manolo Quejido, and El Ojo Atomico (The atomic eye), an industrial nave that closed its doors in May to reexamine its priorities, tend to wear their antiestablishment positions on their sleeves, though one sometimes gets the impression that some of this is du to sheer frustration, since the decline of the art market has eliminated many o the channels for disseminating new work. Still, in his "farewell" letter to the audience of Ojo Atomico, honcho Tomas Ruiz Vivas thundered that "possession [and] administration . . . of an exhibition space is an obsolete model, which works against, rather than for, the art that it attempts to diffuse and promote."

El Cruce opened in February in a garage behind the Reina Sofia museum, and features music as well as exhibitions. It runs on a somewhat less confrontational model than El Ojo Atomico, but it's happy to publish articles i its newsletter attacking the art world for hypocrisy over AIDS, or raising dark doubts about the work of Bruce Nauman, recently seen in a massive retrospective across the street. Galeria del Progreso, on the working-class Calle Magdalena, is more fluid still, with simultaneous installations by different artists, as well as a down-scale artists'-multiples business that thrives around holidays.

Spanish alternative spaces and arts publications are tied together to a considerable extent: not only are cross-culture magazines like Atlantica, Ajo Blanco, and El Europeo first-rate, but even the tiniest spaces cannot afford to go without their own house journal. The roots of this small-press mania go back not just to la movida--the much ballyhooed Madrid club scene of the late '70s and early '80s, from which emerged film director Pedro Almodovar and a slew of coveted fanzines--but also to the links between the painters and poets of late-'40s Barcelona, links that continued through the '60s in Madrid. The most impressive new art publications also owe a debt to the effect of Spain's '80s boom on the local art-catalogue business, which, thanks to inexpensive design and printing costs, flourished to an extent unparalleled in the rest of Europe. One of the new magazines is El Canto de la Tripulacion (The song of the crew), an outsized, tastefully designed bit of subculture pulp ostensibly devoted to bikers, sex, and adventure, with abundant graphic and photo contributions by a rotating group of highly street-savvy artists. Mother is La Nevera (The refrigerator), which comes in a box. The magazine inside--El Congelador (The freezer)--serves primarily as a supplement to some ten artists' multiples produced for that issue. The fourth and most recent box included a video, tiny paintings and sculptures, small books of poems, and an unidentified key with a handwritten note attached.

Another element in Madrid's artistic life that harks back to the not-so-distant past is the dramatic surge in artists' collectives. El Ojo Atomica, Galeria del Progreso, and El Cruce are all run by collectives, as are magazines like El Canto de la Tripulacion, and the combination clubhouse, performance space, and collaborative studio called Estrugenbank (formed in the late '80s as the corporate entity of Particia Gadea and Juan Ugalde). Other artist collectives include quasi-anarchist variations such as Libres Para Siempre (Free forever), Lost in Heaven, and Preiswart (The price is right). Preiswart initiated a near riot a while ago by handing out flyers announcing a bogus giveaway at Madrid's biggest department store; Lost in Heaven caused a more delayed reaction at a show in Rostock, Germany, a city now famous for racist violence, where they hun a banner next to the city hall that said "Make yourself invisible" in Turkish.

Precedents for this collective spirit can be found in certain collaborative groups active during the '50s and '60s. Using the common tag "Equipo" (Team), such groups as Equipo 57, Equipo Cronica (News team), and Equipo Realidad (Reality team) proliferated in the years before Franco's death. More recently, the Malaga-based artists' group Agustin Parejo School has risen to prominence, in part thanks to the success of founding member Rogelio Lopez Cuenca; and Valencia, home of most of the earlier equipos, has now given us a Pop-painting team calling themselves Equipo Limite (Limit team). When Gadea was asked to organize an exhibition of Spanish artists in Tunisia recently, she focused entirely on the work of collaborative teams.

This postauthorial stance, while tied into esthetic changes abroad, seems to have an additional motivation: finding strength in numbers. Spain has not experienced the waves of mass xenophobia seen elsewhere in Europe, but mists an intellectuals appear to be gearing up for the possibility that a worried electorate will take a sharp turn to the right in elections in early 1995. The governing party, the Partido Socialista, is suffering in the polls, partly as a result of the corruption scandals. The opposition Partido Popular, led by conservative Jose-Maria Aznar, has studiously avoided identifying itself with the country's pre-1975 regime, but the recent electoral success of Italy's neofascists has forced Spain's intelligentsia to begin discussing what its coming to power might mean. As one friend confided over dinner, "Because of the strength and staying power of franquismo, most of Spain's modern institutions were built to accommodate fascistic thinking. Rather than changing these institutions, the socialists have only occupied them, and encountered a great deal of resistance along the way. Should the right take over, and there is ever reason to believe they will, the going will no doubt be a great deal smoother." This anxiety has only fueled the rebellion-on-a-shoestring spirit of Madrid's new art scene.

Dan Cameron is a writer and independent curator who lives in New York.