BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA -- Workers in the Industria Metalúrgica Plástica Argentina aluminum factory pushed cardboard boxes containing tin trays to the sides of the building's top-floor assembly hall one weekend last month. They then erected a stage made of metal crates and covered the floor with plastic lawn chairs. For an entire Saturday afternoon, performers from around the country entertained about 250 spectators with Latin-American folk songs that were at once melancholic and uplifting. The show was part of a nationwide series called "Ruta por la Dignidad" -- "Route for Dignity" -- as an enormous banner hanging over the stage declared.
The cultural-resistance concert ended around 8 p.m., the crowd exited and the space was converted into a theater for two plays that would be performed later that night.
In 1998, as the current Argentine economic crisis was beginning, workers at this cooperatively owned factory dislodged the management -- a practice that has become common during the crisis and that supporters call "recovering" a plant.
The workers decided to add the words "Cultural City" to the factory's name and to offer their plant as a community performance space. On weekdays the top floor is a cleaning and packing area. On weekends, it becomes a theater.
The Argentine economic crisis, in statistical terms at least as severe as the Great Depression, has profoundly altered the arts in this country -- but not in the way one might expect. Despite the crisis, or more likely because of it, new performance and exhibition spaces have opened, artistic groups have formed and attendance at cultural events has stayed the same or increased. The number of spectators at an annual film festival here rose 30 percent this year, to 127,000. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes expects 1,100,000 visitors this year, matching record levels of interest set during the past four years of crisis. Meanwhile, the Argentine film industry, according to La Nación, a leading newspaper, has debuted a new movie every week since April.
"There is a cultural explosion now that one could hardly expect in a country faring so poorly," says Jorge Glusberg, director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, which, like the National Gallery of Art in Washington, charges no admission. "But public interest in culture has doubled or tripled, in part because people cannot afford to do much else."
Jorge Telerman, culture secretary for Buenos Aires, agrees. "It would have been logical for cultural activity to decrease. But people are instead increasingly open to culture because they do not want to comply with the stereotype of a defeated country," he says. "And in the middle of a crisis, society looks to culture as a space of reflection, a space that by its very nature helps society search for its identity."
Argentina's economic crisis has left little untouched, and the arts are no exception. Like everyone else in the country, cultural producers scrambled to regain normality after the days of disorder last December. They have since had to adjust to changed circumstances, notably a currency that has lost almost three-quarters of its value this year. But the arts are not merely shaped by the economic depression -- they themselves shape how Argentines understand and respond to the crisis. Through musical comedies, documentaries and concerts, creators of culture have debated whether to pursue political engagement or confrontation -- a key question that Argentine society itself is still struggling to answer. And whether Argentina can find its way through this crisis may depend, in part, on whether, and how, the national arts scene is able to make sense of the dizzying social and political changes that have taken place here.
Last December, political instability, pot-banging protests, looting and police repression created a rupture in the arts, much as it did in most aspects of Argentine life. Rod Stewart and the Emerson Quartet canceled appearances. An exhibition of 18th-century Spanish painting at the Museo Nacional was called off. The Teatro Colón, a legendary opera house that symbolizes stability and sensibility, turned to pop stars to shore up its finances; the premieres of two operas were rescheduled to free stages for more profitable performances.
But normalcy has since returned to the streets of Buenos Aires -- calls for 10 minutes of lights out or horn honking, whether to protest an increase in crime or utility prices, are now heeded only by some -- and the arts have recovered as well. Last week Italian violinist Salvatore Accardo performed; this week the Red Hot Chili Peppers are coming. Glusberg has inaugurated 28 exhibitions this year. Gabriel Senanes, who became director of the Colón last month, promises no more operas will be rescheduled to make space for popular performers.
"The Colón is for a classical repertoire: opera, ballet, the symphony," Senanes says. "If we want to make money, we'll make it with a classical repertoire. The Colón belongs to everyone, but it is not for everyone." Senanes -- who constantly attends to two buzzing cell phones and his electronic organizer -- was chosen to direct the Colón because he is more business administrator than absent-minded professor.
The sharp depreciation of the Argentine peso since December has made imports more expensive but exports more profitable. In the arts, this has made it difficult to lure talent from abroad. But it has also encouraged the export of Argentine culture -- a phenomenon most cultural producers welcome.
"We can't resign ourselves either in this crisis or in any other moment to be passive reproducers of the European repertoire," Senanes says. "There is a musical culture in Argentina that needs to be expressed to the world. We need to be creating our own repertoire or actively reinterpreting the European one. This is always a possibility, but even more so now. The crisis asks Argentine culture what it alone is capable of producing."
Cultural producers have also lowered prices to make the arts more accessible. Senanes created a Monday concert series for which tickets cost two pesos, about half a U.S. dollar. A theater on Corrientes Avenue, Buenos Aires' equivalent of Broadway, does not charge spectators at all; the audience is asked for a contribution after each show. The city government -- which continues to come close to meeting the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's recommendation that 5 percent of the budget be devoted to culture -- helps cultural institutions keep prices low. "My greatest challenge," Telerman says, "is to bring a protest-movement participant, a neighborhood-assembly member and a lady in a fur coat to sit alongside each other in the Colón. This would go a long way to creating a new citizen that recognizes public spaces as his own." He argues that funding free events (such as a new itinerant cultural circus of sorts that he created) can reduce widespread rejection of the government.
Enrique Pinti, a venerable Argentine comedian, also aims to promote a certain notion of citizenship in the acerbic musical monologue he authored and performs, Candombe Nacional. The show, the most popular on Corrientes, retells Argentine history from independence to the present -- a common theatrical motif at a time when people are asking what went wrong. "There is a risk with shows like mine that the audience will end up thinking all politics is a joke. But I have always emphasized in my shows that politics is the only thing that saves us, and that democracy is the system that allows the most people to be saved," Pinti told me in a coffee shop before a show last month.
In the opening scene of Candombe, a chorus -- clad in red, white and blue -- dances while singing in Spanish, "Pay the foreign debt / Don't be lazy / Pay the foreign debt / Don't you forget." But Pinti mostly pins blame for the economic crisis on the Argentine politicians he satirically impersonates. He is so balanced, so academic even, that in Candombe he discusses the views of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who has argued that fiscal-austerity measures supported by the International Monetary Fund and some Argentine politicians have aggravated the crisis rather than ameliorating it.
"It gives me great tranquility that a Nobel Prize winner, who is a capitalist, who is American, believes exactly the opposite of what is being said by the owners of capitalism, like [IMF Deputy Managing Editor Anne] Krueger and [U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul] O'Neill, [former Argentine President Carlos] Menem and [former Economy Minister Domingo] Cavallo," Pinti said.
Many in the arts who share Pinti's criticisms of U.S. policy and the Argentine political class celebrate confrontation rather than political engagement. The "Route for Dignity" concert series, for example, fuses song and political struggle. At the Industria Metalúrgica Plástica Argentina concert, folk singer and series co-organizer Eduardo Guajardo told me, "This country is in a stage of enormous disillusionment and social effervescence, generating tremendous pockets of creativity in every social sector. We, as popular musicians, believe we have to take a step forward by uniting and incorporating ourselves into the fight that our people are waging, through real and concrete commitment, not just by showing solidarity onstage."
A middle road, perhaps, exists in comedies that manage to joke about the crisis without an overt political message. One particularly macabre comedy, by a troupe called Los Macacos, tells the story of a middle-class family that crashes into poverty during the crisis. To support the family, the son has to sell his blood, then his kidney and then a patch of skin. By the play's conclusion, all that remains of him is a brain and two eyes in a glass jar.
By all indications, Buenos Aires residents are showing interest in this expanding array of cultural options. But some observers doubt that this is an Argentine cultural rebirth. Until now, they say, Argentine culture hasn't synthesized and responded to the crisis in ways that are transcendental.
"New artistic practices have yet to emerge in response to the crisis," Telerman says. "There is greater cultural activity. But we have still not seen the artistic reflection of the crisis in a particular play or artwork." Indeed many cultural expressions that are flourishing during the crisis are mere updates or revivals of traditional forms, such as the spasmodic, carnival-esque and often ironic murga dance.
But perhaps, in one of the many unknown neighborhood theaters or exhibition spaces that have recently opened, a playwright, performer or artist has already invented a cultural response to the crisis that will provoke epiphany or catharsis in Argentina, whether now or in the years to come.
"I don't believe -- at least until now -- that we are witnessing an apogee or a moment of great brilliance in Argentine music," Senanes says of his particular corner of the country's culture. "But you can't really know. It would not be the first time in history that the greatest artist of a period passed completely misunderstood in his own time."
