Art and smoking weed | You make art until it explodes

In Switzerland, the world is still in order; at least, if it's up to Schanti and Sabin. Things are going well for them. Sometime around 2020, they decided to found an association, "Polyphon Pervers," and use it to create theater. Because: you have to do something. Otherwise, you'll go under. And if you have to do something, then you might as well do that: culture. Or art. Or rather, entertainment, because no one has known what art and culture are for thousands of years anyway, and that's not important; that's something for philosophers to argue about. What's important is: drinking a white wine spritzer while working, sitting in kitchens for long periods, and talking to exciting people about exciting concepts. All of this, and of course, for money.

So the two of them, Schanti and Sabin, create culture by not giving a damn about art. They bring a provincial theater group together, organize grant applications, improve the catering, bring sponsors on board, and they meticulously enter all of this into their Excel spreadsheets so that afterward, it's clear who worked how much. It doesn't matter what they play anyway; it just has to be fresh and stand out somehow.

And suddenly, in the turmoil of applications, a new opportunity arises: Jules, the dealer who supplies the entire art scene there with weed. And he has a safe full of cash. And Jules just doesn't know what to do with the money. And so Schanti restructures the association a bit so that Jules can pay into the pension fund and actually have a taxable income. And the whole thing goes well for a while, until Manon comes along, the culture editor of this provincial newspaper. He was apparently boring, so she did some research and then suddenly things didn't go well anymore. But that's actually a different story.

The book seems charmingly out of date: all the big, heavy topics don't exist here; they don't need to. And when they do—for example, when the pandemic hits the small, idyllic art world—it all remains strangely unreal—understandably unreal, because Schanti and Sabin and their entire cultural wrecking crew don't have much to do with reality anyway: they live off air and love and the little bit of money laundering that finances all this hocus-pocus.

And you can't really be mad at them, because all these braggarts and con artists are incredibly likeable. Schanti, Sabin, Jules, they're all basically childish people who want to play around a bit with their lives, do a bit of work, have a bit of fun. They mean no harm and don't hurt anyone. Even the only truly tragic character – the drunken ghostwriter Yves, who makes the mistake of wanting to take art seriously someday and then fails miserably at writing a significant play – falls into deep despair, but is also cutely over the top in his out-of-touch existentialism. Yves isn't interested in saying something, but in speaking well: in performing art. In the end, only one character is truly unlikable: Manon, the traitor who has the nerve to take her job seriously and lets this whole pipe dream burst.

Béla Rothenbühler has written such a loving satire of the cultural scene that one almost forgets that there are people to whom theater still means something; to whom art still means something. "Polyphon Pervers" is not—Rothenbühler would say: absolutely not—about art, but only about escapism. And it's about the fact that this escapism leads nowhere if it's self-sufficient; it takes a place like Switzerland for all of this to still coexist.

The charm of the book lies, on the one hand, in its incredibly well-written nature, allowing one to surrender without compromise to art's promise of simply being entertained. It's a book that sounds as if someone were telling you a story so funny at some bar that, for once, you're willing to shut up for two hours. Béla Rothenbühler manages—brilliantly translated from Lucerne German by Uwe Dethier—to find a sound that resonates. And on the other hand, if you're so inclined, you can also find something greater in it. One of the novel's key scenes is when, as part of a performance, looted art from Africa is removed from the museum live and on site and sent back: that's a classic stoner idea. How complicated it is to rededicate looted art—not only for the museums that previously housed it, but above all for the local communities—plays no role in this consideration. It's all about the scandal, the gesture. The moral is: Make art that makes a big splash. Until it explodes. And if it explodes, you've only made art.

But that doesn't have to be the case; the book itself is clearly primarily intended to entertain. To put it in the words of the first-person narrator: Béla Rothenbühler has easily achieved that.

Béla Rothenbühler: Polyphon Pervers. Translated from Lucerne German by Uwe Dethier, Voland & Quist, 212 pp., hardcover, €22.