The Need for Money… is a work in progress that started in Moscow in 2005/2006. At that time, art critic David Riff, member of the Chto Delat Collective, and the artist Dmitry Gutov, together with philosophers, curators, and art historians, grounded the Karl Marx School of the English Language (KMSEL). The reading group met once a week in Gutovʼs studio in the center of Moscow. Initially, it was more about improving English skills than art, which was to be accomplished by means of Karl Marxʼs Das Kapital. In different roles, the Russian native-speaking “students” read the text and compared the English and German translations. An English-speaking “teacher” corrected pronunciation and articulation. The story goes that the course participants took the re-reading of a political economist as an opportunity to find new interpretations, polemics and to drink. The classes became a space for thought, where aesthetic and political concerns were discussed well into the night. 

The endeavor mutated into an artproject as Gutov began to produce paintings for the meetings – monochrome canvases on which he wrote Karl Marx quotes. “Wealth is disposable time and nothing more” is a phrase on one of the pieces in the evn collection, the famous “Reichtum ist verfügbare Zeit und sonst nichts” (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie). Or “ignorance is a devil” from an early text that appeared in the Kölnischen Zeitung in 1842. Pieces of this output have been shown in varying configurations at, for example, the 52^nd Venice Biennial or in the Viennese Secession. For this open and ever-changing picture display, Gutov supplied David Riffʼs soundpiece – original recording from the Moscow English courses. On the live-recording in the evn collection, a language student struggles with the following sentence: “… the need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces.” Content and possible meanings of the statement are not made much clearer by the practice-method in the language lesson. And yet Gutov and Riff want to bring us closer to the “big drama of our time.” In contrast to Okwui Enwezorʼs Venetian oratorio, they bring new life to dead material: Marxism as a practical tool for additional knowledge.

Brigitte Huck, 2015 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)